If you use Gmail you must use filters and labels. I command it. If you haven’t done so already, you can learn tips and tricks from Lifehacker’s Adam Pash. Filters are great because no only can they auto-label your incoming messages, but they can star and auto-archive them. That means that all your Buy.com deals of the day, Facebook updates, and newsletters don’t have to reside in your inbox. This is especially helpful if you often check your email on your mobile device and don’t want it to buzz for every piece of junk you get.
43 Folders' Merlin Mann is the king of the zero inbox and has a book coming out about how to reclaim your day. They’re great tips and the site is worth reading to get you started. The overall message? Filter out the noise, schedule time to respond, and don’t let it pile up (either respond or get rid of it). They’re good guidelines, but many of us don’t have the problem of getting hundreds of email each day. Using the guidelines, it’s possible to come up with a less hardcore solution.
The reason I put “zero” in quotations is because I technically have a zero inbox. The catch is that I also have a second inbox. My second inbox consists of “actionable” shudder email—that is, messages that need my attention, email I need to respond to, reminders, and things I’ve completed and want to save. How do I do it? Two Gmail Labs features: Superstars and Multiple Inboxes.
Making it Happen
Step 1
Go to Labs in the Gmail settings or click on the green beaker icon.
Enable Superstars and Multiple Inboxes.
Step 2
Click the ‘General’ tab in settings and you’ll see your Superstars options. The four I have set up are red-bang, orange-guillemet, blue-info, and green-check. I recommend at least using these, though you can add yellow-bang and purple-question if you need to. I don’t recommend the colored stars, as you will have to add your own meaning to each that is not apparent from the icon itself.
Click the ‘Multiple inboxes’ tab and add the search query “is:starred”. This will pool all the starred messages into one inbox. I prefer this to one inbox for each star type, which ends up cluttering the screen and defeating the purpose. I put it ‘above the inbox’ as well to establish its importance in my workflow.
Step 3
Start using it! As you can see here, I have three messages in my inbox, and six in my Superstars Box. I’ve applied labels as necessary.
The message about my library books is something I need to take care of, but not necessarily something I’m going to email a response to. As a result, it gets the red-bang logo to tell me it’s urgent. By keeping it in my Superstars Box it pesters me to take care of it and I can un-star it when I finish.
The blue-info icon is when I have an email I want quick access to because it contains relevant information. Perhaps it has a confirmation number, as my example shows, or perhaps it has directions to a party. With Superstars, I have immediate access to it without keeping it in my inbox.
I have two messages with the orange-guillemet, which I use as my “reply to” icons. These are messages that need me to follow up with an email. In true inbox zero, I would take care of these things right away, but sometimes I need to find out additional information that would inform what I write. Sometimes I just don’t want people to know I’m a loser who sits in front of my computer all day responding to email immediately. Usually when I respond to these I immediately file them away. If I get a response back, it will end up in my inbox anyway and I can go through the process again.
That brings me to my least used Superstar: the green-check. There are two uses for it. On the one hand, it is used in the rare occasion when I’ve processed an email and want to remind myself that I’ve done a task. On the other, I use it when someone has responded to an email I’ve sent. The “Newseum Images” message, for example, was saved because I needed to show in a meeting that I received a response. The green-check’s lifespan is shortlived but sometimes comes in handy.
The only thing that I don’t like about the setup is that Multiple Inboxes has two sets of buttons, as you can see. So, if I check something in the bottom inbox but click on the top “Archive” button, I get an error message saying that no messages were selected. It would be nice if there could be one toolbar for both, but after a while you’ll get used to it.
There you have it: my Gmail workflow. It’s nice not having 25 messages sitting in my iPhone inbox at all times (especially since conversations don’t thread) and it’s great have a system so that all my email gets processed without me having to be slave to it immediately. So, what do you do to manage your email?
I recently unsubscribed from the 200+ feeds in my Google Reader in an attempt to reduce the time I spent pressing “J”. While the details of that experiment will be saved for another blog entry, it did spark a line of inquiry. Would financial commitments focus my media consumption?
The Problem
I pay for cable TV, I pay for Netflix, I pay $50 a year for Xbox Live Gold. And while I almost never watch TV (that’s the domain of my girlfriend), but I feel beholden to my Netflix and Xbox because I’ve committed money to them. If they were free services, I might not give them as much attention (I’m looking at you, PSN). And that’s precisely what the web is.
We’re used to getting things for free one the Internet because that’s always how it’s been. We put up with ads because we don’t have to reach for our wallets. But I rarely feel a sense of allegiance to websites because I can always go elsewhere for similar information. Granted, there are cases where I read a site specifically for its writers (aka Giant Bomb and Tested), but usually Autoblog is as good as Jalopnik.
This is one reason I still like magazines. Think of having a magazine delivered to your home versus looking at the table of them at the dentist’s office. When I subscribe to Wired or Car and Driver, I’ve made a decision on what to read and have limited my choices. When I’m in the dentist’s office, I stare blankly at the table before a) picking something I already know or b) picking at random. I read an article and get called back to the chair with no sense of satisfaction. Sure, I’ve taken in the information, but it never really sticks with me.
The Experiment
Turning back to the web, what if I used a financial commitment to narrow my consumption? What content would I subscribe to? How much would I be willing to pay? In the case of this thought experiment, I’m assuming that I would be able to enjoy the rest of the Internet, but that I would always start with my subscriptions first and they would take up most of my time.
Content I Would Pay For
TWiT Network, $5/moI’ve been listening to This Week in Tech since episode 20 or so. Leo Laporte’s little empire has a broad enough range of content that I don’t even think about subscribing to other podcasts. I listen to TWiT and MacBreak Weekly regularly, and tune into some of the other shows on occasion. But these two shows alone are worth the monthly contribution. In fact, TWiT already has a recurring monthly contribution system setup, making this a natural first example.
The Mike O'Meara Show, $10/mo
I grew up listening to talk radio. Not like political talk radio, and not NPR, but the kind of radio often described as “Guy Talk.” You know, talk radio epitomized by shocks jocks Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony. The kind of talk radio that is basically dead on terrestrial stations. Say what you want about most of the shows, I will defend to the death the Don and Mike Show. They were on the air together over twenty years, and after Don Geronimo left the airwaves, Mike O’Meara picked up the mantle with the rest of the cast to start the Mike O’Meara Show. After a solid year’s run, their station switched formats and they were out of work. But they came back a few months later with a daily podcast and have slowly been gaining momentum on the iTunes charts. The podcast is five hours of good content a week from a group of really talented people. My higher subscription price reflects my desire to support their effort.
Whiskey Media, $5/mo
It probably goes without saying, but between Giant Bomb and Tested, there’s enough content that one could get rid of their television. I’ll admit that I don’t care much for This is Only a Test, but I’m your typical Jeff Gerstmann apostle, following him about and spreading his Word. The Bombcast is my favorite piece of media and I put everything else on hold to listen to it. The Whiskey Media sites are all about depth—the kind of minutae I can really sink my teeth into. While I have no interest in anime, comics, or (upcoming) movies, I’m really looking forward to the Tested wiki. It’s encouraging to know that these sites are run by passionate people with no interest in selling to a megacorp that will control their product coughcnet cough.
Ars Technica, $15/yr
I actually prefer Ars to its sister site Wired. Between tech, games, and science, their tagline might as well be “Stuff Bobby Enjoys.” Unlike other tech blogs, they’re not caught up posting every little cell phone announcement and they don’t earn their pageviews through the rumormill. The writing is good and the coverage has just the right depth. Ars already offers a $5/mo subscription, but I’m not as much interested in their perks (like the PDF library and forum access) as I am their regular content. My ideal subscription price is more like that of a magazine.
AOL / Weblogs, Inc., $5/mo
Say what you want, it’s hard to deny that Weblogs, Inc. has a good slate of blogs. While Gawker is intolerably bad (save for some posts on Lifehacker), I enjoyEngadget, Joystiq, Autoblog, and TUAW.Like Ars, it has a slew of categories that appeal directly to my interests. The writing isn’t always the best, but these blogs certainly have good coverage as a group. I’d feel better about supporting them if I knew that writers got paid more to contribute, but this hypothetical discussion is about the selfish task of reducing my media consumption.
So, then, now that that’s covered, which websites’ content would you pay for?
Problem is, I have still yet to find a great way to do that. I've tried a handful of apps and workflows: Using To-Dos in iCal, Things from Cultured Code, The Hit List from Potion Factory, and most recently TaskPaper from Hog Bay Software. I've also used widget-apps like Anxiety and Today to help with reminders, and the Things app for iPhone. Yet none of these have had real practical application in my everyday workflow.
Let's begin by addressing my needs. I need a way to manage multiple projects and classes for school, and my personal and freelance projects outside of school. I want to be able to have project groups and sub-projects and tasks and sub-tasks. I need to be able to assign due dates for tasks and projects and see immediate and upcoming tasks. It would be also nice to be able to take notes in my task managing application.
I've spent nearly $150 on GTD software over the past year and have never been satisfied. In my quest for a practical solution to my simple problems, I've wasted far too much money.
A rundown on the pros and cons of each of the software I've tried out would prove beneficial at this point.
Things
Pros: Clean interface, iPhone app syncs over wi-fi, good Services shortcut for context sensitive universal task-addingCons: No sub-tasks, wi-fi syncing is ho-hum, expensive stand-alone iPad app
The Hit List
Pros: Project folders, sub-tasks, Smart foldersCons: No iPhone app, bad Services integration, not much to look at
TaskPaper
Pros: Allows for note-taking outside of tasks, uses plain text files, Internet syncing with to iPhone with SimpleTextCons: No iCal integration, tasks aren't To-Dos, needs tabbed interface
Out of the three, I like TaskPaper the most. I'm fond of having a simple plain-text file formatted by tabs and dashes, and because it's stored in Dropbox, I can edit it on computers without TaskPaper and it still formats correctly. I also love that I can just write notes in it. When I'm sitting in a meeting, I'm jotting down suggestions and ideas as well as to-dos. With TaskPaper, I can take notes in the application and create tasks under them as I see fit. This is a great feature and really suits the lifestyle of a student.
Problem is, TaskPaper is best organized when using project-based files. That means I have a general file for my classes, another for one of my projects, a third for another project, and a fourth for my freelance work. Each file is its own window, and each must be opened independently. And, because they are separate, it doesn't allow me to ask the question: "what are all the things I have to do in the next week?"
I've set up an AppleScript that will export all tasks with due-dates to iCal, but I have to remember to run that when the application is open, then need to remember to look at the upcoming few months in iCal. They're exported as normal calendar events, which is great because I can sync it to my Google Calendar, but this means that it doesn't use the To-Do protocol that gives me a list of all upcoming tasks that display in iCal and Anxiety. I also wish I could set an entire project to have a due date, such that all 15 tasks under it would appear as calendar objets.
The greatest strength of TaskPaper—its minimal interface—is also its greatest weakness. It is absolutely the right framework for my kind of things-getting-done, but it needs to be built out just a little more. It needs tabs to that all projects can be in one window, it needs a scheme for sorting/organizing, it needs to be able to associate due dates with calendar events or/(preferably and) to-dos, and it needs lots of user-testing to iron out the kinks.
I've wanted to try Omni-Focus, but I know it's dumb to spend another huge chunk of change on a GTD app. Since I already own all three applications, I cross my fingers that just one of them will satisfy most of my everyday needs within a few version updates. Else I'm going to have to learn Cocoa and make one myself!
But tech is expensive. Prohibitively so. I am but a poor graduate student whose income is just enough to get by. "Paycheck to paycheck" I believe they call it. Well, perhaps I'm being a bit dramatic. But the point is that I cannot afford the latest and greatest. I can only drool over new products while I listen to tech bloggers, journalists, and commentators discuss how they got theirs day-one. When I hear things like, "the iPad is changing everything," I scoff and am quick to remind people that it is a luxury purpose.
When I make a technology decision, it is well-researched and agonizingly-decided. When I started graduate school, I decided I was going to buy a Dell Inspiron 14, a decision that took nearly two months of reading reviews and waiting for the best deal. I had the Dell and HP websites memorized, and would alternately log in with a regular account and student account to see how I could get the best deal of the day. By some stroke of good fortune, my Dell order was cancelled and I held off on buying a new computer for three month. It became sort of a necessity after I dropped my old laptop on the floor, shattering its innards and outtards.
I decided on a MacBook Pro, not an easy decision by any means. I wasn't going top-of-the-line, but I was sure going to go close. So I dropped my savings on a new computer and Apple Care and hoped for the best. I should mention that Apple Care was of the utmost importance to me because I have a tendency to ruin hardware through normal use. I have a stack of dead hard drives. I once managed to wipe an entire internal drive on my PC only to realize my backup hard drives were also dead. I have bad luck with tech.
All this being said, it's important for me to make reasonable purchases. Whether hardware or software, these purchases should be of good value, good reliability, and fit my current and future needs. This blog will be about those kinds of decisions. In many cases, they won't be reviews. Reviews are for people with money or review units. There will be as many posts about what I can't or won't buy as what I want or have bought.
So I present my Tested.com blog: Practical Tech.
