Inbox makeover (Gina Trapani) Each e-mail message in your inbox demands your time and attention. Filters and rules are great for reducing some of that demand, shunting easily defined mail such as e-newsletters and personal notes to their appropriate folders. But important e-mail messages are often hard to define and organize with automatic, rules-based management. They require filters and rules that reside only in your brain. The key to managing these important messages is to evaluate each one for the response it requires and then quickly convert that evaluation into action. Setup Start by stripping your e-mail directory structure down to seven basic folders, each defined by the action that its messages require (See screenshot): > Inbox For unread and unprocessed items only. > Respond For messages requiring only short responses that can be ticked off in five minutes or less. > Action For e-mail that requires anything beyond a quick response—work, research, or a detailed answer. Triage Timing Keep It Short
Top 10 Email Productivity Boosters SExpand The first message one could consider email was sent more than 30 years ago, and that's probably when people began associating angst and uncertainty with the words "Inbox" and "unread messages." The tools available to read and send emails have advanced considerably since then, but what you actually do with all that chatter, without eating up entire days of work time, is up to you. Luckily, we've covered a wealth of filtering and processing methods and software tweaks that make email less stressful and time-consuming over the years, and a list of our top 10 productive email boosters is after the jump.P 10. If you're inside a big firm, or just part of a big email group, you probably get a lot of messages that aren't really addressed to you directly, but they land in the same bin as the others. 9. 8. 7. Sometimes we're our own worst enemies when it comes to email clutter. 6. 5. It might sound obvious to some, but far too few people utilize and harness the power of contact grouping.
Seek Seek has graduated! The Seek project has graduated and moved on with its life. Visit the new home page for more information on how to join the new mailing lists, synch with the new code repositories, issue tracking, etc. Please excuse our mess during the transition. “Seek” adds faceted browsing features to Mozilla Thunderbird and lets you search through your email more effectively. Feedback / Contribute Send questions/comments/ideas/discussions/etc. to our mailing list (archive/sign-up) Log bugs/issues in our issue tracker (sign-up) Licensing Seek is open source software and is licensed under the BSD license. Credits This software is sponsored by The Andrew W. David François Huynh, dfhuynh at csail.mit.edu
D*I*Y Planner | the best thing in printing since Gutenberg 30 seconds to an empty email Inbox (LifeCleve We all want to control the barrage of emails hurling at us everyday, but often the task is just too daunting. Perhaps, you read Merlin Mann’s Inbox Makeover tutorial or Gina Trapani’s Trusted Trio system for managing email. You might have said, “Wow, this is great and makes a lot of sense. I’m gonna do it now!” Before you give up hope, there’s an instant way to clear your inbox of old emails in about 30 seconds. 30 seconds to zero Put it all in one folder: Create an archive folder In your favorite email program, create a folder and name it “Archive” followed by today’s date. That’s it! You won’t read 95% of it again Most of the emails festering in your inbox are messages that you’ll never ever read again. Now what? Ok, so you’ve you banished all your old emails, what’s next? For more email tips, check out Merlin’s Inbox Zero series.
Top Thunderbird Addons Mozilla Thunderbird has lots of great features including search, customizable views, IMAP, RSS support and more. Contacts Sidebar – displays the address books in Thunderbird sidebar. This lets you easily access all your contacts from the main window, quickly edit contact details, drop files on top of a contact to send it as an attachment and more. GMailUI - is an extension to Thunderbird which add concepts inspired by GMail to Thunderbird, like archiving mail and powerful message searching across all folders. a folder to be your sole “archive” folder, or choose to have an archive folder in each of your multiple accounts. Quicktext – is an extension for Thunderbird that lets you create templates that can be easily inserted into your own emails. Quicktext is the perfect tool to help you quickly answer routine, repetitive emails. Signature Switch- allows you to create multiple email signatures (Private, Business, etc.) Text size adds text size (increase/decrease) buttons to the main toolbar.
Zen Habits | Simple Productivity Multitasking Muddles Brains, (Wired) Some people suspect that a multitasking lifestyle has changed how they think, leaving them easily distracted and unable to concentrate even when separated from computers and phones. Their uneasiness may be justified. In several benchmark tests of focus, college students who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low-multitasking peers. Other studies have focused on multitasking’s immediate effects — children doing worse on homework while watching television, office workers being more productive when not checking email every five minutes. “We wanted to ask a different question,” said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University cognitive scientist. “What happens to people who multitasking all the time?” First, they had to remember the briefly glimpsed orientations of red rectangles surrounded by different numbers of blue rectangles. “The causality question is enormous here,” he said.
Using Thunderbird to Get Things Done Update 2009-02-05: Now that I've been doing this for a few years, I've refined this tip and its subsequent updates into an article at eHow: How to use Thunderbird to get things done. In the past few months, I've been trying to apply some of the principles of David Allen's Getting Things Done to my own work habits. This article describes how I've been using a combination of Thunderbird's labels and saved searches to facilitate handling my email inbox in a GTD fashion. Aside: Although I'm doing this on a Mac, there's no reason it shouldn't work with Thunderbird on any OS, once you account for minor menu differences across platforms. Also, in principle it should work with any mail client that supports labels and saved searches. GTD is heavily dependent on keeping track of "next actions", essentially a comprehensive to-do list. Let's start with the labels. Why not just delete items rather than flagging them? Okay, so this is simple enough so far. So why do I think this works so well?
My organiser - blog to discovery - Revelations along the way to a simpler, happier and more successful life Needing a new organisastion system I am a big believer that it is important to develop your own organisation system that works for your lifestyle, so I have spent a lot of time developing my own organiser. In the last two years I have tried both paper and electronic systems and finally settled on a system using Rollabind discs and […] Also posted in organisation In need of a new organisation system I really like my current organisation system, but I have noticed one serious flaw recently; it is very easy to procrastinate when I’m selecting tasks. Organising my home tasks with a week planner I am a big believer that a good organisation system should work in the office as well as at home. Dealing with repeating tasks in a paperbased system Repeating tasks are important as they are frequently the small tasks that help make our lives run smoothly, e.g. reviewing project finances, tidying the house and phoning friends. My organiser – the remaining sections How I successfully plan my day
Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains (Wired) Paying attention isn’t a simple act of self-discipline, but a cognitive ability with deep neurobiological roots — and this complex faculty, says Maggie Jackson, is being woefully undermined by how we’re living. In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention. It’s not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively. Of course, every modern age is troubled by its new technologies. Wired.com talked to Jackson about attention and its loss. Wired.com: Is there an actual scientific basis of attention? Maggie Jackson: In the last 30 or 40 years, scientists have made inroads into understanding its underlying mechanisms and physiology. We are programmed to be interrupted. See Also: