Amazing
Business
Ideas!

About six weeks ago, Keiron rang me up all excited little a child who had heard that he as getting a bike for Christmas. He had seen a Google Tech Talk on how to make your life easy when it came to managing email. Now I get like the next man bucket loads of emails and anything that would make my life easier would be a godsend.

I went off and viewed said video (approx 45 minutes worth) and I had to join Keiron in his excitement as it seemed like my every prayer had been answered at once. I would highly recommend anyone who’s reading this to go off and watch this video and be amazed.

The chap who was doing this Tech Talk is the guy behind the 43folders.com blog and specifically he has written a whole section entitled Inbox Zero. The basic concept here is that you are not a slave to your email client and that you need to relearn how to use it as a tool than it directing you how you work. It makes a lot of sense and I have put it in to practice and can state this does work 100%. The video discusses at a high level the topic and I then spend 30 minutes or so jumping around his Inbox Zero blog to get a bit more detail.

There is a pleasant satisfaction with leaving the office for the day with no emails in your inbox and the calm reflection you are on top of what is there in your other folders. If you’ve been feeling stressed recently, save the money on a shrink and spend some time on this.

Getting things done

While poking around in mate’s blog, I discovered that the general principles he is talking about are based on some work by David Allen. If you’ve already gone off and looked at it web site, come with me on this as he’s not yet another loud mouthed American who has dreamed up some corporate bullshit methodology to make your life allegedly easier and him lots of money. Yes he is American (I’ve nothing against American’s but us Brits are always a little sceptical about the yanks) and he has come up with a methodology and I’m sure he earns nicely from it, but this one in my opinion is not bullshit.

Owing to the major success I had on following the principles of Inbox Zero, I took the plunge and purchased one of his books, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity. It is an approx A5 260 page light weight book that in my opinion is a very easy read. The text is pretty chatty in the writing style, but this probably accounts for how easy it was for me to fly through it.

Having done time management courses in the past and read articles and bits of books on the topic before, I found them either stupidly boring or not worth the paper they were written on. However this couldn’t be further from the truth for Getting Things Done. Maybe it was because I had bought in to the general idea from watching the Google Tech Talk I don’t know, but I am now a convert.

The general principle is that you need lists of actions and outcomes. Pretty common sense, but the way that David teaches you how to manage these and the process of using them makes life easy. I am particularly a fan of “emptying your head” as he describes it which makes you go through a process of clearing all those to-do, should-have-done items out of your head and recording them in this new system, be that on a note pad, program on your PC or whatever you find the best for you. Having done this, it is amazing how easy it is to sit and relax, not because you’ve done everything (although you can achieve more using this system), but knowing what you have not done.

Your brain no longer reminds you while you’re in the car that you’ve not emailed your Cousin to invite him to your BBQ this weekend. Yes you do remember or think of things that need to get done while you’re in the car or at the supermarket buying food, but I have dealt with this using a little Phillips VoiceTracer digital Dictaphone.

It also highlights how you should clear your “in trays” (I use inverted commas because your voicemail, physical in tray, email etc are all in trays for the concept to work) and then work out what to do next. What is the next action, is the key question.

The book goes on to talk about working out what to do next, which oddly when you first see it, does not put priority of a task at the top of the list of things to consider. Odd as that may sound, when you see how you should do it and then follow that through it makes you realise how wrongly you had been doing it previously.

Using it in practice

I have to be honest only been using it a little while, however it works. It’s a simple process to follow and without trying achieved tons of things that have been lying around for ages. I’ve cleared the decks, tidied the desk at work and made by home office spotless. Everything is where is should be and I know what there is to do and when it needs to be done.

As Keiron will testify I am not one to recommend something strongly lightly, but this is one concept I would whole heartily suggest everyone goes and learns about. Not only will you get lots of stuff done, you’ll be more relaxed in doing so.

Keiron however has failed on the first hurdle. He bought the book on my recommendation when I was still only 2/3s through it, took it on holiday with him and he didn’t even tough it! Tut tut, if you don’t read it you’ll ever see the wonders of how the other half live.

Highly Recommended Buy

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity

Updated 31st March 2008: I found this Google Tech Talk by David Allen himself.

Part of my empire is that I am a Director in a web hosting, e-commerce consultancy business. Our clients are small businesses who need an internet presence with a reasonable amount of hand holding. Periodically we get asked about push email for their PDAs.

There are several ways technically to achieve this:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (or newer)
• Blackberry
• IMAP IDLE

None of these currently our email infrastructure caters for. After getting asked for about the hundred time by one customer I spent a little time looking in to it.

Exchange is a pain and stupidly expensive, considering this client would not be prepared to spend £10-15/month per email account. This instantly knocks out Blackberry also as it’s a similar cost and as you need to buy this through a mobile network, makes it impossible for us to mark it up of any value. So the cheapest option would be IMAP IDLE, but we’ve discounted that as we’re more than happy with our current email server.

This means we were in a bit of a sticky wicket. Around the same time I came across an email management methodology called Inbox Zero (I’ve discussed this here). For the purpose of this post, it really made me think about the idea of push email and if this wasn’t just some stupid fad being pushed by Microsoft to sell more Exchange licenses and Pocket PC enabled PDAs.

So let’s look at Push Email first. If you’ve got this far I’ll assume you know that this is a service where the network pushes automatically new emails to your PDA without any user interaction. This means no matter what place or time of day you’re connected to your corporate email.

The advantages of the user is that they have near immediate notification of new email and better efficiency on the server from being polled.

I’m a little sceptical about the latter one and my users don’t give a fig if I have a single email server or a server farm handling their emails as long as it works so I’ll not discuss this here.

Immediate Notification of Emails

Great, you’re on the train and an important email comes through from a prospective client. Great, reply to them and get the deal - superb customer service and a bigger bonus. We’ll that’s a great sales pitch, but in reality how often is that going to happen to the 99.9% of users here? Never I reckon.

I can see some benefit for one of our customers who has engineers on the road out installing air conditioning systems. He wants to get next jobs etc to them asap. Their PDAs would quietly be getting this information, while they are servicing Mrs Bloggs Acme Airmatic 2000!

However as much as that sounds logical, if they have their spanner in their hand, will they see or do you want them to be interrupted in their job with info on their next one? Not me if I was their boss and more importantly if I was Mrs Bloggs, I’d be royally annoyed that I was paying someone by the hour to fiddle with their PDA thingy-whatsit.

So why not just do a send and receive then they finish the job? Or an arguement that is valid for what ever situation you’re in, just set your email client to poll ever couple of minutes.

Having a Life (or should than be get one?)

There are two sides to this, if you are an employer if you can get your staff to pick up emails at home on their own time and to be at your beck and control all the better. However frankly, when I’m at home and not in work mode, I’m just not interested that some daft American wants some stupid slides done today because he forgot to ask last week while I’m eating my dinner with my family.

Of all the people who have Blackberrys, Motorola Qs et al, they are glued to the bloody things 24 hours a day. What is more they seem to have been brain washed in to think it’s in their own interest to be like this. “Oh it saves me stress in the morning reading my emails.”, “It keeps the boss sweet, will help my promotion.” and other such diatribe of rubbish. Yes your employer has loved you so much to give you a new toy, that’s entirely in their own interest. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Interrupts

The biggest reason why I would never want or currently prepared to offer such a service is that the interruptions from email are many and regular. You could easily spend all day servicing your inbox without achieving anything worth a damn. Wife’s tale or not, but every interruption costs you 15 minutes of your life to get back in the zone and continue. So why would you want more when you’re not in the office. Not being in the office is great, you can get so much stuff done.

Part of the idea behind the Inbox Zero approach is that you should not be driven by your inbox, but that you go back to email being a tool. You are not a drone to Outlook, break away be free and get some real work done.

Costs

To implement this based on Exchange system you would need:

• New server hardware and associated support contracts etc
• Exchange 2003 licenses
• PDAs
• Costly wireless data charges from your mobile network
• Productivity drop of staff with such a device from being interrupted every X minutes.

Conclusion

In summary I can not see any reason both from a business perspective or technical one to warrant the time and more importantly substantial cost of implementing such functionality. In fact for our customers I suspect that it would cost them in wasted time and massive wireless data charges. If they are they desperate for it, or something similar use the regular Send/Receive mechanism in their PDA email client.

It’s a gimmic, a fad and as waste of money - don’t do it.