another coffee, please

A Framework for Inbox Zero (Gmail centric)

phoebe — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 04:38:16 +0000

I heard about Inbox Zero way back in 2008, but shrugged it off as something that other people used because they got so many emails and never replied to them. Here is a quick recap of some of the links that capture the spirit and reasoning behind Inbox Zero:

43 Folders series of articles on Inbox Zero
the Inbox Zero video (long – will open in a new window)

With the proliferation of all the “social” sites around these days (Google+, Facebook, newsletters, group buy sites, Twitter.. the list goes on) I just get way too many emails to deal with on a daily basis. So I’ve decided to be strong, cut what I don’t need, and most importantly create and stick to a procedural way of dealing with emails.

I did a lot of reading on Inbox Zero before I started on my quest. It’s important for me to be able to deal with 100% of the problem, because if it’s only 99% that additional one percent keeps creeping up .. and creeping.. and creeping.. until it turns into a problem I can’t solve, and I’m back at square one. There are a lot of blogs outlining various ways to solve the problem. There are games and plugins. There are rules such as “only check your inbox once an [hour|day|week]” or “if you can’t answer it in two minutes or less, don’t”. Which of these should you follow? How on earth are you supposed to keep all these rules AND have inbox peace and quiet?

I think of Inbox Zero as a framework with one very important outcome: everything is out of my inbox. There is no “hard and fast” way of achieving it as everyone is different (some people like to delete things straight away, but I just couldn’t!). Some people like to use lots of tools, but I like being able to do things from any medium, without a dependency such as a firefox plugin that becomes a bit of an excuse.

Here is my framework:

1. Have a process. It has to work for you. Do you get lots of questions? File them to answer them together. I get a lot of junk mail in my inbox, so I have a process to filter them, and I have set labels to “__1, __2, __3″ so I can sort them in order of how important they are to me so I read them in order. If a process isn’t working for you, change it so it does. Most importantly though is to stick to it. There is no easier way to lose your mailbox than by sabotaging your carefully thought out process.

2. Be ruthless. Inbox Zero is not about the “maybe one days”. It’s about making a decision about anything that comes into your sight. Is it something you need to action? Mark it, file it, job done. Have you received the same email newsletter every week that you never bother reading? Unsubscribe right now and don’t worry about it ever again.

3. Be responsible. If you are supposed to have replied to that email from two weeks ago that you didn’t because you can’t be bothered, make a responsible grown-up decision. Yes, I will answer it (Mark it OR action it, file it, job done!) or No, I will delete it – if it was important they will email back. This is the hard one for me, and Inbox Zero has helped me take responsibility for the things I may have just left to languish in a pile of unread email…

4. Email takes time. It doesn’t have to be a LOT of time, although initially the cleanup of my inbox was like spring cleaning after a long winter (I had thousands of emails to go through!). Once you get to a state where you are starting with a blank slate, every email that you see in your inbox should be important, and therefore you need to take time to respond to it. I find that with less email cluttering my inbox, I take the time to consider what I should do with a particular message, and put more thought into actions or responses.

5. There are always bad days. I haven’t had one of these yet, because I’ve just started being aware of keeping my inbox nice and tidy (and empty!). When I go overseas though I have no doubt that I’m going to lose track of where I was, there will be spam that I haven’t yet created a filter for, and things will break. I’m telling myself now that I will be patient when I see the overgrown mess in my inbox, and that I will take time out to tidy it up, update my processes (filters, labels, and so on), and return my inbox to that wonderful state of Zero.

These are my five reminders of how to keep my inbox clean. I think they are general enough for me to work even if I change all my labels and filters and even the email application I’m using. I’m trying to apply the same concepts to my work email which is a completely different type of email chaos – I need a slightly different focus, because my work depends on me being able to respond to lots of questions, whereas my personal mail tends to be handling of the occasional important email and mostly invoices and receipts.

What is your process for Inbox Zero? Do you operate along similar rules/ideas or do you have much more solid processes around what happens to each email? Let me know in the comments!

iPad 2 is here: who cares?

phoebe — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:57:32 +0000

Okay, I care, because I’m posting about it. But what is it about the iPad2 that makes me want one? I just got a netbook, after all, and can I really justify $579 (16GB, WiFi only) up to $949 (64Gb, WiFi+3G) after that? Of course I can: I’m a techie and that’s a gadget. Would I use it, though? Don’t I already have tools (an iPhone, a laptop, a netbook, a computer) that do these things already?

I went through the Apple features list for the iPad2 (AU) to try to sell myself one. I already know what I think I want it for: GarageBand, and the reports of this $4.99 app’s musical instruments being “just like the real thing”, such as a pressure-sensitive keyboard. Oh god how I want one of them! I don’t even have a keyboard because I can’t stand the mechanical lack of tone, timbre or anything resembling a real piano. And no music program has really come close, at least without a very expensive attachment.

Other things I think I will find useful though? (for $900 I could get myself a nice electric piano, complete with a stand and pedals, probably)

The HD camera. I imagine I won’t use FaceTime (I don’t see any need for videoconferencing at the moment – maybe if OTHER people get an iPad2 and I want them to see ‘every freckle on my face’ (eek!), but it would be very neat to record movies on a large screen rather than looking at a tiny 2.5″ LCD on my camera for minutes at a time!

I don’t really need more than WiFi for how I think I will use it. If I need 3G on the go, I can tether to my phone with the latest iOS update that lets you create personal access points. This is a good thing, as it will keep my budget down. Oh, and hey, it’s got Bluetooth. The only thing I can see that is missing here is an expansion slot for additional storage.

Are there comparable alternatives? I really don’t think so. I know there will soon be many more Android tablets out there (the Motorola Xoom, new Samsung Galaxy Tab, etc) but why I like the iPad2 is this one simple reason (that I like all Apple products for): it just works. Out of the box I am 100% confident that this little beastie will do everything I expect it to do from the ads, with very little configuration other than putting in my name and email address. When Apple says it turns on instantly, that’s what they mean. Right now. When they say that its accelerometer is smart, it IS – no flipping back and forth between vertical and landscape to try to see things in the right format. (Their spellcheck could do with some help, though – must be a reason they don’t advertise it, ha ha.)

With ten hours (closer to 6-7 with real world usage, I’d imagine) battery life I could take this to work and read it on the train, something I can’t do with a netbook (though I am trying). I could read BOOKS on this darn thing and save myself the cost of a Kindle.

The Smart Cover stand/case I should really include overall cost of the iPad2. At $79 for leather and $45 for polyurethane it isn’t cheap for what essentially looks like a sheet with creases in it, but from all accounts it is a must have for usability. I am generally relatively careful with my techno-products (I have had an iPhone 3GS for 2+years without a case, and there are no scratches on the screen) but the Smart Cover is more than that.

Ah this is sounding more and more like a lost cause. I don’t think the iPad2 is a PRODUCTIVITY tool. I would get frustrated trying to use this slim and light (both in size and power) machine trying to multitask the way I love to do on my home computer. Why I want it is because it offers more than just the tablet version of my email, of my word processor, of my music-creation app. It is a different experience, and I think Apple knows that, and it’s why the iPad2 will be successful.

RSS, or Really? Syndication Sucks

phoebe — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:22:51 +0000

I have a hundred and twenty nine RSS feeds in my Google Reader. Pruned from some hundred and fifty I had about half an hour ago. I’m still working on paring down the list… but even then, I feel obliged to keep some of them because the content they have (when I bother to read them) is damn good. The only feeds I’ve managed to prune so far are included in this list:

They haven’t posted in a while
The blog has shut down
The title sucked

That criteria is somewhat friendly to bloggers since two of the three mean that the blogger won’t actually care that I’m no longer an avid reader of their musings. Not that I think that people who write blogs watch their reader counts go up and down like that, but come on, I still haven’t unfriended anyone on Facebook JUST IN CASE they’d notice. Someone once told me I’m too nice.

Anyway, back to the feeding frenzy. Google likes you to tag your feeds to aid in organisation, and you can have multiple tags for a feed, but only one folder. However, a folder IS a tag. It took me a while to realise this back when I was a feed-reading newbie, so I have a bunch of double-tagged feeds that are in a single folder. The next thing I’ve done is prune off all the tags I don’t use, such as “read me later”. What a dumb idea that was, Phoebe! That’s reduced my tag count from about eighteen to twelve. However my reading trend says that I usually only read about two of those tags, so the next, major step is to remove the other 10 tags and create two or three larger folders that don’t sort on category, but rather, how interested I am in their content. I think I got this idea from somewhere (probably a post on a blog that I had in my RSS feed). The goal is to have a couple of categories, like:

I will read this ASAP
I will read this when I have time
I will probably read this (if categories 1. and 2. are empty)
I won’t read this.

The idea behind this is to actively monitor what I’m reading and move things between the four categories as I need. I’ll initially sort them the way I think I read them – it’s pretty easy working out what’s in Category #1! – and then I will move feeds down or up as I notice myself reading them more. Once a feed has been in category 4 for a while I will purge the whole tag/folder. I’ll report back (hopefully) in a couple of months when hopefully my feed list has been cleaned up!

How do you manage your RSS feeds? Do you use Google Reader or some other tool? Do you use folders/tags or not at all?

R U Okay?

phoebe — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:38:55 +0000

Today is one of those days. Not enough sleep, too much work, trying to do too much in too little time and trying to be perfect. My usual basket of worries multiplied tenfold and all coming at me at once. I woke up feeling absolutely crappy, sick in the stomach, and even my usual “don’t worry you’ll get a coffee soon” self-pep-talk didn’t work. I just wanted to curl up and lie in bed and cry – so I did.

Then I got up and got dressed (after some cajoling from Z) and checked my work email, and freaked out bigtime about some numbers I’d sent to someone that looked OK last night but were absolutely totally utterly wrong, and I went back to crying in bed. In my work clothes. Absolutely drained and it wasn’t even 7:30am.

It took me a long time to decide not to go to work in the morning, because I don’t want to appear as though I’m “chucking a sickie” but I knew if I went to work and someone – maybe a colleague, maybe a client, maybe some stranger – looked at me the wrong way and insinuated I wasn’t capable of doing a billion things at once, I would just crack and start bawling my eyes out. I say this from experience. I know I have a breaking point.

A friend of mine posted a link on his Facebook wall to RUOK?day which is today, October 7. I’m not normally one for these things (except Daffodil Day because I love their merch) and when I first heard of it on TV I thought it was a little bit of a gimmicky “I like it on..” concept. I imagined hordes of teenagers posting R U OK LOL on their Facebook statuses and Twitters. Not for me, I thought!

But today when I woke up and felt really overwhelmed, it was the stories on that site via videos that really touched me. A woman, seeing a guy standing on his roof ready to take his own life, stops to have a chat at 3 in the morning, and changes his life. A paramedic who has seen the horrible results of suicide needing similar support himself after he’s diagnosed with manic depression. These things touched me and made my problems seem a lot less significant. Bearable.

There wasn’t anybody to ask me if I was okay this morning (at least not until after Z had gone to work) so I asked myself. And I was surprised at the answer, because once I’d come back to reality, all the worry and stress of the things I’m expected to do lifted. I wasn’t feeling pressured to be AT work or to BE someone or to GET ALL THIS STUFF DONE. ”Are you okay?” I asked, and the answer was “yes”.

I’m not sure who’ll read this post, but if you do, let me ask you a question. ”How are things going for you?”

Go Go Google Priorities

phoebe — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 22:17:03 +0000

I recently turned on the Gmail Priority Inbox feature for my “general all-purpose email account”. It sounds so good in theory – and it does exactly what it says on the box.

Priority Inbox automatically identifies your important email and separates it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters.

From what I can see it prioritises people over “bacn” (like spam, but tastier!) probably by a record of the emails that you have read versus the emails that you delete or archive without reading. I’m getting an odd mixture of stuff in my Priority Inbox, including some Facebook posts but not others (and they all get downranked straight away, anyway) and it’s missing emails from my friends that I would think are more important.

Perhaps I’m using it incorrectly, though. I’ve only used it for about a week and I’m finding that I am almost ignoring all the new emails that come into my inbox that aren’t in the Priority Inbox, which is a little disconcerting to put that much power into the hands of a .. machine. On the plus side, it is encouraging me to unsubscribe from those newsletters I don’t even read. And at some point no matter how powerful Priority Inbox is I still need to go through all those “not important” emails – and I really don’t want to be hit by a nasty surprise later down the track.

My concern with Priority Inbox, and Inbox Sorters in general, is that they provide only the illusion of helping you to get organised. Priority Inbox just adds another pane on my inbox that tells me I need to archive more emails. I really do prefer to search for what I’m interested in, and why not, with the power of Google search behind my 4000-odd emails?

How do you you sort your inbox? Do you like to depend on a smart algorithm to tell you what’s important, and what to read later, or do you need to read every email that comes through your mail server?

(un)Realised Strengths

phoebe — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:29:29 +0000

Today I went to a panel session. I’ve never been to a panel session before and didn’t know what to expect. It was run by Cisco, and FITT, and the Australian Computer Society, though, so you can expect it was pretty slick. Plus there was a promise of “networking” – a word that scares me because it involves selling yourself to complete strangers (in a professional way!). But I am prone to bouts of proactive career building so I registered within the first 24 hours, before I could talk myself out of it, and before the registrations closed because so many people signed up.

The panel session was called “Discover your unique strengths – Striving for self mastery”. I can never work out what these titles really mean and I’ve decided before that I should just ignore the title of these events because sometimes it goes way off topic. Having said that though, the words “strength” and “self-mastery” caught my eye.

The people on the panel were worth doing some quick iphone research on the way to the panel (me, organised? ha!) and they all sounded pretty interesting. I’m just going to copy their names from the event page since they probably have CVs that go for miles:

Les Williamson – Vice President, Cisco ANZ
Sara Adams – Operational Director, Commercial, Cisco ANZ

Clive Leach – Executive Coach

Dr. Suzy Green – Coaching and Positive Psychologist
Yu Dan Shi – Director of Marketing, Cisco ANZ

So two women with Director in the title, and a Dr. Talk about motivating – that’s where I want to be one day. So it was with great interest that I listened to Yu Dan talking about how it was difficult to fudge a self-review at Cisco because they measure you on strengths, not weaknesses. Two things struck me – one, she understood that fudging self-reviews usually was inevitable (she’s human!) and two, that strengths based measurements of your ability are really, really good for women.

It made me stop and think for a moment about what my strengths are, and I realised I couldn’t completely answer that question. I know I have strengths but I have no idea what other people perceive them to be. And normally when I’m thinking about perception I worry about looking too young, or being a female, or not wearing the right clothes, and that stops me from bringing out my positives. So that’s one thing I decided I would work on: identify my strengths, and then promote them to others.

The other two speakers – the men! – were equally interesting. Clive Leach talked about “flourishing”, a state that only about 20% of workers experience. I understand this feeling because I know I’ve been there: a state where you want to wake up and go to work and you feel great. A healthy life is where you flourish both at home and at work, of course. Too much over-flourishing at work and you’ll affect your home life. Les Williamson, who is Yu Dan and Saras’ boss, talked about how he works to try to combine corporate and social or human networks, to bring out the best in people so that they are, well, flourishing. At least, that was part of what he talked about - aside from that, he was a very funny guy, very down to earth, and not at all who you would expect to be the VP of a massive multinational like Cisco.

On the way back to work (yes, unfortunately it was only 12-3pm) I wrote down a couple of things to follow up. Actually, I wrote down a lot of nonsense too (something about people on trains having jazzy ringtones) but I figure that’s all part of the brain dumping that helps me clarify my real thoughts:

1. Websites, tests, assessments of strengths

http://www.authentichappiness.org/ , where you can do a VIA strengths finder test,
Realise 2, a similar strengths finder tool that uses more business language,
and the next book I’m going to purchase, Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0

2. Word of the day: “Authentic”.

How to be authentic when you deal with people at work (and at home!)
Giving authentic feedback. Asking for feedback. I thought it might be valuable to start asking people what my strengths are. And my weaknesses. That all kind of scares me a little. Gotta sleep on it.

3. You don’t have to be an expert in the field to be a Manager in it

Something Sara Adams said, that resonated pretty strongly

4. Email a few of the people I met, to try to keep in touch and do that “networking” thing. I really suck at talking to people in person and I promise I will try better next time. I did give out a few business cards, which is kudos to me for (a) remembering to bring them and (b) actually giving them to people.

I got back to work feeling energised, until I found someone’s email that made me feel little again. Sigh. I dealt with that one by stomping around the room creating negative energy.. woops. Gotta make a note not to do that next time. Fortunately the issue (storage) I am talking to the Ops Manager about later today, but that’s another story for another time.

Linux Tip: Mounting a Directory using –bind

phoebe — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:15:36 +0000

Useful for mounting the same directory in multiple places, particularly in chroot jails I hear.

# mount –bind olddir newdir

Mount a directory olddir as a mount point newdir (of course, mount point must exist!). Check using mount -l to see that it is in fact (rw,bind).

In /etc/fstab to mount on boot:

/path/to/olddir /path/to/newdir none rw,bind 0 0

Professionally Speaking

phoebe — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:40:31 +0000

I’m interested in developing this blog as I learn, but I know something I have to do is commit to it. I’m sitting here today on a Monday night, logged into my work email, reflecting on my career so far (all three years of it) and my career to come. What I’m interested in, what I’m looking forward to, what I want to be in a year or five years or ten. It’s something I think about regularly especially when work starts to get stressful or frustrating.

“It’s my choice.. it’s my life.” — Rachel Berry (on Glee)

I can see so many career choices, so many paths that are available to me. I have a university degree in Computer Science, I’m interested in everything, I’m quick at picking up new things. I love to communicate and share knowledge. These all seem like useful traits/attributes or certificates to have. I want to be the best I can be but I have no idea which of my strengths I should play on or which of my weaknesses I need to develop.

I was thinking about my career goal the other day, and I can sum it up something like this: “I want to go to work every day giving more than I gave yesterday, learning more than I knew yesterday, being more than I was yesterday”.

What Makes “Customer Service” In IT?

phoebe — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:33:23 +0000

This is an industry that attempts to redefine “service”. If your server is up and running, then you can’t complain about “service”. If you can contact a service desk out of hours and get an automated email reply, then you are getting “service”. As long as your service provider is providing something you can’t or don’t want to do yourself.. this is considered “service”. It’s a concept that, I admit, I am rather bitter about. I had a dream when I was younger of working in retail (one day when I am an old lady I will serve you at Myer). I love the thrill of making customers happy, going above and beyond their expectations; in IT, however, it seems as though the base level of service is good enough, and don’t do more unless the customer is paying through the eyeballs for it. Ugh!

It gives me hope that there are technical people, developers, IT professionals – whatever you want to call them – out there who agree with me. Who see customer service as more than restarting services when they’re told a website is inaccessible; they will, of their own accord, conduct analysis of the problem, suggest upgrades, fixes, modifications that will improve the end product. I love workplace environments where you don’t mind working overtime because you know that the customer satisfaction is worth it – either for the warm and fuzzies or for the extra income that will come in or maybe just knowing that they’re going to tell their own customers about you.

A company that really struck me as understanding “customer service” is Runic, developers of a game called Torchlight. A single user posted on their forums asking if a feature was available, and with no further ado the developers added it. The customer didn’t have to raise a request via a customer service channel, then wait for it to be acknowledged as an issue (probably only after a percentage of their user base raised the same issue), and then wait for a fix or change to be pushed out with other system upgrades. It may have only been a minor change, but it was done without fuss, and without cumbersome processes.

I think that’s what makes “service” so difficult. It may be that Runic is small enough that its developers can make changes to code without having to go through a huge change control process, but then again: why should any IT company have to go through such processes? Why make the customer suffer for what may be a simple change? I dislike workplace policies that require every little change to go through iterations of reviews until either the goalposts move or grow or just fall over and everybody forgets why it’s happening in the first place.

I would rather fix, install, or make the customer’s life easier than to have to wait for their server to fall over while I’m waiting for internal approval of change requests. Customer service creates satisfaction. Satisfaction speaks for itself: it’s advertising to everybody what kind of service they’ll get if they come to you. And that is good for business. Service levels should imply satisfaction with the end results, not just a way of protecting yourself if an issue is found. It’s good to know there are companies like Runic who are really putting service back into IT.

And Now For Something A Little Different…

phoebe — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:49:57 +0000

My boyfriend is moving in today! This makes me a very happy camper! Now the interesting part (and I suppose relevant) is how we’re going to coexist happily when we’re both nerds with our own ideas of what is good (he likes MSSQL. Enough said.)

My grand plan involves a network that can support:

my virtual environment (VMWare)
Macs (my macbook), PCs, the Wii, Linux, etc
HTPC / media server – for watching movies! also for going through photos when the family comes over
file server – because we really have that much STUFF. We both still have assignments from our uni days!

It all sounds relatively easy, and given that we already have a wireless router at hand it shouldn’t be too hard to set up. I hope to share my experience here particularly with anything that comes up unexpectedly and how we resolve issues… even the personal differences ;)