The Productivity Pro® Blog by Laura Stack - Time Management, Getting Things Done, How to Be More Productive

I just read this quote by Lewis Eigen, uttered in 1961, which is even more profound today than it was then: "The workers and professionals of the world will soon be divided into two distinct groups. Those who will control computers and those who will be controlled by computers. It would be best for you to be in the former group."

A 2001 survey sponsored by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and conducted by Harris Interactive shows that the increased use of technology such as cell phones, beepers, email, and computers has had a tremendous impact on the feelings of overwork in

America

. The four out of ten employees who use technology often or very often for their jobs during typical non-work hours more frequently feel overworked. About one-fifth of employees in the study said they often or very often have to be accessible to their employers during typical non-work hours and non-work days, while 30 percent said they never have to be accessible. Which are more stressed? Employees who are more accessible to their employers during non-work hours feel more overworked. 

Consequences of being available 24/7:

·        Loss of time for loved ones, reflection, relaxation, and spiritual growth

·        No “unavailable” time: intrusive

·        Can violate desire for privacy

·        Pleasurable activities (lunch with friends, a walk) quickly lose their pleasure when you’re “on call.”

·        Feel like you have no control over your time.

Keep your cell number private. Only five people have my cell phone number: my husband, mother, day care, best friend, and assistant. If you give it to everyone, you will never have private time. Unless your job requires it, give the number to as few people as possible, so you can turn it off and protect your privacy when you choose.

Turn off the computer and television. How much time do you spend surfing the Web each day? Playing video games? Watching television? The Bureau of Labor Statistics “Time-Use Survey” from September 14, 2004, states that on an average day in 2003, men spent about 2.7 hours watching television each day and women watched 2.4 hours each day. Holy cow! If you’re among that group and reduced your television time by only five hours a week, you’d gain almost 11 days a year. What could you do with 11 days a year? Spend more time with someone you love? Think carefully the next time you reach for the remote.

Be fully present. Some people don’t feel productive when they’re not doing four things at once (such as driving, talking on the phone, drinking coffee, and putting on makeup). If this describes you, shift your focus. Avoid the tendency to multi-task at home. Be especially attentive with children for their safety. On weekends, turn off the technology completely. Resist the urge to sneak back into your office to check email “just one more time” while your family hangs out elsewhere in the house.

Draw the line somewhere. If you stayed connected to your email and cell phone all weekend, you will go to bed physically and mentally exhausted on Sunday night. Instead of starting the week recharged, alert, and efficient, you will be sluggish on Monday morning. Slow down and rest. Reinvest in yourself.

What are other ways you use to control your technology, rather than allowing it to control you?

A reporter asked an interesting question today: How do you know if you’re spending too much time surfing eBay?  While I’m all for saving time on Internet shopping and having things delivered, instead of driving around town to ten places trying to find the same item, you don’t want to cross the line into an addiction.  An addiction?  That’s right.  How many hours a day would you have to devote to something before it would be labeled an addiction?  Television watching?  Gambling?  Drinking?  eBay surfing?  As with anything, it can get out of hand.  So I told the reporter I’d have her readers ask themselves these questions:

·        Do you spend more time on the computer surfing eBay listings than you do with your significant other and children?

·        How would you feel if your spouse could see the listings you’re viewing?

·        Are you purchasing items in private or on a separate credit card, so no one knows what you’re buying?  Are buying things you are embarrassed to tell your spouse about or that are causing financial strain?

·        You don’t leave the house any more to go shopping, because you can find anything you need on eBay?

·        Can you spend an evening with your partner without thinking about whether someone has responded to your eBay seller inquiry?

·        Does your heart beat faster when you see a message waiting for you in your inbox from a certain eBay stores?

Tell your partner you’re sorry you’ve been so unavailable, and make steps to change. Don’t let the anonymity of technology let you cross boundaries you wouldn’t in person. Force yourself to buy things in cash, so your credit card purchases don’t become unmanageable.  Make a list of things you need to buy, and get out and about to meet real people in real situations.  The delivery costs can add up quickly, so only buy unique items you can’t find anywhere else, only when there is a legitimate occasion.

I am rid of spam!  YES, it’s true!  Just in the last few months, as many of you have experienced, the volume of spam I was receiving was increasing drastically.  I was getting 200+ spam email messages a day, and it was killing my productivity and frustrating me to no end.  Just scanning the subject lines and deleting was costing me precious time, and some spam messages were causing my Treo handheld to reset upon email retrieval.  I’ve tried several end-user anti-spam filters, and nothing was doing the trick.  Add to that multiple domains, email addresses, and aliases, and the problem was compounding daily. 

ENTER Mail Foundry.  My webmaster, Lance Gibb, installed the appliance on his server, routed my mail (all addresses, domains, aliases) through it, and TA-DA!  No more spam.  No kidding!  99% is gone.  At the end of each day, I receive a quarantine digest of all messages MailFoundry grabbed, and I have the option of releasing them back to my in-box and tagging them as not spam.  I have only had one or two messages with false positives.  I can also report messages I receive in error that are actually spam and should be grabbed next time. 

You could even do it yourself, if you own your own domain, have total control of your domain, and know all the technical details of how to route your mail.  But it’s just as easy to contact your webmaster and recommend MailFoundry. The best part yet?  It’s FREE!  I highly recommend it.

Merry Christmas!  No spam is my best business present to myself!

I’ve always used RSS Reader 2.0 as my news aggregator/feed reader, until it started acting buggy, and I explored other options.  After reading other blogs and postings on the subject, I decided to try NewsGator Inbox for Outlook…and I love it!  What a time saver!  It integrates right into my Outlook email client and acts just like an email.  It has its own folder, and I can delete, forward, store, and search blog postings just like email.  It adds a nifty "Subscribe in NewsGator" item to the Internet Explorer menu.  I also like the wizard that lets you search feeds by keyword.

It has some disadvantages: you can only use it with Outlook, although NewsGator has different software versions as well.  The only thing I don’t like is you can’t group RSS feeds.

There’s a free 30-day trial at the NewsGator InBox website; the software version is only $29.95, which is well worth the convenience of seeing everything in one place (if you’re an Outlook user).

Bottom line: If the average "Joe" had this tool when blogging first started, it wouldn’t have been near as confusing and more people would have taken the time to learn how to subscribe to RSS feeds.

I love this amazing little plug-in for Outlook.  Your $30 will be well-spent.  You highlight information from the text of an email, hit a hotkey, and the software instantly determines whether you’re highlighting contact, appointment, task, or note information and opens the appropriate dialog box in Outlook with the information *already populated* for your review.  You can try it free for 45 days.

Visit http://getanagram.com/anagramoutlook/ to see a flash video and read about the neat features.

Here’s a blog I like called Daily PlanIt.  Has a great list of top ten time management and personal development blogs/sites.  I trust his opinion…mine is listed ha.

Get Organized with Home Helpers cites two main time management resources: Work Wonders and Home Helpers.  Check out http://dailyplanit.wordpress.com/2006/10/28/get-organized-with-home-helpers/ for a helpful list of resources.

According to a report from Basex, the average "knowledge worker" — someone who is part of the growing information economy — loses 2.1 hours a day to interruptions. If those workers make an average of $21 an hour, that adds up to $588 billion a year — more than the gross domestic product of

Argentina

. See http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceandsociety/2006/01/frazzing.html

Then another article http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Technology/story?id=1549972 goes on to say, “Other companies, such as Ambient Devices, say keep it simple. You shouldn’t have to open your e-mail whenever an icon pops up on your screen. A glance should tell if the new message is important to you, much the way you glance at a clock.”

Actually, that’s a *really* bad idea.  Even glancing at an email starts your mind a-wandering, and there aren’t too many people who are disciplined enough not to open it if the subject line and sender looks even remotely more interesting than what they’re working on.  If you have the luxury of having two screens (which boosts productivity by 30%), keep one dedicated to your communications functions, and mute the sound and blank the screen when you’re trying to concentrate on a project.  Bring a kitchen timer from home, set it for an hour, and dare yourself not to check email until the timer goes off.  If you can’t, you officially have email OCD.  If you only have one monitor, either close your email program completely, or if you have to have it open to check your calendar, don’t keep your in-box up. 

Better yet, go under Tools, Options, Email Options, Advanced Email Options and turn off all the global alerts, noises, envelopes, and pop-ups when you get an email, so you won’t be tempted to check it.  Then go into your Rules and set a specific sound to play when you do get a message from a particular person such as your boss.  That way, your ears will hear the cue, but your eyes won’t go to the pop-up and distract your thoughts.  You can complete the sentence you’re working on before checking the message.

http://articles.news.aol.com/business/_a/radioshack-lays-off-employees-via-e/20060830125309990016?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Can you believe this?  Radio Shack laid off 400 workers—via email!  Talk about a major breech of email etiquette.  I was just laughing at another article I read about someone being laid off via text message on her phone, and I even thought to myself, "Oh, great, pretty soon they will be laying people off via email" and boom!  How rude.  Out of 65,000+ people surveyed on an AOL site, 93% said email is an inappropriate way for a company to lay off employees.

Let’s remember one of the basic rules of messaging: the more emotional and complicated the message, the greater the need for a rich medium, such as a face-to-face conversation with a real person.  How will this people remember this employer? Bitterly.  When better times arise, will they want to return to Radio Shack?

Spam can be annoying and time consuming. In a test, Northeast Netforce investigators “seeded” 175 different locations and monitored the fake addresses over the next six weeks for spam; 100 percent of email addresses used in chat rooms received spam; 86 percent of posts in newsgroups received spam. So what can you do to help reduce it? Bottom line: Don’t use your work address or personal address for open, public forums, where spammers are harvesting your email address. Create a screen name that isn’t associated with your email address or a “dummy” email address. Your ISP can automatically forward the “dummy” address to your “real” address. When spam builds up, delete the decoy. For $9.95 a year, you can get a block of 500 disposable email addresses to use from www.Spamex.com. You can also purchase spam-filtering software for your computer, which “grabs” junk email and files it in a special folder, separate from your real email in the in-box (my favorite is McAfee Spamkiller, www.McAfee.com).

I was reading an article in Information Week appropriately titled, “Eaten by the Email Monster.”  http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2006/08/eaten_by_the_em.html

It links to several useful articles on how to handle information overload.  I thought I’d add my thoughts on how to efficiently process email: the 6-D Information Management System™:

1. DISCARD = Delete it

2. DELEGATE = Forward it

3. DO = Reply immediately if it will take you three minutes or less

4. DATE = Needs work but not now.  The key is to somehow get it out of your in-box.  Pick one favorite method and try to be consistent, so you don’t confuse your brain about what you did with that email.  Options:

* Move to a process folder called “Action” or something similar.

* For emails that require action, move (NOT drag, which creates a copy) them to Tasks (or drag to the to-do icon in Lotus) by right-clicking the message and selecting Move to Folder, and then Tasks.  A new Task automatically opens and inserts the email into the text portion of the message, which can now be replied to right out of the task).  This physically removes the email from your in-box, not just create a copy.

* For time-sensitive emails (meetings or appointments), follow the same procedure above, but select Calendar after you Move to Folder, which will open a new calendar item and automatically move the email message to the text portion of the window.

* If you’d rather work with a paper copy, print the email and file it in your tickler folder. Create a personal folder called @Tickler and drag email there that requires follow-up. When the paper copy (trigger) comes up in your tickler file, you know the original is in your @Tickler folder. That will save you from having to retype the email message when you respond to it.

* Copy the email into the contact’s record in your contact management software (such as ACT or Goldmine) and schedule an activity to follow up.

* Set an email reminder (NOT a calendar reminder or Task reminder) by right-clicking in the flag area (NOT setting a flag) and selecting Add Reminder.  Fill in the day and time you want the reminder on the email, and move the email to the proper project folder.  You will get a reminder when the email isn’t in your in-box (Outlook 2003).

* Forward it back to yourself, select Options, and check “Don’t deliver before,” fill in a date and send.  Delete original.

* Drag to the proper email personal folder, and write a to-do on your paper planning as a cross-reference to remember to do it.

5. DRAWER = If no action is required, but you’d like to keep the email for reference, create a personal folder for the project or reference type and drag the email to the correct folder. Or you could create a Word or other word processing document and save it on your hard drive.

6. DETER = Unsubscribe from email lists and tell your friends to stop sending you their “joke of the day”! Or use the Office Assistant (under “Tools”) or other Rules to automatically moving email from particular people to certain folders (or just delete it then).

I hope this helps!  Force yourself to do one of the 6 D’s every singe time you look at a new email. All the email in your in-box will be new, and you will stop re-reading messages over and over.  Do a major processing spree like this at least three times a day, but do NOT check them as they are coming in.  Turn off the global alerts, set Rules to play for important people, and control your OCD trigger-happy email finger!