Xobni, Activeinbox and other email management

Xobni, yes, it’s Inbox backwards and that pretty much sums up the approach to sorting out the morass of email that we all have to deal with these days. So far, I have it installed on my WORK machine only.

As might be apparent from previous posts, I’m all about making it easier to find stuff in a hurry.

1. Windows 7 desktop search is pretty good,
2. Outlook is OK at finding things if you give it permissions to crawl through everything but…
3. Xobni actually makes a huge difference to finding those rogue emails (assuming you haven’t deleted them) :)

I’ve been using the Xobni Outlook client for a while now and recently added (today) the BlackBerry mobile app for managing and finding stuff whilst out and about.

I hadn’t appreciated quite how dependent on my Outlook archive I had become until I lost a huge amount of data recently, the only backup of which was eaten by a rogue security installation which has ensured that I now have EVERYTHING of value synced to the cloud through Evernote.

Incidentally, Xobni does a nice plugin which fires stuff to Evernote and tags your contacts which is kind of useful if you move about a bit…

I’ve also been mucking about with the BETA for Xobni in Gmail and have signed up to the alpha program in iOS when they get around to publishing it…

I’ll let you know how I get on but as of today, I no longer have >1500 emails in my Gmail inbox thanks to yet another freemium product: Activeinbox which provides a GTD plugin for Gmail. Thus far I haven’t had too much to do with it to know if it’s worth upgrading (personally) but it’s nice to be able to have a ZERO inbox in more than one location. Now to sort out my personal inbox at home and maybe harmonise everything so that I can manage personal stuff on the iPhone – more on this in a future blog post…

For the moment, however, I’ll sign off with every intention of getting some kip…

4 Free Ways to Learn to Code Online

4 Free Ways to Learn to Code Online.

I have more important and pressing studies to attend to but might come back to this later…

Workflow (part 1)

Part of my job requires me to read and digest large quantities of information and then decide what meaning this (usually) web-based information has for me and my team.

My typical day will see me scan the RSS feeds of more than 150 feeds (gosh, I just realised quite how many feeds I get through…) using a Google reader subscription which enables me to consume and mark up as read, the feeds on a multitude of devices. I’m commuting for nearly three hours every day so this time can be put to good use on the way to the office reading work related materials and on the way home with more entertainment content. I’ve found that the iPad and iPhone apps are really great for reading feeds but more on this in a sidebar on the iOS apps I find most useful later.

I’ve found that I can scan through most quickly using a web-browser such as Chrome, although I use IE and Firefox interchangeably.

Setting Google reader to expanded view allows scrolling to automatically mark the posts as read, I tend to open any possibly useful or important posts in a new tab just as a placeholder when scanning through large amounts of items in the feeds. I’ll then use other cloud-based software to either readitlater or send it to Evernote

Recent events have required me to read a number of non-English language sites and the translation features from Google in Chrome or using the Google Toolbar in IE make the automated translation of sites effortless. Yes, it’s machine translation and the resulting text has to be taken with some degree of caution but to get a sense of what is being said, I’ve found it to be invaluable. Another benefit of using Google Reader to aggregate feeds is that I have a searchable trail of all content I’ve browsed since I signed up using Reader. This has saved me on more than one occasion.

More on this later once I’ve got some sleep.