Don't Trust a Stranger with Your Email Address

We give out our email address to strangers all the time but we feel vaguely uncomfortable doing so.  There's often a good reason to do it (such as subscribing to a mailing list), but by giving out our email address we give someone else power over us: power to fill our inboxes with spam, power to waste our attention, power to give our email address to others without our permission.  It's uncomfortable because we know, in that moment of trust, that once we give away this power we can't get it back.  It's like giving a key to your house to a service professional who's doing a job for you.  It's a good reason to give out a key, but will the key be abused?  Will copies be made?  Will the key be used for something other than that for which it was intended?

In this article I explain how to keep the benefits of sharing your email address while maintaining the power to take it back if it is abused.

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Easier Life Balance with Google Calendar

A calendar such as Google Calendar is great for planning how I'm going to spend my time in the upcoming week.  It would also be helpful to know how much time I'm spending in different activities, to help me balance my life better.  Unfortunately, I haven't found a calendar program that makes it easy to see this information.  Fortunately, Google Calendar makes it easy to add features so the information can be present right next to your calendar.

I've created a Google Calendar Sidebar Gadget that tracks how many hours you're spending in tagged events.

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Fast Email Sorting with Apple Mail

Some people like to classify their incoming email quickly into categories and then respond to them later.  This can be useful to people who get a high volume of email each day and want to empty their inboxes quickly.

In the screencast below I show how do to this by creating keyboard shortcuts in the Apple Mail program.

Why "Productivity Game"?

The metaphor of a game is powerful for people who care about getting results for two reasons.

Games Are Clear

In a game, the important things are clear to everyone involved:

• the end goal
• where we are in relation to the goal
• actions we can take to move toward the goal

Games Are Motivating

A well-designed game matches the challenge of the task to the ability of the player.  People often procrastinate doing their work by playing games.  What if we viewed work as a poorly designed game and redesigned it so that doing your work felt like playing an engaging game?

Did You Get Back to Me?

Sometimes I'll send a question to a friend or colleague via email and I won't hear back.  When I follow up with that person later, the answer is always the same: "Yes, I saw your email, didn't I reply?  I'm sorry, I meant to."

The answer makes me feel better but this common situation creates a problem for me.  How do I keep track of emails I've sent that didn't get responses?  I need a way of checking up on these without having to remember all of them.

David Allen presents a good solution in his book Getting Things Done.  He suggests creating a "waiting for" folder in the email program and then using the BCC feature to put a copy of the email there when sending the original request.  The "waiting for" folder can be checked periodically to see if any requests didn't get responses.  In this article I'll demonstrate how to implement Mr. Allen's solution using Gmail.

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