Two Minute Offense

Merlin has a great (or at least a decent remindering) series on how to cut down email clutter. For those who need something in their system to tinker with, there is now something else you can incessantly mess with: e-mail filters! Just when you thought you had everything perfected! Of course, if you need some more help on where to start (Merlin’s advice is somewhat high-level, you could digg into this post about how to set up your Gmail account to read newsgroups and mailing lists).

“Doing Getting Things Done stuff” should not be on your list of Next Actions. If it is, you’re doing something wrong.

Please feel free to leave comments with other things that should not be “Next Actions.”

With My Web 2.0, the new Yahoo Maps, and the (hopefully) soon to be released Mail 2.0, Yahoo is quickly amassing quite an array of awesome web services. Add to that the new Yahoo Answers, and, well, that’s that.

Most of the answers I’ve seen so far have been pretty good. We’ll see how the quality goes as the “newness” of it wears off…

At least you know it won’t be cluttered with Spam Questions (unlike my comments are - thank god for auto-moderation!) since they only keep the questions around for 14 days.

I could help but reply to this one… (Note, the link won’t work if you’re reading this post more than 14 days after the post date)

Now that you can get your shirts on and off more quickly… Let’s inject some style into the wardrobe situation. Don’t worry, it doesn’t require spending any more money.

Just make sure that when you go to put that shirt back in your closet, take an extra second (the one you saved by putting on quicker earlier) and make sure it goes to the back of the rack. Then you can just take the first shirt that’s there and put it on really fast! It’s like the “top of the drawer” approach for the stylish. You can even sort your shirts, so if you’ve got long sleeve for cooler climes, and short sleeve button downs for when the weather is a little warmer, you can move the “categories” around so the best available choice is always the First Choice.

This will, obviously, decrease the so-called “repeat” outfits, instantly making you more stylish than probably half of the people you work with.

The categorization also works well if your apartment/house has fairly small closets (or relatively few of them) and you have to share with someone else. I know that the first shirt after my wife’s clothes will be the one I’m going to wear.* I know it’s going to be clean, and since I limit the number of pants I have to only go with the shirts I have, I know the rest of my wardrobe will fall into place around it. (That’s a whole different post, though, isn’t it?)

*I let her have the front of the closet since I’ve got about 7 inches on her and it’s easier for me to reach back there.

I think I’ve pointed it out before, but the GTD set usually seems to intersect in large part with the Personal Finance set…

So, here’s where I’m putting my money:
1) NetBank Checking account: 1% interest - no charge for ATMs… you can use Washington Mutual surcharge-free ATM’s for free money withdrawal
2) NetBank Money Market: 3.04% interest (minimum balance of $500) - used as overdraft protection for the NB checking… which basically means all my liquid cash goes in here with very little in the checking account because there is no charge for using the overdraft protection.
3) ING Direct Savings: 3.30% - provides easy transfer of funds from Money Market account to…
4) Emigrant Direct Savings: 4.0% !! - they just upped the rate yesterday; guaranteed through the end of December 2005. This is where my wife and I are putting our savings for the house downpayment (and, well, any extra cash we have as well).

It’s a little bit of process to get the money from the money market to the ING to the Emigrant, but the 4% interest is Definitely Worth It.

In addition:
1) Discover Card - 1% cash back with no limit. You can double for some retailers to get gift cards. Others give you a little extra (GAP gives $25 for redeeming $20, same for Bed, Bath & Beyond. Great for going to weddings… )
2) Marathon (Gas station) Credit Card - 5% back on all Marathon purchases (since they usually have cheaper gas than most places anyway) and 1% back on everything else… not sure about the limit on this one…
3) TJX/Marshall’s credit card - 5% back at Marshalls and TJ Maxx which is where my wife and I do pretty much all of of our clothes shopping. The 5% goes towards a gift certificate that they mail automatically when you get over $10 (nice to not have to request anything).

There you have it. As an added bonus, I can manage all of my finances from the Web.

Hope that didn’t take more than 2 minutes to read.

As coincidence would have it, I came across an article that mentioned BlogLines email subscriptions service… How did I not know this before? I guess because when I started using BlogLines, I pretty much dropped all my email subscriptions because I was so enamored with RSS. Now that I’m back on the newgroup/email list wagon, I will give this one a try…

Set up a Bloglines account, then scroll down to the bottom of the navigation window and select “Create Email Subscriptions”. Bloglines will assign you an email address that kinda looks like garyfugere.13999089@bloglines.com. Why set up a Bloglines email account? Here it is in Bloglines own words:

“Bloglines free email accounts allow people to receive email newsletter subscriptions within their MyBloglines page. This helps to reduce traffic through your primary email inbox and helps to contain the spam menace. A Bloglines email account gives you a trump card when a newsletter breaks the rules of opt-in marketing. When you unsubscribe from a Bloglines email subscription, the email address disappears. You never have to worry about trying to find the unsubscribe instructions for an unwanted mailing list.”

I subscribe to several newgroups via Yahoo and Google. Recently I decided that digest versions of certain newsgroups were not cutting it, so I changed my membership options to get individual emails… Can anyone guess where this is going?

My inbox was pretty much immediately flooded with emails. Of course, these are emails that I want to read… but not that I necessarily need to read right away.

The solution? Gmail makes it easy…

1. Create a label for the group
2. Create a filter to apply to the “To:” address of the group (since everyone sends email to the same address for it to be distributed to the group)
3. In the filter: apply the label for the group, and have it Bypass the Inbox

Now all the email from your various newgroups will be delivered to the different tags, won’t clutter up your inbox, and is much easier to read than the digest format. This is especially true when people manage to use the same subject to continue the thread (for some reason, people like to change the subject line) since Gmail will group them all together for you.

I first came across the knowledge in this area while listening to Brian Tracy. Leading Forward has a few good bullet points that I think you can probably read in less than 2 minutes.

Leading Forward: How to Multi-Task Productively
Effective multi-task requires careful thought, in addition to my previous post, some tactics to bear in mind to ensure appropriate multi-tasking are:

• Limit multi-tasking to simple tasks. Keep multi-tasking to simple tasks, that which does not require deep thinking, creative thinking or problem solving.
• Set apart time and energy for important work. Give important work, work requiring deep thinking, problem solving or creativity and imagination, the quality, energy and time it deserves. This will mean you will need to persevere on an important task until it’s completed
• Remove distractions and limit interruptions. When working on complex and important tasks, remove distractions, shut down your e-mail client, switch off your phone and TV, etc. Focused time and energy on important, complex tasks IS the most productive way to work!
• Daily and medium-term planning is crucial. Without effective daily and medium-term (a 40 day window) planning, ensuring appropriate multi-tasking is impossible, you ultimately remain in crisis (multi-tasking) mode. Planning helps to schedule time for important and complex work which is best suited for focused attention.

I have found that I often lose data (ie: thoughts and ideas) when I am forced to switch between tasks. Even when these tasks are related (parts of the same project), I either have to completely finish what I’m working on, or write down all the important things I need to remember with the regard to the task (which saves me some loss in productivity, but less than if I just switched without capturing that data).

How many times have you gone “Oh, right, now I remember you saying that”?

If you used computer-based lists like me, then you probably enjoy some amount of automatic sorting by the list program. This is good, of course, but a way to make it even more effective is to choose your words carefully. What do I mean? Well, obviously I’m going to explain or this wouldn’t be much of a post would it?

Say you’re adding something to a list that already has several items, and this thing you’re adding isn’t as important, or isn’t something you want to do right away… The example I’ll use is adding content to a web page (since this is what made me think of it). Adding the particular set of content I will be adding for this project is not as important as doing some other things I’m working on for this project (like getting all the buttons and forms to work correctly). So, instead of calling this item (Next Action, if that’s not trademarked - which it probably should be) “Add content to xyz.html” … I’m going to say “Put content into xyz.html.”

Figured it out yet?

If I use the word “Add” my lists (and probably some of yours too) will put this action near the top (ie: in alphabetical order). But if I say “Put” then there are other actions that will appear before this new one (usually, since P is for “Pretty far down the alphabet.” Things that are more important to “Add” to the site (since I seem to be “adding” a lot of things for this project) will appear before things that are less important to “Put” into the site.

If you don’t have a program yet that lets you make and sort lists, I have to recommend AirSet. It’s still under development, but they’re adding features as fast as I’m adding posts. And they reply to their emails in a much more timely manner.