Archiving Emails in Mail.app, there's an app for that.

If you are using Mail.app on OSX, this post is for you.

It's been well known to people that read my blog that I am an Inbox-Zero ninja, and generally pride myself on my ability to get through vast amounts of email quickly because of the system that I have refined over the past several years of experimenting.

Techniques in Archiving

One of the things about Inbox Zero is the ability to quickly move an email out of your "Inbox" and into another folder.  If you sort your emails that come into your Inbox by topic or subject or whatever, different folders may do good things for you.  For instance I have a folder where all Snort related email goes.  The three Snort mailing lists go straight to my inbox where I read most of them and then file them away using a keyboard shortcut.  Other Snort related mailing lists just go straight to this box, leaving me with only the important ones in my inbox.

Most listserver traffic of the 40 or so listservers that I belong to go straight to a "listserver" folder, where I can deal with it later.  You get my point.

But everything that I don't filter, is in my inbox, which usually nets me about 200~ emails a day that I need to deal with.  When I read an email I have possible outcomes.

• Delete it


• Archive it (if I need it later)


• Respond to it (if it takes shorter than 2 minutes to accomplish this task)


• Delegate it (if I am not the appropriate person to deal with "x" email)


• Make a todo to deal with it later.

Delete it

Duh.  I don't do enough of this.

Archive it.

This is the meat of the post, and kind of the point of writing this article.  I am a firm believer in leaving your hands on the keyboard if possible.  Learning the keyboard shortcuts in your favorite app will not only save time, but it also keeps your hands where you need to be doing work.  On the keyboard (instead of continually reaching for your mouse).  There are keyboard shortcuts for almost anything in OSX, and if you can't find it, or the menu command doesn't have a keyboard shortcut, you can make a keyboard shortcut to do what you want in Snow Leopard.  Heck, there are keyboard shortcuts in Gmail (learn em!)

Now, how do you do this in Mail.app, well there is a little app called "Archive" that will allow you to do this.

Archive.  Archive allows you to do exactly that.  Archive the email that you are presently on.  It creates a folder in your email accounts named "Archive", and when you mash the shortcut in your inbox, it puts the email that you have lighted in the appropriate Archive folder.  Simple, clean, done.

There is also Mail Act-On, which I've talked about before here, is a nice little app if you need to do more advanced things than Archive, but for 99% of you, check out Archive, it does what you need.

Respond to it

If I think it'll take less than 2 minutes to respond to the email that I am currently reading, I'll bang out a response.  I try to not bang out a "quick" response "just to keep the ball moving" as Kevin Rose says.  I try to write out a through response.  My point in doing this is to eliminate further email by providing any answers I can, by asking the appropriate question so that the response to my email is full of exactly what I need it to be, and so that people don't waste more time by me not wasting theirs with a "short terse banged-out email".

Delegate It.

Otherwise known as the "Forward" button.  I get a ton of email, not all appropriate for me to handle, some need to go to our web team, some need to go to our research team, but it comes to me, because I "handle" the email, as opposed to ignore it.  I don't mind being the conduit to which people communicate, at least I know things are getting done, and I have a pulse on what is going on.

Todo It.

If the email contains an action that I need to perform, but I can't do it right now, I have a keyboard shortcut that allows me to highlight a section of text, mash a keyboard shortcut, and Omnifocus will grab the hightlight-ed input that I selected and makes a Todo out of it, along with a link in Omnifocus back to the email that generated it.  (This is called "Clipping" for you Omnifocus nerds, get ON IT.)  I quickly set a context (email) and a due date.  Then I go onto the next email.  Everyday, I get to the bottom of the "Todo"s that are due that day, and that includes the thoughtful emails.

Matter of fact, writing this post about "Archive" was a Todo.

Let me go mark it done.

BTW -- Inbox Zero comes from Merlin Mann.  I'm not stealing his work.  It's insightful.  He rocks.  MerlinMann.com and InboxZero.com

Google Wave, it's dead. So sad.

In case you haven't heard.

So, on Google's "Official" Blog (which one guys?  You have so many!) they announced yesterday that they are pulling the plug on Google Wave.

So sad.

I think Wave had some really good potential, but I'll say it here, as I have said it since the beginning, Wave would have never caught on unless it replaced something else.  Wave was pretty neat, it was like a Wiki, Google Docs, Gmail, Gtalk, and god-knows-what-else all rolled into one.  It worked, it worked pretty well.  But it didn't replace anything for anyone.  It was a "and also" technology.

Let's Hope

Google rolls some of the technology they developed for Wave into the rest of their products.  For instance, simultaneous typing. That could be useful in Gmail and Gtalk.

I think the collaboration-on-documents idea was great.  That would be most useful in a corporate setting.  I would have loved to use it at Sourcefire.

Design

Some of their design ideas were great. Look at the navigation window over here on the right.  Look at the shading around the box, Look at the title bar (how it can be collapsed).  Look at the "+" button.  It all looks very nice.  It has icons, it has lots of html5 being used to shade and render it.  The drop shadow, the links.  Every box on Google Wave seemed to be more carefully thought out and precise.  The GUI was a wonderful idea and one couldn't very well argue with that.  The scroll bar (not pictured here) was nice to use.  Every pane was separated into it's own individual boxes.  You could tell there was a difference in between all of them.  Take a look at this post over at lifehacker.org: http://lifehacker.com/5400644/google-wave-look-and-feel-coming-to-gmail-other-google-apps.  I don't where they got that screenshot, but that's the way that Gmail should look!  Look at the boxes, the drop shadows, the shading.  The whole look and feel reeks less of a "Web App" and more of a Desktop app.  It has polish.  It has great design.  If you take a look at a screenshot of Gmail, from my own inbox, you will see what I am talking about.  Look at the panes here.  Look at the navigation windows.  This is not good GUI design in a web app, functional?  Yes.  Good looking and easier to navigate? No.

If Gmail wants to act like they are a desktop email replacement tool, they need to stop looking like "Mutt" and start looking like Wave.

In a way, I'm kind of sad to see Wave go.  There was a lot of really great ideas there.  I enjoyed using it.

However, I can totally see how it didn't work for some people.  It was confusing.  People didn't understand how it was different from anything else they used.  As I said, it didn't replace anything they already had, it didn't have a "need".  When the iPhone was invented people immediately saw the "need" for it.  A phone that is brilliantly easy to use.  It also replaced things.  It replaced their phone, it replaced their blackberry.  It was simple.

Wave wasn't simple.  It didn't replace anything, and that is why it failed.  People don't need another email system.  In fact, they need less.

Google services on the iPad and tablet computers

Google today rolled out their new version of the Gmail web interface specifically for the iPad.  Looks pretty nice.

Nice side by side pane view, similar to the native iPad Mail app.

Read the post below:

Official Google Mobile Blog: Google services on the iPad and tablet computers.

OAuth access to IMAP/SMTP in Gmail

...another entry from Google on the "Openness" aspect of their solution.  They have implemented OAuth IMAP/SMTP for Gmail.  So instead of you having to pass a 3rd party website your username and password credentials, you can use OAuth to be able to authorize that 3rd party website to access the information in Gmail.  Nice Approach there I think.

Google Code Blog: OAuth access to IMAP/SMTP in Gmail.

Yale Daily News - ITS delays switch to Gmail

Many universities and businesses have switched to Gmail as an email processing, cloud based platform.  I like a lot of the features of Gmail, ease of access, simple interface.  But I'm not a fan of several things as well.

Yale was thinking about moving to Google Apps as a platform, and said that "everyone was so caught up in wondering how we can do it, and forgot to ask should we do it."

Interesting article.

Yale Daily News - ITS delays switch to Gmail.

Detecting suspicious account activity on your Gmail

Official Gmail Blog: Detecting suspicious account activity.

I found this article interesting.  Google has implemented a kind of security feature in Gmail.  What it looks like, is now Google keeps track of the IPs that you log into your Gmail account from (which they  have for awhile now, check this out from back in 2008) and let's you know of any very strange deviations in pattern.

The example they provide is this:

Google knows, in this example, that this person normally signs in from California in the USA, then suddenly in the middle of all the normal accesses, there is a login in Poland.  Which is strange for the user, and you get this popup when you log into your gmail:

I think this is head and shoulders above what any of the other competitors are doing with their free online email solutions, and hopefully this will make strides to curbing some spam and illegal access of accounts.

No doubt that this had something to do with the illegal access of accounts from China during the whole "Google/Intel/insertothercompanieshere debacle".  Glad to see Google doing things like this.

Great Anti-Email post

Jeff Atwood, blogger and coder over at Coding Horror, one of the many blogs I read, had this post up sometime last year, and I thought it was such a good post that I've recommended it to a couple friends, but I realized I never actually blogged it.

Jeff discusses a similar topic to what I've discussed in the past.  Checking email less often, shutting your email off for periods of time, turn off the "new message" ding.   All great points.

Go check out his post here.  Jeff, great job!

Bottom Posting

Recently was chastised for Bottom posting on a Mailing list, so I thought I'd write a few words about it.

I bottom (or inline post) mostly because I like the email to be a message. You read a message or a letter from top to bottom, from left to right. It wasn't until email clients started top posting (looking at you Outlook/Lotus Notes) that email was written in the top-posting format, forcing you to read an email backwards.

So I looked it up, basically looking at two different information stores.

Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
RFC1855 -- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

These two places will define how to write email and how email should be written, on mailing lists, use groups, or any other email transaction.

The particular part to pay attention to is in RFC1855 --

"- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just
enough text of the original to give a context. This will make
sure readers understand when they start to read your response.
Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the
postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a
response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context
helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!"

Summarize the email at the top, and post below it. In other words, bottom-posting is the correct way to write email, as per RFC.

Things I wish about Email

Someone asked me:

"Joel,


I read your last post on Thunderbird and noticed you said [...] that you were "over client based email".  I use Thunderbird.  Why do you say that?  What don't you like about [...], client based applications?"  -- Yes I paraphrased.  But spelling is intact.

Mail.app
-- I would like the ability to shut off Spotlight indexing.  Meaning, I don't want Mail.app to download all of my Mail locally.  It's IMAP, that means keep it up in the cloud.  I don't want it here.  Also?  Very slow when dealing with Gmail.
-- I would like the "new" ability to "archive" an email with a keyboard shortcut.  In Thunderbird 3.0, I can mash the "a" key and the Email that is currently selected is archived.
-- Threading.  Threading is awful.  It works GREAT in Gmail, and is perhaps Gmail's best feature, bar none.
-- No way to bottom post.

Thunderbird
-- Same as Mail.app as far as the Spotlight indexing goes, except, I can shut it off in Thunderbird (awesome!).  But I don't want the client to download my email.  Period.  I want it kept in the cloud with no local copy.
-- Slow.  SLOW.
-- Threading, same as Mail.app, Threading sucks.  Again, Gmail has this down.
-- Too much CPU
-- Too much RAM.  (600 Megs?  Are you kidding me?)

Mutt
-- Slow
-- Can't open attachments, (yes, I know what you Mutt guys are going to say, but still, I would like the ability to just click (or tap a shortcut key) and open an attachment.  Not having to do a bunch of crazy nonsense to tie apps together.
-- Threading, I rather like the threading that Mutt has, and the customizability of Mutt beats everything else, bar none.

Outlook
-- Seriously, Outlook sucks.
-- Why am I including it here?
-- No way to bottom post
-- Inconsistant GUI
-- Slow
-- No way to bottom post.  Check out this fix (http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/)
-- No addons
-- No archiving
-- PST size limits
-- Bad rule granularity.


I solicited feedback from Twitter, regarding the above, and these are the responses I got.

"Lack of keyboard for control wrt to moving from folder to folder.. GMail makes that very easy." -- @jasonish


"The difficulty in working with the OS address book - Thunderbird vs Windows 7 contacts comes to mind (complicates my iphone sync)"
-- @tomsellers


"haven't found one with a conversation view on par with gmail."
-- @jjarmoc


"1) Folders < Labels (ability to 'symlink' emails to multiple tags) 2) i use 3-4 devices to check mail 3)Gmail's thread handling"
-- @jamesjtucker

and in the interest of fairness.  I'll get on Gmail too.

Gmail
-- I want the ability to mark two conversations and make them thread together.  For instance, let's say there is a thread, then someone answers that thread, but the mail client for that person adds "UNCLASSIFIED" to the thread.  The Thread is then broken, visually, but it is still the same.  I want to be able to combine them.
-- Your IMAP implementation really sucks.  Bad.  Oh, and it's slow as hell too, almost artificially.  Seems like you really don't want people using any other email solution except for the web.
-- Drag and drop of attachments.  This should be possible in HTML5, or at least with Google Gears
-- Lack of Google Gears (and thusly, no offline gmail support) for Safari/Snow Leopard.  Can we get rid of Gears and be HTML5 compliant please?
-- Lack of Bottom Posting option.  No, addons through Greasemonkey do not count.  Want to really impress me?  Reformat an entire email (when I hit reply), to flip the thread around based upon indexing, (come on, you guys can figure that out), to read top to bottom.
Check this out Google.  Do THIS and all would be awesome -- http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/
-- GPG/PGP support.  I don't use it, simply because it's a pain.  So I don't.  I probably would if I could.
-- The ability to filter on more headers.  Ideally, I'd love to be able to perform regex on headers.  Similar to procmail.
-- Label based signature blocks.  Or at least account based.





Please leave comments below.

Things I wish about Email

Someone asked me:

"Joel,


I read your last post on Thunderbird and noticed you said [...] that you were "over client based email".  I use Thunderbird.  Why do you say that?  What don't you like about [...], client based applications?"  -- Yes I paraphrased.  But spelling is intact.

Mail.app
-- I would like the ability to shut off Spotlight indexing.  Meaning, I don't want Mail.app to download all of my Mail locally.  It's IMAP, that means keep it up in the cloud.  I don't want it here.  Also?  Very slow when dealing with Gmail.
-- I would like the "new" ability to "archive" an email with a keyboard shortcut.  In Thunderbird 3.0, I can mash the "a" key and the Email that is currently selected is archived.
-- Threading.  Threading is awful.  It works GREAT in Gmail, and is perhaps Gmail's best feature, bar none.
-- No way to bottom post.

Thunderbird
-- Same as Mail.app as far as the Spotlight indexing goes, except, I can shut it off in Thunderbird (awesome!).  But I don't want the client to download my email.  Period.  I want it kept in the cloud with no local copy.
-- Slow.  SLOW.
-- Threading, same as Mail.app, Threading sucks.  Again, Gmail has this down.
-- Too much CPU
-- Too much RAM.  (600 Megs?  Are you kidding me?)

Mutt
-- Slow
-- Can't open attachments, (yes, I know what you Mutt guys are going to say, but still, I would like the ability to just click (or tap a shortcut key) and open an attachment.  Not having to do a bunch of crazy nonsense to tie apps together.
-- Threading, I rather like the threading that Mutt has, and the customizability of Mutt beats everything else, bar none.

Outlook
-- Seriously, Outlook sucks.
-- Why am I including it here?
-- No way to bottom post
-- Inconsistant GUI
-- Slow
-- No way to bottom post.  Check out this fix (http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/)
-- No addons
-- No archiving
-- PST size limits
-- Bad rule granularity.

I solicited feedback from Twitter, regarding the above, and these are the responses I got.

"Lack of keyboard for control wrt to moving from folder to folder.. GMail makes that very easy." -- @jasonish


"The difficulty in working with the OS address book - Thunderbird vs Windows 7 contacts comes to mind (complicates my iphone sync)"
-- @tomsellers


"haven't found one with a conversation view on par with gmail."
-- @jjarmoc


"1) Folders < Labels (ability to 'symlink' emails to multiple tags) 2) i use 3-4 devices to check mail 3)Gmail's thread handling"
-- @jamesjtucker

and in the interest of fairness.  I'll get on Gmail too.

Gmail
-- I want the ability to mark two conversations and make them thread together.  For instance, let's say there is a thread, then someone answers that thread, but the mail client for that person adds "UNCLASSIFIED" to the thread.  The Thread is then broken, visually, but it is still the same.  I want to be able to combine them.
-- Your IMAP implementation really sucks.  Bad.  Oh, and it's slow as hell too, almost artificially.  Seems like you really don't want people using any other email solution except for the web.
-- Drag and drop of attachments.  This should be possible in HTML5, or at least with Google Gears
-- Lack of Google Gears (and thusly, no offline gmail support) for Safari/Snow Leopard.  Can we get rid of Gears and be HTML5 compliant please?
-- Lack of Bottom Posting option.  No, addons through Greasemonkey do not count.  Want to really impress me?  Reformat an entire email (when I hit reply), to flip the thread around based upon indexing, (come on, you guys can figure that out), to read top to bottom.
Check this out Google.  Do THIS and all would be awesome -- http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/
-- GPG/PGP support.  I don't use it, simply because it's a pain.  So I don't.  I probably would if I could.
-- The ability to filter on more headers.  Ideally, I'd love to be able to perform regex on headers.  Similar to procmail.
-- Label based signature blocks.  Or at least account based.

False Alarm -- No more Thunderbird

Probably belongs in a tweet, but since I blogged about it here, I'll write it here.

Stopped using Thunderbird.  After it consumed 20 Gigs of space downloading my email, constantly kept my CPU at 80-100% and the hardware fan busy, consuming 500 Megs of RAM...  I ditched it and went back to Gmail on the web.

It did have some very nice features, however, basically, I am just over client email programs.

That is all, you may return to your regularly scheduled programs.


Please leave comments below.

Thunderbird 3.0

I know you've read from me time and again that I am a big proponent of Google's Gmail interface.  However, ever since Mozilla put out Thunderbird 3.0, i've been trying it.  It combines the best of both worlds, offline (even though Gmail just released that non-lab), client access, OSX integration.  But perhaps the best thing is that they have an archiving system now.

You read a message and you mash "a" and the message is placed into an archive by year-month timestamp, and is no longer in your inbox.  The simplest way, client side, to maintain Inbox-Zero.

Take a look at all the new features here.


Please leave comments below.

Thunderbird 3.0

I know you've read from me time and again that I am a big proponent of Google's Gmail interface.  However, ever since Mozilla put out Thunderbird 3.0, i've been trying it.  It combines the best of both worlds, offline (even though Gmail just released that non-lab), client access, OSX integration.  But perhaps the best thing is that they have an archiving system now.

You read a message and you mash "a" and the message is placed into an archive by year-month timestamp, and is no longer in your inbox.  The simplest way, client side, to maintain Inbox-Zero.

Take a look at all the new features here.


Please leave comments below.

Why I haven't been talking about Email

I received an email recently asking me why I haven't blogged (really at all) about email recently. This person enjoys my tips, and actually, the most read articles on my blog are about Email.  However, I think it's because I have it figured out now.

I use Gmail on the web.  No local client.  (This is probably the biggest saver!  Deleting my local mail from my computer saved me about 6 Gigs of space.)
I use keyboard shortcuts and the "To" and "Cc" indicators (The little >> and > signs)
All listservers skip the inbox and go straight to their labels.
All "bulk" email (twitter and facebook notifications, marketing emails, advertisements, special deals on Hertz rental cars, etc) is tagged as "Bulk" and skips the inbox.

For the periodic "checking" of email I use Google's Notifier application.  (http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/notifier_mac.html)  Where I have shut off the sounds, and shut off the popups.

This also has the added benefit of working with my Google Calendar, where I DO have pop-ups enabled to remind me of stuff.

I process email to Inbox Zero everytime.
To flag emails I use the little stars.
To make To-Do's I use Omnifocus.  This has the added benefit of, you know, in case Gmail goes down (as it has recently a couple times), your "To-Dos" aren't managed by your Inbox.

This has made my email process so efficient, I don't have to waste time screwing around with how to make it "Better".

I thought about using tags to flag things as "To-Do" or "Important" or "Needs to be done" or something.  But I don't want to mess with my system.  It works.





Please leave comments below.

Why I haven't been talking about Email

I received an email recently asking me why I haven't blogged (really at all) about email recently. This person enjoys my tips, and actually, the most read articles on my blog are about Email.  However, I think it's because I have it figured out now.

I use Gmail on the web.  No local client.  (This is probably the biggest saver!  Deleting my local mail from my computer saved me about 6 Gigs of space.)
I use keyboard shortcuts and the "To" and "Cc" indicators (The little >> and > signs)
All listservers skip the inbox and go straight to their labels.
All "bulk" email (twitter and facebook notifications, marketing emails, advertisements, special deals on Hertz rental cars, etc) is tagged as "Bulk" and skips the inbox.

For the periodic "checking" of email I use Google's Notifier application.  (http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/notifier_mac.html)  Where I have shut off the sounds, and shut off the popups.

This also has the added benefit of working with my Google Calendar, where I DO have pop-ups enabled to remind me of stuff.

I process email to Inbox Zero everytime.
To flag emails I use the little stars.
To make To-Do's I use Omnifocus.  This has the added benefit of, you know, in case Gmail goes down (as it has recently a couple times), your "To-Dos" aren't managed by your Inbox.

This has made my email process so efficient, I don't have to waste time screwing around with how to make it "Better".

I thought about using tags to flag things as "To-Do" or "Important" or "Needs to be done" or something.  But I don't want to mess with my system.  It works.





Please leave comments below.

Snow Leopard, so far..

Been running Snow Leopard since yesterday. As Apple promised, on the surface, you can't really tell that anything is different. When you click on the dock, you notice the popup is different. You notice the stacks are different when you click on them. You notice the 20Gb (Yes, GB!) of space on the Harddrive that you get back. (20 on my machine at least.)

But the thing that I noticed so far is the speed. Especially in Safari when it comes to javascript. Loading things like Gmail come up almost instantly now. Further pointing out how much faster Snow Leopard is than it's predecessor. The installation took about 45 minutes on my wife's laptop, was very smooth, and had zero problems.

So far it's running like clockwork. If I run up against ill experience I'll make note and post it, but so far, it's running like a top.

Snow Leopard, so far..

Been running Snow Leopard since yesterday. As Apple promised, on the surface, you can't really tell that anything is different. When you click on the dock, you notice the popup is different. You notice the stacks are different when you click on them. You notice the 20Gb (Yes, GB!) of space on the Harddrive that you get back. (20 on my machine at least.)

But the thing that I noticed so far is the speed. Especially in Safari when it comes to javascript. Loading things like Gmail come up almost instantly now. Further pointing out how much faster Snow Leopard is than it's predecessor. The installation took about 45 minutes on my wife's laptop, was very smooth, and had zero problems.

So far it's running like clockwork. If I run up against ill experience I'll make note and post it, but so far, it's running like a top.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part Two)

Managing To-Dos

As I promised a follow up post to my previous blog post here.

I stated, I try to manage things through Todo lists. When I read an email that I need to take action on, I make a ToDo out of it. Simple to complex, I make a ToDo out of it. Not just emails either. If I am in a meeting and I hear an "action item" for me, I knock that out. If I get a shopping list from my wife, I put that in my Todo list as well.

There are several tools that I have evaluated and used over the years, let me go over a few of these and see if any of them help you. The one that works for me is not the one that may work for you. You have to figure it out for yourself. Make the ToDo list work for you, not you working for your ToDo list. If you find yourself spending most of your time in your ToDo list "managing it" (prioritizing, categorizing, contexting... You are doing it wrong. Managing your ToDo's should not be a ToDo within itself.)

1) Google Tasks

Google Tasks is a built in Task manager into the Gmail interface. It is accessible on the left hand side of your Gmail interface near the labels. (Look for the obvious word "Tasks"). I like this method, it's keyboard accessible, works great, and is accessible from the web.

However, There are two reasons I don't use Google Tasks. First is templates. If I want to make a standard "Group" of tasks. Say, 10 things that I must do with each client, I want to be able to template these 10 things, copy the template and use it over and over for each client. The second reason is, for some reason, right now, Google for Domains doesn't support an iPhone version of tasks. This sucks. It works in the regular Gmail, but not in Google for domains, yet. If you have the luxury of using Gmail for your primary email, I'd suggest checking out Google Tasks. Learn the keyboard shortcuts for it, and you'll whiz through it. Best feature? Being able to create a ToDo related to an email (So you can go to the ToDo and get back to the exact email). Shift-t.

2) Remember the Milk, GTDAgenda, Backpack

All three of these are web based services that you can use for ToDos. I tried several of these, however, most of these require an extra step, or an extra website to log in to and maintain. To me, that's not reducing the amount of work I have to do, that's increasing it. I shouldn't have to increase the amount of things I have to do in order to manage a ToDo list. Each of these has their own merits. I think Remember the Milk is the most extensible. (Meaning it has an iPhone app as well.) GTDAgenda was fairly nice. In the interest of Full Disclosure, I was asked to evaluate GTDAgenda and received a free account. I used it very little because of the above reasons. Backpack is overkill. It's like a Wiki, on crack.

3) Omnifocus

Or OmniOutliner.

This is what I use, it's an OSX only application, but it allows several things that I find vital. The only thing that I don't like about it is that it's a separate app on my system (As opposed to Gmail Tasks, which is built in.) If I have an email (or damn near anything on my computer) I can highlight it with my mouse, and mash a keyboard shortcut (which is customizable) and Omnifocus takes what I have highlighted and makes it a Todo. This is the best.

I am able to assign contexts and projects to everything, assign due dates, make reoccurring tasks... etc.

It also allows me to use templates, as I discussed in Number 1. I can set up a series of tasks, then copy the series of tasks by right clicking and saying "Duplicate".

It allows me to Sync between my computer and my iPhone. Now, the way this takes place is, Omnifocus takes it's DB and puts it up on MobileMe's iDisk. The iPhone, with it's accompanying app then syncs with the DB up on the iDisk. Not a big deal, but it can be a pain to have to keep two in sync. I'd rather just use Google Tasks.

Pain in the butt part? It's expensive. Stupid expensive. It's 79 dollars for the OSX app, and it's another 19.99 for the iPhone app. I think this is bull.

4) Things

This is another program similar to Omnifocus. Simpler to use. (Less complex of an interface), but also, it's 49.95 for the App, plus another 9.99 for the iPhone version. It syncs, but not with MobileMe. Your computer that has the app on the desktop must be on the same Wifi network in order to Sync. That's fairly annoying.

5) ToDo.txt

This is a shell script, basically, that allows you to simply manage ToDos in a simple fashion from the command line. You can barely do contexts and project tagging, but you can't do subordinate projects or anything like that. It's a pretty cool little tool if you are one of those people that likes to manage everything you possible can in a command line. I have several friends like that, and I like to be like that too, but this program just doesn't have enough of the features I need to be able to manage it.

6) Tasks in your email client

Outlook, Thunderbird (with addons), and Mail each have their own ToDo system.

A) Outlooks works like this. You can drag an email over to the right pane (in Office 2007), you can also drag an email down to the "tasks" icon in the left pane at the bottom of the screen. Problem with either one of these solutions is, if you move the mail out of the inbox and into a PST, poof. The ToDo is gone. Seems counter intuitive to me. Anyway...

B) Thunderbird has various plugins for Managing Todos. I didn't put many man hours into investigating the use of the ToDo system within Thunderbird, because I didn't use Thunderbird for more than about five minutes.

C) Mail.app -- This is the only Mail program on OSX that has a ToDo system worth a crap. But even it has it's own problems.

You can create a todo based off an email, highlight the text you want and tap the "Todo" button. Mail will create a Todo based on the email. This Todo is stored in a central db that is shared between Mail.app and iCal. Problem is, as of right now, there is no way to get those ToDos on your iPhone. Come on Apple. Plus Mail.app is dog slow when dealing with 200,000 emails. (And gmails imap implementation sucks)

So, currently I am using Omnifocus until the second best (Google Tasks) comes along. At which point I will probably abandon Omnifocus, even if Google Tasks doesn't allow me to template, I will gladly ditch Omnifocus for a less "sync-y" built in, Cloud managed Task manager. I paid the full retail price for both of the Omnifocus apps (basically totaling about 100 dollars for two apps... to manage Todos. (Seriously Omni Group. The Pricing?)) It's a good pair of programs, but it's a bit overweight and expensive for what its use is.

After my Todos get into my Omnifocus program, I arrange them in two methods.

1) Project

2) Context

If the Todo is work related, I put it under "Work". If the Todo is home related (ex. Get new lightbulb for Microwave), I put it under home. Context is the "Where" portion of the todo.

So if I need to email Dave about that thing we were working on, the Project will be "Work" but the Context will be "Email".

That way, if I have a few minutes, I can take a look at my Todo list under the context "Email" or "Phone" or something, and knock a few of them out. This allows me to fit in ToDos that I have time for. Which will bring me to my next post on productivity, using my Calendar. But that's for another day.

Please leave comments below.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part One)

I know I have written many articles on productivity as it relates to Email and GTD before. Check out some past articles here, here, and here. In fact, that last article is my most hit and read article on my blog, in the (almost) five years I've been blogging.

Recently, with a lot of various changes within my personal lifestyle, such as getting the iPhone 3GS, consolidation of email addresses, and generally trying to establish a workable workflow in life, I've been putting the touches on how to process email and generally work with things in life more efficiently. I'll try and write a series of articles on this, so I don't bore you with one big long one.

First, and probably the most interesting as far as I think, is how I process email.

So, my corporate email is Gmail. My company moved our Email hosting solution to Gmail a bit ago, foregoing the traditional take on keeping email in-house, backing it up, using IMAP or Exchange, having people manage it. etc.. It saved our company a ton of money by doing it, and I find that things are much more efficient now that our email is hosted in Gmail.

First off, almost everyone in the computer industry has a Google account now. It's a hard pressed experience to find anyone that doesn't have a @gmail.com account now. I know a ton of companies that their actual email domain (such as ours) is gmail's engine as well. So it's a familiar interface. There was a bit of learning curve with some of our personnel when we first moved to Gmail, but so far it's been great, and if you are a business with the flexibility and need to reduce the amount of machines and backups and people that you are currently maintaining, I'd seriously consider taking a look at Gmail for your corporate enterprise.

Anyway, back to productivity...

Accounts and Consolidation

All my email accounts forward to one account. One. I virtually have about six email accounts for various things (such as emails originating from this blog), but all of them are forwarded to one account. This makes consolidation of email and processing much easier. In Gmail under "Settings", and then under the "Accounts" tab, you can put all your email addresses you have under here and it will be able to "Send mail as:" for all of the accounts that you forward to your one account. Below the accounts you are specifying are two radio buttons.

"Reply from the same address the message was sent to"

or

"Always reply from default address"

If you want to have all your email coming out of your one "consolidated" account always be that single address, leave the bottom radio button checked, however, if you want your email to be allowed to be sent as the address that it was received on, check the top radio button. This will allow all of your email to be addressed from the proper account when you reply or forward.

Labels

Gmail has abandoned the traditionalist thought of "putting email into folders", and after a while so did I. Now, for those of you (like me) that were used to their email coming into the inbox, and then having a series of filters, either in Outlook or Mail.app, as you would read in my previous articles, to put those emails into folders, Gmail is a bit different. Instead of sorting things into "containers", you may have one email that is "tagged" with different containers. These tags and containers are called "Labels". Think of an email like a piece of paper. You can label this piece of paper with several things to remind you where to find this paper. So, let's say it's work related. You might tag it with "Work". What if it's a receipt? But it's also work related? You might tag it with "Work" and "Receipt", and maybe "Expense Report". The email doesn't exist in multiple copies, it's just labeled additional things.

There are two types of labels in my opinion. Types that I call "Straightfoward" and "Dynamic". (You won't see those terms in the interface, I just made them up.) Straightforward for me, is a static label. For instance. Anything from the domain "Sourcefire.com" is labeled as "Sourcefire". This can be considered a static folder, or Straightforward label.

Then I have another type of label that I call "Dynamic". This label spans across "folders" and labels. An example of this is, "Customers". Any email I get from a customer, I label as "Customer". These emails probably exist in about three other labels (receipts, to-do, Sourcefire, etc) but are also tagged as "Customer" so I know where to immediately go find an email from a customer.

Filters

Filters are a way of automatically performing different actions on emails. Applying labels, deleting them, marking them as read, skipping the inbox, etc. I talked about some of the things you can do with filters in this post. So I encourage a read of that. I use Filters as "How can I possibly get this email out of my inbox in the most efficient way possible if its something that I don't have to read right away".

For instance. I belong to about 20 or 30 listservers of various natures. Computer listservers, Apple listservers, Gmail listservers even. Things that interest me, things that I like to read or participate in. (This nets me about 1000 emails a day) But you know, these aren't things that need to be dealt with immediately. Sometimes, ever. The Listservers that aren't as important bypass my inbox directly. Read the above post on how I do this, and you'll see.

The point of this is, the email that I don't need to DEAL with right away gets put away.

When an email hits my inbox, I have one of three actions that I do with it.

1) Read it, Reply to it.

2) Read it, Make a Todo out of something it contains.

3) Read it, Archive it.

That's it, either write them back, make a Todo, or get rid of the email. I don't keep things in my Inbox. Inbox Zero is what I attribute this to. I follow the principle of "if an email takes less than two minutes to respond to, do it. Do it right now." If I think I'll need to write a long winded response, or I'll need to look something up in order to get a proper response to your email, I flag it as a Todo, and I Do it when I get done the inbox process. If I need to forward it, I do it. If I read it, digested the email, and it contains no action, I archive it. I'll write a blog post later on Todos and how I process those.

Another key thing if you follow my advice for email consolidation with Gmail is -- keyboard shortcuts. Seriously. You have got to learn these things. Go into your "Settings" in Gmail, and enable the Keyboard shortcuts. Go back to your inbox and Hit "?". Question Mark. You will get a nice on screen display with all the shortcuts that are available in the Gmail interface. It will take you about two weeks to master these, but after you do, you'll be flying through email. Almost too fast. Make sure you actually read what you are doing. Sometimes I'll make the mistake of checking off several emails at a time and archiving them. Accidentally archiving one I needed to deal with.

The reason I attribute some of my workflow process to the iPhone 3GS is, this is the first iPhone where the Gmail web app wasn't a complete dog in terms of performance. Prior to this version of the iPhone using the Gmail web app worked just fine, don't get me wrong, but it was slow enough to just tick me off enough to not want to use it. Now with the iPhone 3GS, the processor is faster, it executes javascript faster. It's become my replacement for the built in app on the iPhone now. (Oh yeah, and cut and paste helps a lot too when trying to put stuff into a ToDo list.)

Until next entry...

Please leave comments below.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part One)

I know I have written many articles on productivity as it relates to Email and GTD before. Check out some past articles here, here, and here. In fact, that last article is my most hit and read article on my blog, in the (almost) five years I've been blogging.

Recently, with a lot of various changes within my personal lifestyle, such as getting the iPhone 3GS, consolidation of email addresses, and generally trying to establish a workable workflow in life, I've been putting the touches on how to process email and generally work with things in life more efficiently. I'll try and write a series of articles on this, so I don't bore you with one big long one.

First, and probably the most interesting as far as I think, is how I process email.

So, my corporate email is Gmail. My company moved our Email hosting solution to Gmail a bit ago, foregoing the traditional take on keeping email in-house, backing it up, using IMAP or Exchange, having people manage it. etc.. It saved our company a ton of money by doing it, and I find that things are much more efficient now that our email is hosted in Gmail.

First off, almost everyone in the computer industry has a Google account now. It's a hard pressed experience to find anyone that doesn't have a @gmail.com account now. I know a ton of companies that their actual email domain (such as ours) is gmail's engine as well. So it's a familiar interface. There was a bit of learning curve with some of our personnel when we first moved to Gmail, but so far it's been great, and if you are a business with the flexibility and need to reduce the amount of machines and backups and people that you are currently maintaining, I'd seriously consider taking a look at Gmail for your corporate enterprise.

Anyway, back to productivity...

Accounts and Consolidation

All my email accounts forward to one account. One. I virtually have about six email accounts for various things (such as emails originating from this blog), but all of them are forwarded to one account. This makes consolidation of email and processing much easier. In Gmail under "Settings", and then under the "Accounts" tab, you can put all your email addresses you have under here and it will be able to "Send mail as:" for all of the accounts that you forward to your one account. Below the accounts you are specifying are two radio buttons.

"Reply from the same address the message was sent to"

or

"Always reply from default address"

If you want to have all your email coming out of your one "consolidated" account always be that single address, leave the bottom radio button checked, however, if you want your email to be allowed to be sent as the address that it was received on, check the top radio button. This will allow all of your email to be addressed from the proper account when you reply or forward.

Labels

Gmail has abandoned the traditionalist thought of "putting email into folders", and after a while so did I. Now, for those of you (like me) that were used to their email coming into the inbox, and then having a series of filters, either in Outlook or Mail.app, as you would read in my previous articles, to put those emails into folders, Gmail is a bit different. Instead of sorting things into "containers", you may have one email that is "tagged" with different containers. These tags and containers are called "Labels". Think of an email like a piece of paper. You can label this piece of paper with several things to remind you where to find this paper. So, let's say it's work related. You might tag it with "Work". What if it's a receipt? But it's also work related? You might tag it with "Work" and "Receipt", and maybe "Expense Report". The email doesn't exist in multiple copies, it's just labeled additional things.

There are two types of labels in my opinion. Types that I call "Straightfoward" and "Dynamic". (You won't see those terms in the interface, I just made them up.) Straightforward for me, is a static label. For instance. Anything from the domain "Sourcefire.com" is labeled as "Sourcefire". This can be considered a static folder, or Straightforward label.

Then I have another type of label that I call "Dynamic". This label spans across "folders" and labels. An example of this is, "Customers". Any email I get from a customer, I label as "Customer". These emails probably exist in about three other labels (receipts, to-do, Sourcefire, etc) but are also tagged as "Customer" so I know where to immediately go find an email from a customer.

Filters

Filters are a way of automatically performing different actions on emails. Applying labels, deleting them, marking them as read, skipping the inbox, etc. I talked about some of the things you can do with filters in this post. So I encourage a read of that. I use Filters as "How can I possibly get this email out of my inbox in the most efficient way possible if its something that I don't have to read right away".

For instance. I belong to about 20 or 30 listservers of various natures. Computer listservers, Apple listservers, Gmail listservers even. Things that interest me, things that I like to read or participate in. (This nets me about 1000 emails a day) But you know, these aren't things that need to be dealt with immediately. Sometimes, ever. The Listservers that aren't as important bypass my inbox directly. Read the above post on how I do this, and you'll see.

The point of this is, the email that I don't need to DEAL with right away gets put away.

When an email hits my inbox, I have one of three actions that I do with it.

1) Read it, Reply to it.

2) Read it, Make a Todo out of something it contains.

3) Read it, Archive it.

That's it, either write them back, make a Todo, or get rid of the email. I don't keep things in my Inbox. Inbox Zero is what I attribute this to. I follow the principle of "if an email takes less than two minutes to respond to, do it. Do it right now." If I think I'll need to write a long winded response, or I'll need to look something up in order to get a proper response to your email, I flag it as a Todo, and I Do it when I get done the inbox process. If I need to forward it, I do it. If I read it, digested the email, and it contains no action, I archive it. I'll write a blog post later on Todos and how I process those.

Another key thing if you follow my advice for email consolidation with Gmail is -- keyboard shortcuts. Seriously. You have got to learn these things. Go into your "Settings" in Gmail, and enable the Keyboard shortcuts. Go back to your inbox and Hit "?". Question Mark. You will get a nice on screen display with all the shortcuts that are available in the Gmail interface. It will take you about two weeks to master these, but after you do, you'll be flying through email. Almost too fast. Make sure you actually read what you are doing. Sometimes I'll make the mistake of checking off several emails at a time and archiving them. Accidentally archiving one I needed to deal with.

The reason I attribute some of my workflow process to the iPhone 3GS is, this is the first iPhone where the Gmail web app wasn't a complete dog in terms of performance. Prior to this version of the iPhone using the Gmail web app worked just fine, don't get me wrong, but it was slow enough to just tick me off enough to not want to use it. Now with the iPhone 3GS, the processor is faster, it executes javascript faster. It's become my replacement for the built in app on the iPhone now. (Oh yeah, and cut and paste helps a lot too when trying to put stuff into a ToDo list.)

Until next entry...

Please leave comments below.