Posts Tagged ‘email’

Your Guide to Getting Productive with Gmail: Apps & Extensions

We’ve covered the basics of productive email use with Gmail. By now, with an average email load, you should be able to power through it all within 15 minutes. But that doesn’t mean you can’t cut down on even more time, or make Gmail an even more powerful application, with the help of a few browser extensions and even some desktop applications.

To quickly recap: in part one we looked at… » Continue

June 30 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: browser, email, gmail, information management | 2 comments»

Your Guide to Getting Productive with Gmail: Managing the Flow

Last time we redirected all of our email accounts to the one place, our central email hub at Gmail. Once you have all your accounts trickling into Gmail, you’ve got to manage that flow of information so that a) it’s possible to get through all of your email in fifteen minutes or less and b) it’s easy to find next week, next month and next year.
The Inbox is Sacred
You… » Continue

June 25 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: email, gmail, information management | 10 comments»

Your Guide to Getting Productive with Gmail: Account Consolidation

Gmail is a powerful tool, but many users of this service aren’t tapping into its full potential. To help you get more productive and get the most out of Gmail, I’m going to spend the next few articles talking about the most effective features of the software and the techniques and practices you can use to make the most of it.

In this first installation, we’ll talk about account consolidation. This… » Continue

June 23 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: email, gmail, information management | 20 comments»

Gmail Labs: Get experimental features in Gmail

Tonight, Google has released a bunch of new experimental features in Gmail, which you can enable any of them through a “Labs” tab in your setting area. Interesting enough - this is a development effort of Google developers’ free 20% time. Initially, there are 13 features available:

Most of them could enhance your productivity (except the Old Snakey game). I have enabled three most useful features:

Quick Links. Consider this

» Continue

June 6 2008 | By Leon | Tagged: email, gmail, google | 4 comments»

Saving Time on Routine Tasks: Optimized Writing

Last time we looked at saving time on routine tasks, we found a few ways to optimize our reading process. Today, we’re covering the opposite side of the same coin with optimized writing. Technically, we’ll spend more time on optimizing your typing than writing, but in this day and age there’s really not much of a difference.

Using your computer, by nature, involves writing. You no doubt write something at… » Continue

May 21 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: efficiency, email, instant messenger, optimization, sms, writing | 5 comments»

How to Ruthlessly Reclaim Work Day Time

When you’re starting a small business or working from home as a freelancer, you need to make every minute of time count; it’s a race against the clock to break even before your new endeavor uses up your savings and breaks you.

But there are always a million and one things that interfere with and take over your day. Your to-do list of twenty items that you intended to tackle by… » Continue

April 28 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: email, feedreader, freelancing, home office, housework, phone, Technology | 21 comments»

Following Email Etiquette

In Simplifying Your Information Intake, we looked at strategies to reduce the amount of email you need to deal with, and how to deal with what’s left much faster. Anyone who undertakes the task of clearing out their inbox for good and getting a handle on their email habits inevitably discovers that the biggest reason email is plaguing so much of their time is the amount of unnecessary… » Continue

April 16 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: email, etiquette, information, organization | 13 comments»

Go on a High-Information Diet

Everywhere you turn these days people are complaining about too much information. The phrase “information overload” gets more than 1.5 million hits on Google. (This post makes it one more!) Everyone seems to think that if they could just reduce the flow of information into their lives, everything would be all better. They could finally relax and take a minute to catch up.

My advice is the opposite: you don’t… » Continue

March 19 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: email, information, input, Management, rss | 25 comments»

Simplifying Your Information Intake

Productivity. We spend more time reading about it, talking about it, writing about it, thinking about it than actually making it happen. We complicate it with a disjointed system of hacks that don’t really work well together, then we decide to simplify it; every year, every month, it’s a vicious cycle for those of us addicted to the cool-aid of productivity and lifehacking that streams forth from the feed… » Continue

March 7 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: email, feedreader, information, processing, rss | 13 comments»

The Gaps in the Standard Address Book

When I was a kid, my dad would give me little tasks around his office to keep me out of trouble. My favorite was gluing business cards to Rolodex cards and carefully arranging them. Kept me out of trouble for hours at a go, because my father not only had plenty of contacts but also hated organizing his Rolodex himself.

Dear old Dad’s tried plenty of contact management systems in… » Continue

March 6 2008 | By Thursday | Tagged: address_book, contact_management, email, networking | 30 comments»

How to Be a Good Neighbor In an Attention Economy

These days, everyone has too much on their minds. Gone are the days when woke up, went to the factory, put in your time, came home, and sat down with a selection from the three TV shows on that night. Gone, too, are the days when a long-distance call from grandma in Wisconsin was an event, something to look forward to and to put everything on hold for. Or… » Continue

March 3 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: attention, Communication, email, interruption, promotion | 11 comments»

The Simply Effective Guide To Reaching Anyone Online

Networking online is very similar to networking face to face. You’re ultimately trying to connect with people and forge relationships. The only real difference is that you’re using slightly different tools to communicate, and have to compete a bit harder to get their attention.

It’s not always easy, but it’s never impossible, if you commit to being a certain type of person, and taking appropriate measures to reach your goal… » Continue

February 27 2008 | By Alex | Tagged: Communication, email, networking, online, tool | 7 comments»

My Struggles With Email Triage

I enjoy information, probably more than I should. I’ve managed to find a career path where information really is money — if I can break a story or create a new angle on it, I can eat at the end of the day. I’m constantly on the look out for new information that I can use. I get emails about all sorts of things, follow almost 300 blogs and… » Continue

February 14 2008 | By Thursday | Tagged: email, information, overload, Productivity, rss | 20 comments»

Do Your Emails Suck? How to Write Emails That Get Results

Feel like a slave to your inbox? Improve your writing and you’ll save plenty of time by eliminating miscommunications and the need for follow-up. Email management productivity tips can only do so much if you don’t know how to write an effective email. That doesn’t mean you have to strive for lyrical prose in every message (though I always welcome lyrical prose in my inbox). The key is to… » Continue

December 19 2007 | By Pamela | Tagged: email, work, writing | 12 comments»

10 Simple Tips for Using Email

We all use email, but, sometimes we use it too much or use it inappropriately. To get the most out of email we need to use it carefully and judiciously. These are 10 tips to get the most out of emailing.

1. Use different email accounts for different purposes.

It is is good to have separate email accounts for separate purposes. For example, you may have one for business and… » Continue

September 26 2007 | By Tejvan | Tagged: Communication, email, internet, tips | 20 comments»

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