Another effective solution to handle the email backlog

A few months ago I posted a solution for handling large quantities of email.

A few of those tips were: You must organize your inbox, archive items, separate them into tags/categories/labels, use filters to direct incoming mail into specific labels instead of receiving everything in the inbox. That reduces the clutter and allows you to focus on more important email first. (i.e. I redirect all newsletters to a ‘Newsletters’ label and automatically set them to ‘Read’).

One thing I mentioned previously was getting straight to the tasks and answering all email before starting with other work. This gets your mind off the issue of ‘pending mail’ and allows you to concentrate fully on other tasks. However, sometimes this is not that easy as there might be certain emails you must spend more time on, and you might need to get busy with other things at that moment.

My solution for this issue is to start a new reply to every single email you plan to address in the course of the day. Add a salutation, and save the message. In certain emails where you might have to formulate a proper answer you might want to do a sketch; type in the main topics and then just save it as a draft like the rest. Do this for all your pending email and then get them off your inbox.

That way you will have peace of mind that you have started the replies, and you can get down to other matters knowing that your inbox is now clean.

Do you have any special way of managing your inbox? Share your comments,

Unproductive? Stressed out? This might help…

How can you be more productive at home and at work, while ridding yourself of unnecessary stress? These are a few tips I have found along the way:

Pending matters (personal or work) tend to stick to your brain through the day, even though you are not focusing on them. They are like a cancer that cuts off productivity, just like a person who is going through divorce or difficult times will have trouble coping with work and friends, this holds with any kind of personal activities that have been left pending.

• If you take email seriously, divide it into “personal” and “work” folders. Attend to personal mail before leaving to work each morning, or at night before going to bed.
• Write down task lists (Use Google Calendar, Outlook, Google Tasks or even pen and paper) and divide them into days. You can’t do everything in a day, so be realistic. Try to do everything that is personal at home, and everything that is work related at the office.
• When you don’t accomplish a pending task, don’t leave it “hanging”. Set it for a later time (after work maybe?) and remove it from the “overdue” list. If it was something urgent you couldn’t accomplish and it involves someone else, let that person know (email? phone?) immediately that it will take you another day to finish it.
• While at work, be sure to have your pending activities listed appropiately and go through them in order, remember you can’t do everything at once and it will only stress you out thinking about how much you have to do, specially when you have a deadline.
• If you read personal email at work, try to archive (or store) personal emails that arrive, and mark in your calendar that you must attend to those emails when you get home. If it is something urgent, reply at once that you will attend to the issue at a later time.

By following these steps, hopefully you will be able to clear your mind at work and start to focus on what you have to do, not what you had to do and didn’t do, nor what you have pending and might have to do later. Everything at its time.

Now get to work!

Have you ran out of ideas for your blog posts?

I mean, seriously, we all face creative block sometimes, however, you might want to ask yourself this sometimes: Is my life really that interesting? Is what I have to say really that interesting? and, How can I spice it up?

I just read an interesting post that talks about cross-dressing as a method of overcoming the creative block, to be able to develop another “way” of thinking, as in thinking as the opposite sex would. It sounds interesting, however, I don’t think it should be necessary to reach those extremes. I live by a basic rule:

If you wouldn’t read what your writing down, you probably shouldn’t be writing it down in the first place.

If you run out of ideas, probably what you are doing right now isn’t interesting enough. The thing to do is find something you would really like to do, then blog about that. For example, go explore the world, take photos, learn a new language, start software programming, make your own website, learn to use photoshop, or a thousand other things come to mind.

Why? This is not only about blogging. Expressing yourself or your thoughts via a blog is only a way to reflect your own self on the web. So if your own self is boring, the best thing to do is to make your life less boring. And it is possible, it doesn’t matter if you work, or are too busy all the time, there is always a way to inch in a few things you would like to do. Think about it.

If someone managed to make a whole vlog series about “You Suck at Photoshop“, surely you can come up with something creative and blog about it. I don’t know, just evoke your wildest dreams, just think and act random, sometimes that’s the best way in enabling that creative part of your mind. That way you will never run dry. However, don’t blog without a reason. If you are not feeling it, then don’t go posting it.

What is Google Wave?

So, you might have heard a lot of talk/posts going around lately referring to Google Wave. So what is this “Google Wave” everyone is talking about?

It is a beta service from Google, hosted at http://wave.google.com, which currently is only available to 100,000 people. Those people are having their invitations sent to them by Google as a preview of the service. It is expected that the service will go live in X amount of time, possibly after they have determined that the system presents a low rate of bugs, and can hold up to the excessive demand on their servers (We don’t wait it dying like Gmail, do we now?).

According to Google Wave’s short about page, a Wave is the following:

• A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
• A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

However, Wikipedia goes on to explain a little more in depth what Google Wave is:

• Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.

So I hope this has cleared any confusion as to what the service is, what we can expect from it, and how reliable it is going to be. We all have our fingers crossed that it will turn out to be what we expected (and that it wont fall down as much as Gmail).

Social Media and Marketing… Where are we?

Where are we today regarding Social Media and Marketing?

Social Interaction: Lego People

Advances in Social Media are changing the way we market our products, services, or ourselves. It’s not all about *the logo* any more, it’s not about what your company represents, it’s about what your customers represent to you, it’s about how will your customers benefit from your service, and how can you learn from their experiences to build up on your products, and deliver better service.

One platform isn’t the future. One platform isn’t even better than another. A platform is a tool, and us marketers must know how to use these tools to reach our customers, without aimlessly devoting everything towards one specific platform. Today it might be Twitter and Facebook, tomorrow Google Wave, and the next day who knows, but we must always keep in mind that it’s the person that makes the platform useful, not the platform that makes the person useful.

Chris Brogan is an expert. I don’t usually call someone an expert unless I really mean it. He recently gave a speech at New Media Atlanta (which I obviously did not attend to), and he just posted the video capture for the whole speech on his blog. If you have a spare hour I recommend you give it a good listen.

So what are your thoughts about Social Media? Where do we go from here?