Tag Archives: Organization

Approaching Inbox Zero in Gmail

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Earlier this year (yes I meant to send this out much earlier) I went to a meetup hosted by my local PyLadies group. There Tracy Osborn of Wedding Lovely and Hello Web App fame gave an amazing talk about marketing for developers. I was truly inspired by the talk, and I feel it was very relevant for me, especially as I try to launch my first product and startup Amber Penguin Software. I could write a series of blog posts just on the content from this one meetup alone, and I probably will over time. But today I’ll focus on one thing in particular that I’ve learned from Tracy.

Getting to Inbox Zero

Nowadays I try to not organize my day to day tasks, by either my inbox or even one of my many, many Trello boards. Rather I try to bite off a few urgent and important tasks each day. Still I end up spending time on tasks initiated from emails in my email inbox. Unfortunately my inboxes seems to fill up faster than I can manage them at times. I would love to have a clean inbox as in Inbox Zero technique but more importantly I want to be much more responsive to the emails I get. Also opening up my email can be overwhelming when I see the number of emails in my inbox.

Using Multiple Inboxes in Gmail

One of the things I learned after the meetup, while browsing Tracy’s site was a technique to get my inbox under control at least in Gmail. In essence, you need to enable the “Multiple Inboxes” lab experiment in the Gmail Labs settings. Then you need to write a few filters such as is:drafts || label:follow-up (which happens to be my filter for follow-up emails) for each particular inbox. Et voilà! You have a much more manageable inbox that is subdivided into categories, and the actions you need to take.

Where it works and where it doesn’t work

Unfortunate this technique only works in Gmail at the moment. Some other webmail providers maybe have a similar multiple inbox solution, but unfortunately ProtonMail does not but it is a suggested feature. So my ProtonMail will probably lag behind in terms of how quickly I respond, unless I or someone else implements the multiple inbox feature in ProtonMail.

However where I can use multiple inboxes like in my Amber Penguin Software email (managed by Gmail) it has drastically improved my email experience and my own responsiveness. My Gmail still needs some love to get everything under control, but once I do I will be much better at replying to emails. Ultimately this technique helps you become more confident in categorizing your email, and then acting up on it when the time comes.

Returned from Afar

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My plane touched in Toronto Thursday afternoon around 3:15-ish.  And officially my regular schedule resumed on Friday.  However in reality, I’m still behind on a number of things, and everything is still one gigantic mess.  I do plan to get back to blogging on a daily basis.  But at the moment  I’ve got a ton of e-mails to answer, phone calls to make, meetings to schedule and a bunch of other administrative stuff to do.  Hence I’ll keep the updates short and sweet until I can dig myself out of this mess.

A Productive Day, Lacking the Space

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Yesterday proved to be a productive day.  I am pleased with the expanding file I bought.  I could finally find an organized place for all those bills, receipts and miscellanous loose leaves of paper that clutter my room.  In addition I am caught up on my correspondence.  Looks like I’m making progress in the dating game too, something I thought would never come about.  Of course I will not for sure until I know for sure.  Still as the amount of near-misses increases, so does the likelyhood of a hit.  All in all I am at ease.

I still need to organize more and clear up both my physical and digital clutter.  The digital clutter only requires time.  But I am severly lacking space in the physical world, and I am not sure how to deal with this.  I have to either consolidate something or get rid of a large volume.  Nothing really comes to mind that can help me with this.  I do have some ideas.  When you are dealing with a small space, you have to get real creative with managing space.  And no the answer is not digitizing as much as possible, since that takes too long.  I might need to do some research into this problem.

For the most part, I’ve dealt with my lack of time problem.  I make time and tunnel out chunks of free time when I can.  But making space eludes me at the moment.

UPDATE: I read up some interesting ideas for saving space.  Need to get rid of stuff especially out of date things, unused clothes, and old pointless notes.  Also I need to see if I can convert objects into money, as that will help motivate me to cut deeper.  Hmm… this is gonna take some time and effort.

The Day After

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Today marks the first day of my 26th year of existence.  So far I feel quite pleased.  I have some progress in my various goals.  I go out more often.  I talk to more people.  I have found a few girls who have taken some sort of an interest in me.  Life goes on without missing a beat.  In my mind, my writing is shaping up nicely.  Programming is left to the side, for now.  But I plan on working on that fairly soon.  Getting a license and a car is within my reach.  For once I can see myself living an ordinary independent adult life.  For various reasons I’m doing anything crazy like moving out.  Or spending vast amounts of money, or doing silly things in general.  My time management, project management and organizational skills are far better than they were a year ago.  And most importantly, I still see a glimmer of hope of my eeking out a prosperous existence on this rock.  My situation is not the simplest or the easiest, butI still I have room for maneuvering.  All in all, the day after and the coming days looking promising.

It is On My Desk

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No, I’m not mocking Marika’s blog name.  Rather this morning I am tired and uncreative.  At this point, the creative artist starts stealing ideas from more inspired artists.

Over the course of my university career, I learned the elegant art of organization.  The results from just a little effort and some smart thinking goes a long way.  Now I feel compelled to organize, pile, list and label everything.  Not because I’m a neat person by nature.  I just found organized chaos makes one so much productive than in an disorganized chaos.  And I’d rather waste my time dragging my butt out bed in the morning at sloth’s pace than waste time looking for my keycard frantically.  Instead of asking myself, “Where did I put so-and-so.”, I’d rather tell myself, “Great!  Found that things, and did the task.  Now I can do something for myself now.”

This morning I dragged myself out of bed to the sound of a humming computer.  Yesterday evening’s upgrade of my desktop to Jaunty went smoothly.  Except for a few prompts concerning configuration files.  With tired eyes, I clicked through said files, and then went to the task of pretending to be awake.  Some idle surfing later, then I tired to find that blasted receipt so I could expense a piece of hardware.  In contrast to what I said in the above paragraph, organizing papers still eludes me.  After a bunch of looking around I still couldn’t find what I needed.  Saddened I left for work, and tired hard not to fall asleep.

Today starts the first day of a new project at work.  And I start the day extra early for personal reasons.  Should be a fun new project.  But as I look what is on my desk, somethings impress me and others distress me.  The lack of the receipt spoils my attempt of filing my expenses yet again.  The lack of my laptop’s mouse, means a forced existance with only the touchpad/trackpoint.  The lack of coffee in my cup is of minor temporal concern.  I just need to stumble toward the coffee machine down the err… hall or aisle or office space.  I’ll figure out what to name I should call it when I wake up.

Presence and lack of certain items on my desk, help or hinder my efforts today.  The standard pen, notebook, laptop, headphones and USB pen drive means I can be productive to today.  I really miss my mice though.  The IBM branded water bottle is a nice touch.  The bastards never gave me a job, not being an intern and all.  But I like the bottle and soft briefcase I got from them.  The soft briefcase on my desk I could do without.  Paperwork, bills, papers and sad dysfunctional Internet Tablet all hide there.  They will demand I turn my attention at them.  The briefcase is there so that I can’t just wave away the work.  The chocolate bar wrapper sat on my desk until I noticed.  Nice chocolate waffer… not so great substitute for breakfast.  But breakfast I plan to grab from the sandwich bar downstairs once they open in a bit from now.

A welcome change to the items on my desk is the change of books.  Yesterday I finally finished Joseph Tissot’s How to Profit from Your Faults.  A fine read, but a hard read with so much quotes of saints and biblical references.  The books discussed how to deal with sins and all that inconvenient stuff a modern technocrat living in a postmodern positivist-relativist world, sometimes wishes he could wave away.  But alas the soul remains and the fallen nature of humanity is what it is.  Might as well find a way to make oneself better, even by exploiting ones faults.  Today instead I have Mary Beth Bonacci’s Real Love book.  A lighter read about dating, marriage, sexuality and all that jazz from a Catholic perspective.  Normally I don’t mention what I read, due to the obvious personal nature of things.  But today I don’t really care what anyone thinks.  And if I can piss off a positivist-relativist by showing that a logical thinking technocrat feels the need to read “God nonesense” and to delve into “antequated” religious thought, then that will make my day.  Rubbing salt into the wound I’m an anarcho-capitalist.  And I’m building your future world.  Enjoy!  Hopefully I managed to offend someone and ruin their day… just to meet my quota of negative karma feedback. 😛

Also I write this stuff, since I know part of my audience is of a traditional Catholic leaning.  And I just want to throw at least some token support and love your way.  God bless.  As for my open minded, non-discriminating friends, you understand the importance of transparency and free thought.  So I’m sure you don’t mind my occasional religious rants.

Another sort of welcome addition to the desk is the cellphone.  Yes another Nokia device, and not your standard phone.  Before I open up the box and set it up, I’m going to deal with Nokia’s tech support team again.  And Nokia tech folks, you are all wonderful people working for a very forward thinking and innovative company.  Having to send my Canadian bought IT to a repair place in the US via an American address IS NOT very forward thinking or smart.  Since the cellphone seems to have Asian roots, I’d rather not have to send it to Taiwan to get it repaired.  Unless of course you guys want to pay for the shipping, in which case I have no qualms.

Anyways enough of my rant today.  I need to get a coffee, reboot and get some work done for my dear, generous ex-client before I get to work on my new project.  Take care everyone.  I hope I haven’t offended to many of you.  Or my rant was not too long…  Have a happy April Fool’s day.  Avoid becoming a fool today.  Just adding some more words to get the word count to over a 1000 words (1006).  And I’m off.

A Review of January 2009

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1day.pngEvery so often I like to look back and review my achievements.  In the past I did it so rarely, that I just looked my current work and the few things I remembered made it look like I achieved little throughout the year.  So I’ll try to do a quick review for January here.

In writing, I started to edit a bit of chapter 1 of my book.   I planned on writing substantially more, but this didn’t occur as I didn’t work on my novel systematically.  However I did manage to restart more or less daily updates to my blog.  Now with the move to the new blogging application, I feel more productive and more in control.  I still need to clean up and improve my blog since my migration from Blogger to WordPress.  This next month, I plan on adding regular writing sessions for my novel.

In computing, did manage to purchase a new personal domain.  I set up this WordPress blog on this too.  I tried to setup clean URLs on my Drupal sites.  But for all my attempts, I could not setup my Drupal multi-site as planned.  Aside from a bit of maintenance, I still need to organize a good chunk of my files on my desktop at home.  The Internet Tablet still needs to shine in terms of really boosting my productivity.  For the time being, I use it more as a MSN client on the run and as a podcast-capable MP3 player.  This month, I will need to set some time aside and add GTD task management as something I can do on my tablet.  Also I plan on spending time organizing my desktop and digitized life.

I won’t get into my personal achievements.  However I will mention that I am keeping up with regular communication with old good friends and some new ones.  And I try to respond in reasonable amount of time.  I still need to get a cellphone though.  And the wintery weather prevented me from doing any driving.  But I am keeping up with my resolution to eat my own cooked food and being ready for work consistently.  And my finances are in check and all accounted for.  This February, I need to keep at it, better controlling my stress levels and making sure I continue growing.

On the professional side, I haven’t achieved my goals of learning Qt, GTK, C++ or maemo development.  Did however reviewed and strengthened my UML diagramming skills.  I am becoming a better, more visibly calm and upbeat consultant.  I still need learn to exude more calmness and in-control feeling.  I am managing to avoid most potential disasters at work.  So this month, I plan on brushing up and acquiring new programming skills.

Overall, I would consider January a month of personal growth.  I can’t say I achieved 1/12 of everything I want to achieve this year.  But I managed to get a sound base to start expanding upon.  Some major projects still need to get off the ground.  I will postpone and spend less time on a certain project, since it might not provide enough reward for the amount of effort put in.  I still need to clear off the majority of minor tasks from earlier months.  But on the whole I find myself a better, more approachable person and if nothing drastic happens in the next month, I should be able to continue on moving forward.