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…

5 Tips for Keeping Remote Workers in the Loop

5 Tips for Keeping Remote Workers in the Loop.

Reblogged from Mashable:

1. Be Hyper-Aware of Misinterpretation of the Written Word
2. Share Informal News As Well as Company News
3. Be Open About Less Positive Developments
4. Use the Cloud
5. Always Make Further Actions Crystal Clear

Workflow (Part 2)

In the first part of this topic, I covered my scraping of information from RSS using Google reader and then holding “buckets” for later review such as readitlater or send it to Evernote.

Click on the above image to go to LucidChart to see the flowchart representing this aspect of the work or download the PDF…

The reason for going down this route is based on my attempts to implement the disciplines in Getting Things Done (GTD) written by David Allen.

In short, everything that has your attention needs to be gathered in one place and sorted into actionable items.

I would say I am an enthusiast rather than adept at following the GTD methodology but it has helped keep me on a relatively even keel, even if it has driven my wife up the wall from time to time when I decide to “get clear”. What I am still working on is the keeping it clear…

So, how does GTD impact me on a daily basis when doing work related tasks? Well, I’ve been using a combination of things so far but have found that the combination of MS Outlook and my BlackBerry mean that I can handle most email related issues from anywhere. It’s taken a while to set up Outlook to handle the GTD type stuff but there are a couple of great guides which I have found invaluable. I did sign up for a trial run of the GTD Connect but to be honest was so busy in the two weeks of the trial that I didn’t have time to log in to check it out fully… perhaps there is a lesson in there for me.

Anyway, GTD underpins my approach to email handling and is starting to have an impact on the amount of “stuff” I manage to actually get done. FYI, my email inbox is at Zero at least once a week or more often if I can manage it.

As an added bonus, this was me March 12th with the height of the Japan earthquake and tsunami in the news before Fukushima Daiichi took over the following week. Are four screens enough?