Category Archives: Technology

Technology

Email – savior or bane of our existence?

Do you dread coming back from vacation to find the buckets of work email waiting for you?  Do you secretly use your iPhone/Blackberry/etc. while on vacation just to “clean out your email a bit”.  Do you think all of this email is making us smarter or able to work better?  And…what did people do 20 years ago when email was almost non-existant in the workplace?  People still did stuff, the economy still grew, right?  I mean, we built rockets to fly people to the moon before we had laptops, web browsers, Mathematica, and email!

I don’t know the answers to most of these questions…but I do know that the good use email is wonderful and a great time saver, and the poor use of email is a time waster, a morale killer, and sometimes bad for your career.  People do things like blindly reply-all over and over again filling up everyone’s mail box, CC their boss just in case, say angry things they would never say in person, and more.  So how do we define the difference between good and bad email.

Characteristics of bad work email:

1. Bad emails tend to have a lot of people on the TO or CC line.  Unless its a group announcement of some kind, this usually signals the sender doesn’t know who the relevant people are and is just blasting it out.  Equivalent to standing in the lobby and yelling out your message.

2. Bad emails tend to have information instead of knowledge.   As my friend from high school put it, information is simply data without a clear understanding of its significance, while knowledge is the useful application of accumulated data.

3. Bad emails tend to have no clear indication on whether action is expected from the recipient.

Characteristics of good work email:

1. Opposite of the above three items.

The key challenge is to deal with the daily deluge of information from all sources: email, Twitter, Facebook, newspapers, TV, websites, Digg, and so on. Sifting through all this raw data, analyzing it, discovering patterns, ignoring the noise, and not spending too much time acting on irrelevant information is critical to the survival of any information worker or professional.  Improving our use of email is one way to reduce the mental clutter of our daily work existence and hopefully moving us closer to spending time generating knowledge instead of just more information.

Technology

Time to try a new task management application

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About a year ago I started using an iPhone 3G and had to find replacement applications for a Sony Clie NX-70 Palm based device I had been using for 5 years (yes, it was and still is really that good).  The Datebk5 app I had been using was pretty nice and the iPhone was missing a heap of capabilities in comparison, most noticeably in task management.  So after learning about the Getting Things Done (GTD) system from David Allen’s book a year earlier, I bought OmniFocus for the Mac and then the iPhone.  In a nutshell, GTD advocates you list “projects” you are working on (e.g. “submit ACME proposal”, “clean garage”), “contexts” in which you can do things (e.g. “on the phone”, “email”, “writing”, “running errands”), tag all your tasks with these two attributes and place them in an order in which they need to be done (e.g. “write proposal” followed by “buy envelopes” followed by “mail proposal”).  This allows you to focus only on the next action required instead of on the inifite amount of items most of us have in front of us at any given time.  By staying focused and making small progress daily and not becoming overwhelmed by the big picture, you have a greater chance of “getting things done”.  The idea of “contexts” is that you when you decide it time to make phone calls, you look at your “on the phone” context list, and start doing things on it, regardless of project.  Its a relatively simple system, but I’m not sure it works for everyone.  I tend to not really think in contexts, and thus task management systems based around GTD (like OmniFocus) start to get in your way.

So after using OmniFocus for a year and generally not really enjoying the experience, I’ve recently starting using the web-based ToodleDo app, along with its corresponding iPhone app.    ToodleDo lets you use many of the methods of the GTD system (it has contexts, and folders, and status, etc.) but is flexible enough that you can only use what you want.  I have to say, I’m enjoying it much more (and its much less expensive too, as in free for the web app and only $4 for the iPhone app, compared with nearly $100 for both OmniFocus products if you get them at full price).  I think the feature of ToodleDo I like the best is the “hotlist”, which is a compilation of items you have deemed important via priorities, due-dates, flags, and so on.  It cuts across projects and contexts and is just a nice list.  For those of us that don’t think in pure “project” or “context” terms like GTD advocates, this simple feature alone is really useful.   And the bonus is, all your tasks are on the web, so you can find them from any computer.  Hooray for competition.

Education, Technology

What’s the deal with Twitter and Facebook and …?

How many times have you heard that question?  These days it seems that Twitter and Facebook are everywhere: they appear on the cover of national magazines, get press coverage on the national news, and seem to be mentioned by anyone who wants to appear like they are up on new trends.

So what’s it all about?  Are these websites going to destroy the news business?  If you don’t use them, will you become totally irrelevant.  It’s a complicated issue, but of course the answers are no and no.  What tends to get people in trouble is extreme positions one way or another.

On one side you have the “believers” who speak to the strengths of a new technology and proclaim it will change everything and all who do not follow will slowly (or quickly) fall behind.  These are the folks who find the new tool an indispensable part of their day and don’t understand why other’s “don’t get it”.

On the other side, you have those who claim that these new technologies are a waste of time, an invasion of privacy, and don’t provide any new useful information.  These are the “non-understanders” — the folks who equate their lack of understanding of a technology with its lack of utility (the same crowd that tends to criticize events or programs they also never watch or attend).

Somewhere in the middle lies the best path – an appreciation for what the technology brings to the table and how it fits in with other technologies.  For example, Facebook provides a nice mechanism to stay in touch and share photos and stories with your friends (most of those relationships exist outside the Internet too!).  Twitter provides a nice mechanism to follow lots of information at once, from many sources, including people you don’t know but have interesting things to say.  Is someone annoying you with constant updates of their sleep and dietary habits — just unfollow them…its one click away.  But maybe someone is providing insight into a topic you are interested in — follow them.

So don’t blindly follow the herd when it comes to technology proclamations.  Examine each technology for what it can bring to your life.  If it doesn’t bring utility, don’t use it, but don’t condemn it.  And if it brings utility, then use it, and point its uses out to your friends.