Posts Tagged ‘email’

The Benefits of Automation

Automation is the use of control systems to control processes, reducing the need for human intervention. Putting this into context, automation is having technology do things for you so that you don't have to. Automation is all around us. When you're at a set of traffic lights, there isn't a traffic light operator that decides when to change the light from red to green. It is done automatically… Continue reading

July 2 2009 | By Paul | Tagged: automation, email, Productivity, time, twitter | 7 comments»

A Quick Guide to Email: Not Being “That Guy”

If you're reading this, odds are you are a knowledge worker whose time is very valuable and who requires large chunks of uninterrupted time in order to do whatever it is you are being paid to do. You aren't cranking widgets. Instead, you're trying to discover the history and social significance of widgets across cultural contexts, or you're trying to design a revolutionary new machine to produce widgets, or you're… Continue reading

March 11 2009 | By Art | Tagged: email, etiquette, priority, time-management, time-wasting | 10 comments»

Canned Responses: Which Emails Should You Standardize?

I've got a whole stack of standard responses that I cut and paste into emails. There are certain requests for information, for instance, that I get on a pretty regular basis. I don't really have an interest in retyping the same message over and over again, so I have saved my commonly used emails and just cut and paste. Gmail made that whole process much easier this week… Continue reading

November 28 2008 | By Thursday | Tagged: email, gmail, template | 14 comments»

An Interview with Jared Goralnick — Founder of AwayFind

A new productivity tool, AwayFind, launched yesterday. I had the pleasure of getting in on the beta and, simply put, AwayFind will change the way you think about email. As a general rule, most of us check our email religiously. We're all scared that a time-sensetive email will come in and we won't see it in time — but what if we were notified of the most important… Continue reading

November 14 2008 | By Thursday | Tagged: awayfind, email | 6 comments»

Mastering the Short Email

“I apologize that this letter is so long. I did not have the time to make it short”

— BLAISE PASCAL

Good writers know that lean, vibrant language is almost always preferable to verbose, rambling writing. There is virtually no writing in the world so good that it can’t be made better by making it shorter. There are exceptions, of course – a contract needs to cover every possible potentiality, as… Continue reading

September 17 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: attention, brevity, business, concision, email, writing | 15 comments»

7 Email Myths That Plague the Workplace

Myths about how to best do email abound. Some are explicitly stated and drummed into your head, and some are the unspoken expectations of the modern corporate world. To succeed at tackling the big email time sink and making email woes a thing of your past, you need to acknowledge these myths for what they are, and implement a system that works. Systems need good foundations in order to work, and… Continue reading

August 20 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: email, myths | 15 comments»

MobileMe: A Review of Apple’s .Mac Descendant

It’s been a rocky start for Apple’s MobileMe, but things look like they’re settling down now and the service is, for the most part, chugging along. If you're an optimist, the botched launch wasn't such a bad thing after all, with Apple issuing free trial periods of up to four months before the subscription fee kicks in for affected users. I’ve been lucky—I haven’t had to put up with any of… Continue reading

July 23 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: apple, appointments, contacts, data management, email, organization, sync | 8 comments»

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 reading

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 reading

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 reading

June 23 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: email, gmail, information management | 21 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

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 reading

May 21 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: efficiency, email, instant messenger, optimization, sms, writing | 6 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 reading

April 28 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: email, feedreader, freelancing, home office, housework, phone, Technology | 22 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 reading

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 reading

March 19 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: email, information, input, Management, rss | 31 comments»

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