Getting Things Done
Organizing Sent Email
I’m having a really tough time finding a useful tool or system to easily organize sent email. Every “organizing your email” tutorial out there seems to focus on the deluge of inbound email and how to handle, process, and organize it.
An overlooked problem, it seems, is organizing your sent email. Typically, most of us, when we need to find an email we sent previously, just search through our email Sent folder. Thunderbird and Outlook are more than capable of doing this.
What if I just want to easily browse through the last 20 emails I sent someone?
You don’t need to be a Geek to be Computer Savvy
Background
I come across two types of people it seems: Geeks, and non-Geeks. Somehow, in the past two decades, it has become to cool to be a Geek. Which is very strange. Because to define a non-Geek, I would typically say, “A cool person”. How can both be cool?
Well, not surprisingly, this has left the rest of America in the lurch, too. Here’s why this has become so damaging to middle-America.
Grocery Shopping Revisited
Several years ago, I designed a spreadsheet for grocery shopping in Microsoft Excel. The idea was that we would no longer forget certain things when we go shopping. With (now) six children, the human brain can only hold so much information. We’ve tried shopping in larger amounts and cooking in advance (known as freezer cooking), but for day-to-day life, when things get kind of hectic and we lose our ability to plan, we had to have a more consistent approach to fall back on.
What’s Wrong with Online Feed Readers
I was reviewing TechCrunch’s post from March 2006 about the state of Online Feed Readers because I’ve been wanting to find a way to read and track my feeds online. I’m a pretty heavy news junkie - for at least the things I like to read about (sorry, Associated Press), but I’m sort of bound to my computer to track and manage my feeds. Sometimes, I have a little extra free time where I’m waiting for someone or something and there is internet access nearby, so I’d like to be able to check out the latest feeds and catch up on them.
Joe’s Goals
I’ve been playing with Joe’s Goals for a few months. Joe seems like a pretty good guy who just got married on August 26. I don’t know if that was one of his goals or not, but he has definitely worked hard to make such a simple free goal tracking application. He is nearing 10,000 users. If you are needing a simple way to track some goals that you need to get done each day, I’d highly recommend considering Joe’s Goals. Unlike a lot of goal tracking software, Joe’s Goals is very simple, very Web 2.0, and very hip. A child could use it. Try it and see if it will help you to remember to get those daily chores done a bit more often.
Windows XP Taskbar Efficiency
I was at a friend’s house recently and was watching him navigate his own system. It occurred to me how much more efficient he could have set up his computer. I’ve often thought this when I’ve seen other people’s computers, so I thought I’d finally share some ways in which I try to be as efficient as possible. Hopefully, this will help save you some time each week.
The Windows taskbar is a great tool and can really save you a lot of time if you use it to its maximum potential. Otherwise, it is just a waste of precious screen space. In fact, this friend had his taskbar in the “auto-hide” mode which made sense partially because his taskbar wasn’t working that well for him.
Normal Day Productivity
Steve Pavlina has posted a very useful article on how to have a productive normal day. I’ve often thought what he expresses - that our culture is geared toward special events (i.e. graduations, holidays, birthday parties, weekends, etc). We seem to give little thought and planning to the present normal daily life.
We tend to let normal days just slip by, always looking forward to the next event. For me, it has been very difficult lately to have any sort of normal day since my son Obadiah died, so I found Steve’s article helpful.
Is your Email Response Time an indication of you?
It is pretty easy to get an email address these days. Almost too easy. Yahoo, Google’s gmail service, and MSN all offer free email addresses. Almost everyone has one even if they use another one as their primary address. Recently, I’ve dealt with about a half-dozen people, both in my personal and professional lives, who seem to think email is just for receiving. They either let email pile up and respond at a later day, or more often, never respond at all.
Getting Things Done
I am a huge fan of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”. I’ve been an efficiency expert most of my life and highly adept at getting more done faster. Yet, until David came out with his book, most of the “organizing” books I’ve read (probably over 100) were all variations on a theme. David finally codified what I and others had been thinking for sometime but often unable to put into words.
