email - TheWayoftheWeb

3 quick productivity tips for the weekend

March 17, 2012 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

If you’re like me, you’ve probably skimmed through a variety of productivity tips every week, planned to take a closer look, and then forgotten about them by the weekend. But recently, I’ve made 3 key changes which have really helped my productivity by reducing the information overload we’re all experience between email, social networks and the constrant stream of new content being published.

1. Archive all emails older than 2012:

With the amount of emails I get on a daily basis, Inbox Zero seemed about as likely as taking a vacation in Narnia this year. Prior to the last two weeks, I’d kept trying to delete or respond all emails, but the number never seemed to drop below 1500 which was pretty overwhelming. By archiving I can reassure the librarian squirrel instinct in me the email is still searchable, but now I’ve got a far more manageable 200 emails left for 2012 to action or file for responses. Much less stressful, and suddenly my email looks more like an actual action list, rather than a mess.

2. Cut down on RSS:

RSS is not dead – it’s still the most effective content delivery system around. The problem is it’s too effective in allowing me to hoarde every possible website I enjoy, but noone has come up with a way to de-dupe the echo chamber that is particularly bad for tech blogs. So in addition to removing a number of sites I rarely get useful information or great entertainment from, I’ve also cut down on the number that constantly publish ‘me too’ coverage.

I’ve also resolved to only check RSS at the end of the day, when everything else is done or scheduled for the following day – I love keeping up with the latest news and the best articles and features, but I’m not running a site for breaking news, so I don’t really need to check RSS every 30 or 60 minutes these days.

3. Kill cross-platform duplication

I’ve suddenly realised that I read some sites via RSS, see their updates on Facebook and their tweets on Twitter, as well as an occasional appearance on Google+. And there are very few people in the world who I need to pay that close attention to.

I’ve finally been making use of the ‘Hide All By’ option next to every Facebook update, and it’s definitely helping in making it a more usable social network, and letting me actually use it to keep up with my friends. The brands I like still get a ‘Like’ for their page for what it’s worth, and I don’t have to be bombarded by updates from a 10-year-old film I listed on my profile years ago.

OK, so this isn’t the most comprehensive productivity toolset you’ll see, but importantly I’m getting much more done with probably 30 minutes of effort to archive emails, unsubscribe to some sites and hide some Facebook posts. That’s short enough that you don’t have to wait until next weekend to get it done…

Buffer

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: cutting down, email, facebook, information filters, productivity, rss

When personalised emails turn ugly

October 5, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I’m all for personalisation and customisation. When done well, it can be a brilliant tool for helping people to feel part of a community.

But with anything good, there’s always a risk that something will go wrong if you’re not careful.

Hence why I had to chuckle when a recent major conference (6 letters with a : in the title) emailed me. They’d already emailed in previous weeks with various offers, but the two last minute emails I received undermined any interest they’d built up.

Because they were both addressed to ‘Steve’.

Now my name isn’t Steve. My middle name isn’t Steve. And even those people who have addressed an email to my blog have said ‘Dear TheWayoftheWeb’, which is fairly bland, but even they didn’t call me Steve.

So, just for the record, I’m not called ‘Steve’.

Buffer

Filed Under: marketing Tagged With: customisation, email, marketing, mistake, personalisation, steve

Does social media really increase your emails?

September 30, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Social Media leads to more time spent on emails, according to a new study by Nielsen (Found via Mashable).

Apparently heavy social media users spend much more time consuming email each day, and it seems to only be increasing judging by the study. There’s no inference whether this is a good or bad thing, but the question I’d be asking is whether it’s also affected the amount of time spent on the telephone, in meetings etc. I probably spend less time on the telephone now than at any point in my life, and yet I’m keeping in contact with far more people on a far more regular basis than ever before.

How to tackle the email increase:

Nielsen and Mashable both point to the sign-up and notification emails as being the biggest cause of the email influx – but there’s a really, really simple solution.

In addition to my two main email accounts (work and personal), I have an account at OtherInbox which has been utterly fantastic at keeping all the notifications etc out of my way unless I actually need them.

Put simply, Other Inbox is web-based mail, but rather than the normal email address, you get an @username.otherinbox.com address (so mine is @badgergravling.otherinbox.com or @badgergravling.oib.com – cheers for the tip Tim). All I then do is insert the name of the social media site (or anything else I fancy) as my email address – so thewayoftheweb@badgergravling.otherinbox.com.

When that address is emailed by the site, Other Inbox automatically creates a folder of the same name and files every email from the site in the right folder.

So anything likely to clog your inbox gets filtered, filed, and saved for 30 days with a free account (paid accounts are really cheap and worthwhile for permanent archives). And you can integrate it with Gmail, access via IMAP etc, etc.

End result – a far less cluttered inbox every day, and storage for those set-up emails you’ll realise you need in two year’s time.

Buffer

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: email, empty inbox, filtering, mashable, Nielsen, otherinbox, social media, social networking, tackling

Saturday link round-up

April 18, 2009 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

Some interesting links for the weekend:

London’s best free wi-fi hotspots – Timeout: The type of guide I kept meaning to find/write, and suddenly it appears!

Email is such a blunt tool – Neil Perkin: Neil not only writes consistently great posts but always seems to find the perfect images to illustrate them, along with brilliant visual presentations.

Social Media is good for you – Faster Future: Nice post from Dave Cushman as a counterpoint to the shock headline-grabbing about how Facebook/Twitter etc are replacing the other scourges of humanity – the radio, record player, television, video nasties, video games etc. See also my earlier post responding to the social networking health threat…

Gordon Brown is apparently going to protect ‘high quality’ content on the internet – Cnet: For ‘high quality’, assume he means traditional media – and for how he’s going to protect it – he has no idea, or at least he isn’t telling anyone…

Swedish ISP won’t retain user data – Ars Technica: ‘Jon Karlung, the head of ISP Bahnhof, says that his company won’t turn over any user data to authorities because it refuses to keep any log files. That decision is legal—for now’. This is why I love the Swedes so much!

Buffer