email – D’Arcy Norman dot net

on after-hours work email

The results were immediate and powerful. The employees exhibited significantly lower stress levels. Time off actually rejuvenated them: More than half said they were excited to get to work in the morning, nearly double the number who said so before the policy change. And the proportion of consultants who said they were satisfied with their jobs leaped from 49 percent to 72 percent. Most remarkably, their weekly work hours actually shrank by 11 percent—without any loss in productivity. “What happens when you constrain time?” Lovich asks. “The low-value stuff goes away,” but the crucial work still gets done.

via Are You Checking Work Email in Bed? At the Dinner Table? On Vacation? | Mother Jones. (via BoingBoing

I’d love to set this policy up at the office. I’m as guilty of this as anyone.

Update: and… 5 minutes after sending the link to the article, and we have an informal policy in the Taylor Institute to try out prohibiting work-related emails before 8am and after 5pm, and on weekends. Awesome. It’s a start.

mailboxes

Screen Shot 2013 01 21 at 7 17 13 PM

just dumped a bunch of stuff into archive folders. only 1.5 GB of work email, including 385MB sent by me over the last 2 years. Feels like it should be more than that…

zero

This almost **never** happens. But I took the time to nuke old emails that I didn’t need to keep, and dump stuff that is no longer relevant. An inbox cleansing is very cathartic. [Merlin](http://www.43folders.com/) would approve. (but it probably won’t last very long…)

Inboxzero

phishers using copyright to appear legitimate

Phishing is nothing new. But they keep trying new tricks. Here’s the latest modification (on top of the clever ASCII-Art form and spoofed email address):

Screen shot 2010-11-06 at 7.43.50 PM.png

I assume/hope there is a standing order to fire anyone on the spot for providing their account info to these moronic phishers.

Priority Inbox without GMail

GMail’s new Priority Inbox sounds interesting – a special inbox with just the messages that are important to you, likely from people you care about. There’s likely some magic special sauce in the Priority algorithm, but a simple facsimile can be created using a Smart Mailbox in a standard email app.

I have a group in my address book:

It currently has 96 people in it. People that I would stop what I’m doing to read a message from.

Then, in my mail app, I created a Smart Mailbox with a simple rule:

Screen shot 2010-09-03 at 10.21.00 AM.png

Done. A special Priority Inbox, without having to use GMail. There are probably some tweaks I could add, and some conditions to refine it, but it’s a pretty decent start. Any messages from the folks in my Extended Family & Friends group get popped in here automagically, without having to sort out the bacon and noise.

dear email account user,

I just got this phishing email. You may have received a copy of it as well. I normally delete them without much thought, but actually read this one. It’s got a new angle I haven’t seen before. Here’s an image of the email (not using the plaintext, to avoid attracting phishers and spammers etc… wait. too late…)

Update: Microsoft just nuked the account used in the phishing scam.

Inbox Zero

Watching Merlin Mann‘s “Inbox Zero” presentation at Google. I got inspired to stop saving emails for CYA purposes. I just deleted over 1600 messages that were accumulating in my inbox. I saved less than 100, into a “Deadmail” archive folder.

This is the cleanest my inbox has looked since I got the account in 1987. Yes. The account is now 20 years old. Actually, this is probably even cleaner than that, since it came with a “Welcome” message, IIRC.

I’m going to try REALLY hard to stick to the “actions” philosophy – delete, delegate, archive, respond, do something.

Inbox Zero

Cleaning up my inbox

I just went through my email inbox and nuked over 4500 messages. All since January 2005. Anything important is either archived as a project file, or available through the magical wondrousnes of The Goog.

I’d been letting messages just stay in my inbox, using Spotlight and Smart Folders to find stuff easily, but over the last few days the U of C’s webmail client has been warning me (via a friendly BLINKING RED MESSAGE) that inboxes with over 5000 messages are bad, ‘mkay? So, I took the hint and nuked all kinds of stuff. Everything from “status update – February 2005” to various random ping messages.

I don’t think I’ve trashed anything critical, but should be able to focus a little better on a smaller inbox now. I couldn’t quite get to the Getting Things Done empty inbox state, but it’s an order of magnitude closer.

Subscribe like it’s 1999!

I realized that there are a few folks that read this blog without the benefit of an RSS aggregator. To each their own, I figure. So, I just installed a handy plugin to let people subscribe to the output of this blog via email.

If that kind of thing turns your crank, head on over to the Subscribe page, where you’ll be provided with links to the RSS and Atom feeds, as well as a handy dandy email subscription form.

I’ve got no idea what this might do to my blog host, so I’ll run the service as an experiment for awhile. Hopefully it won’t smoke any servers. Enjoy!

Update: Hey! It works! Actually, the email that gets sent out contains the full HTML of the post, so it’s a pretty decent way to subscribe.

If that kind of thing turns your crank, head on over to the Subscribe page, where you’ll be provided with links to the RSS and Atom feeds, as well as a handy dandy email subscription form.

I’ve got no idea what this might do to my blog host, so I’ll run the service as an experiment for awhile. Hopefully it won’t smoke any servers. Enjoy!

Update: Hey! It works! Actually, the email that gets sent out contains the full HTML of the post, so it’s a pretty decent way to subscribe.

Email Autoreply Considered Harmful

I intentionally refuse to set an email autoreply (those annoying “I’m out of the office, but your email is very important to me” messages that get spewed onto mailing lists).

Autorepliers are too dump to not spam lists, and I generally check email regardless of where I am, so it’s not like important messages get dropped. Sure, less important messages might get neglected, but that should be the rule rather than an exception…

The NMC list is a perfect example of this. Someone sends a message, and (especially during conference season) it’s immediately answered by a bunch of “I’m not here…” messages. Annoying. I get it. You’re out of the office. Your email shouldn’t care where you are…

ps. this post is the first one I’ve written using the fancy new WordPress Dashboard widget. It’s rather barebones at the moment, but the idea is pretty cool!

I intentionally refuse to set an email autoreply (those annoying “I’m out of the office, but your email is very important to me” messages that get spewed onto mailing lists).

ps. this post is the first one I’ve written using the fancy new WordPress Dashboard widget. It’s rather barebones at the moment, but the idea is pretty cool!