Shareable: Email Postcard Rule
For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you'd be a fool if you wrote anything private on one. --Judith Martin
Clean Your Old Email With Email Retention Policies
You probably know that you have to hang onto certain paper documents for a given number of years. These documents are required by law, and only after a certain number of years of retention can you get rid of them. The same applies to email, though, which has been used in court cases. But how long do you have to keep the email from Great Aunt Edna talking about the snowstorm? That's where setting up an email retention schedule comes in. You can clean your old email with email retention policies. I get a lot of email every day. If I didn't delete most of it outright, I would have overrun my email capacity years ago. But there are some things I need to hang on to for various reasons. I need to be able to reference all Girl Scout correspondence until the next membership year. I…
Are You Checking Email Too Much?
It's almost reflexive. You pick up your phone and you immediately check your email. The question I want to look at today is about checking email too much...and a better way. I've had a terrible email habit. I think it stemmed from FOMO, but I would check my email around 20 times a day. Waiting in line? Check my email. Cooking dinner? Check my email. Walking the dog? Check my email. And even though I would act on those emails immediately, by filing, deleting or sending to my task system, I knew that I was still taking far too much time with email. It had become a bad habit to constantly check. So what can we do?
How To Reset Your Email
I wandered over to my client manager's desk. I had a changes to go into a release, and she hadn't responded to the system emails asking for her approval. It was the first week of January, and the fix needed to be in the next week. "Oh, I deleted all my emails on January 2nd. I had almost 10,000, and I decided that I just needed to get rid of them because I wasn't going to get through them." And in the meantime, changes critical for the users were left undone as we scrambled to resubmit all the changes to the system.How many emails are in your inbox? If you have thousands, you need an email reset. But don't delete them outright or just plod through the inbox. Here is a better way.
Shareable: Email And Focus
One look at an email can rob you of 15 minutes of focus. One call on your cell phone, one tweet, one instant message can destroy your schedule, forcing you to move meetings, or blow off really important things, like love, and friendship. --Jacqueline Leo
Tell Your Time: Short, Simple, Do-Able Method
I've always wondered why so many books on time management were just overly-long rehashing of warmed-over ideas. Tell Your Time is none of these. A short and straightforward book, it takes some older concepts and combines them to help you figure out how to manage your time. Today's article is about this small and powerful book.
Notebook Apps: Making Digital Planning Work
Once I decided to make the jump to digital planning, I realized that it wasn't going to be enough to use the calendar, task and note apps. My planning is truly planning, and I needed a medium to do that. Today I'll talk about what I looked for, which apps I considered, and what I ultimately decided on and why.
Save Time By Automating with IFTTT
What if you could save time transferring information between systems? Or save yourself having to look things up? Automation gives you that help. Today we will talk about my favorite automation system, IFTTT (IF This Then That).
