We live in a day and age, where a great deal of our time is consumed by things being brought to our attention constantly. Notifications are useful, but they interupt what you’re busy with – Remaining focused is difficult and with notifications popping up constantly, you’re going to find yourself spread too thinly to achieve anything great.
That said, I’ve compiled a list of notifications I’ve disabled and perhaps you can relate or share which ones bug you:
- New GMail messages – If you’re a GMail user and you use Google Talk, you’ll know that each time you receive an email, a little toaster will appear at your system tray alerting you.
- Twitter – Most Twitter clients, such as twhirl use toasters and sounds to alert you of new tweets, regardless of whether the tweet is directed at you or not. If you’re following more than 100 people, you’ll constantly receive tweets. Another thing about Twitter is that each time someone follows you, you will receive an email – this can easily be disabled via the settings in your account on their website.
- Blogs – Most blogging platforms, such as WordPress, send out notifications (emails) when you receive a comment on your blog. Once your blog gets busy, you could face a huge number of emails constantly pouring in – this can be disabled quite easily via the WordPress Dashboard (Settings > Discussion).
- Instant Messaging – I’ve removed MSN completely and normally avoid Google Talk, with the aim of sticking only to Skype. The new Skype is fantastic, there are very few notifications or toasters, yet it’s still easy to tell if there are new messages thanks to the systray icon which presents you with a conversation count.
- Outlook – Outlook works in a similiar manner to GMail, each time you receive an email, you’re notified. Once again, this can easily be removed.
- Facebook – Facebook is an awful contributer to this whole situation – if you don’t setup your account correctly, you could easily receive hundreds of emails daily! Log into your Facebook account and click here to see a list of notifications you’re signed up for. Please note: Facebook add things to this list constantly, so be sure to check back from time to time.
Now you’ll probably ask the same question I did – But how will you know when you receive something? Well, it’s quite simple, you set up certain times to check your email accounts or social accounts, schedule checking in and control the situation rather than being controlled – I can promise you that you’ll start to get things done a lot quicker and more efficiently than usual if you turn these notifications off and check your accounts on a schedule.
As you leave comments or I think of other annoying notifications I’m going to built onto the points above.
Create a separate gmail account and sign up to all these notification services and check that account per your schedule. Works for me!
@Wouter – Now that’s an idea I didn’t think of, nice thinking mate! Something like wastesometime@imod.co.za could work ;)
Yeah mate! Time is money, also to separate your critical work from the not so critical work i’m using a lot of email rules to deliver to different folders. Saves me a lot of time attending to highest priority tasks first. Now that’s an idea for a new blog post :)
Absolutely, taking control over email makes the biggest difference, from splitting personal and work to critical work and non-critical work to all the notifications and rules, if you can get that right, it’s quite amazing to see how much time is saved and how much more organised an operation can run :)
I started working from zero (empty inbox) a few years ago, Its an amazing feeling! I could never go back. Looking @ other peoples inboxes makes me feel unclean :)
I change my notification time @ work based on what I’m doing that day. If I’m coding then its 20 minutes, crisis time then immediate, design phase 5 minutes… etc…
Hi Brett, when you say empty inbox, do you mean that all filters and rules have been run so the actual inbox is empty, but folders are populated? Sorry for sounding ignorant, just want to double check..
Not a bad idea about changing the notification time – I like that. I work as the Operations Manager, but I’m so also senior developer and search engine specialist, so my daily duties change quite extensively. That said, changing the notifications time is a very good idea and would work nicely implemented into my scenario – great tip!
GTD methodology (as in David Allen GTD)
So… I’ve got Next Actions, Read & Review, Reference and the most powerful button nobody ever uses! The delete key.
When I read my mail, if it requires a next action that can be completed in under 2 minutes I do it. If the action will take longer that that I move the mail to a folder called “&Action” [more on the & later] where I will review my actionable emails when I have time.
If its something that has no action but I’d like to review before referencing it, it goes in the R&R folder [&Review].
If its straight reference, it goes into the appropriate reference folder.
If I don’t need it, it gets whacked.
So I end up with an empty inbox, no hunting for stuff…
About the &. In most mail clients [I use thunderbird] & appears before A, so it bounces then to the top.
So:
&NextAction
&ReadAndReview
&WaitingOn
Aarvarks
Books
etc…
Very cool way of doing things indeed. I used a similar method last year with a folder structure for actioning, reviewing and immediate. It worked quite well, but then I found myself having several inboxes instead of one, hehe. However, since then I’ve come up with another method, which would work now with your method.
I presume you file from your action/review folders into appropriate folders once you’re done with the emails?
In other words:
Inbox -> Action -> Client Name ?
I use GMail for personal emails, Outlook for work related and I’m starting to feel that GMail, alone, isn’t sufficient for managing things correctly – I would love to apply this methodology we’ve spoken about to my personal email as I receive between 200 and 300 emails a day, that’s excluding notifications!
I have to be honest, I’ve never tried thunderbird, would it sync and work well with GMail?
I like where this conversation is going, I’m trying to recruite more people to join!
RE: Multiple inboxes; I don’t like filters as they do exactly that, they create multiple inboxes which makes processing information much harder. I prefer a catch-all where I can make quick snap decision as to whether a mail is actionable, reference or junk and sort it quickly.
so:
Inbox
-> Actions (actionable across all projects)
-> Read & Review
-> Waiting On
-> Reference
-> Specific Project
So actionable emails all grouped together, so they can be fully accessed later and maybe moved onto a context based action-list.
Also, actions can only ever become junk or reference after they’ve completed.
Ok, my geek is showing now: I’m a self-confessed productivity pornographer :-/ only because GTD made my work life livable again… I’ve almost got my SA site going as a mechanism for me to learn more about it, registered the domain but haven’t put it together yet..
RE: Thunderbird syncing; Any mail client that supports IMAP will sync correctly.
Damn, indentation killed by post :)
Inbox
-> Actions (actionable across all projects)
-> Read & Review
-> Waiting On
-> Reference
—> Specific Project
You raise a wonderful point when you say actionable emails being junk or reference once processed, I never thought of it really like that – I would still need to file them into a client folder or something, but that wouldn’t be in the way or anything. What happens if you get say 40-50 actionable tasks over say 2 days, that would create a hard-to-manage Actions folder, almost with the need for subfolders? Soz, just testing all areas before, because that’s what happens my side ;)
Cool, I must check out Thunderbird!
If you’re got 50 actionable task that need to be completed in 2 days then you learn to say “no” mate… If you work 9 hours a day without a lunchbreak thats a new action ever 20 minutes…
Otherwise things get organised by project and action lists get organised by context(@home, @phone, @PC, @meeting etc…)
Read “Getting things done” by David Allen.
and check out my shiny new productivity website! which may or may not be up depending on whether it ever gets into the top half od my priority list :D
I thought of something though..
If I use a client, such as ThunderBird,I could set it up using IMAP, but I worry that it will turn into a situation where I am suddenly managing both GMail and TB, lol, because I want to be able to access mail from everywhere, argh!
Deleting an email TB side would delete from GMail too, which is great, but would downloading mails TB side, remove them from the GMail server? Or, is there an option to leave a copy on the server?
Grief, decisions, decisions :D
@Bm – I’ll definitely look into the book. I’m reading The Power of Less by Leo Babauta, which is turning out to be rather great. He runs http://www.zenhabits.net, which is a great blog. So, once I’ve done with that I’ll take a look into your suggestion.
What’s the address of your site? I’m definitely interested in looking!
I agree what you mean about that many actionable tasks, completely.
IMAP4 synchronizes your mailbox and stores your mail server-side, so any action you perform using will be aggregated to all your clients… mark as mail as read using your cellphone and your desktop pc will pick it up…
Merlin Mann got me onto GTD via boingboing ages ago….
Best Link: http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done
Site will be called:
http://www.progeek.co.za
but haven’t had a chance to put anything together yet, still in the “deciding what to even use stage… wordpress? drupal? roll my own? meh… dunno
I got Thunderbird running with IMAP and am busy looking into all the little extra settings in order to sync trash folders and so forth, looks good! 43folders – I know the site quite well, great site.
Let me know when you put your site up, I’d recommend WordPress over Drupal any day of the week ;)
I use notepad … lol.
But no, seriously. I generally have a single “tasks.txt” file on my desktop any day of the week (work or home). Every task is a new line, supporting info/resources/points as indented text, and I # or // out (lol coder geek) any task that’s completed.
I use my desktop to hold files I’m working with, and at the end of every day, create a folder named that date (19-Sep-2009), dump everything in there, and dump *that* into a bin.
If I ever need to find something I know I worked on, it’s in there. If I need to review what I did on a particular day, it’s in there. Every now and then, the whole bin gets compressed and stored on a network share (at the office) or my 500gb drive (at home).
As for email, believe it or not, I use Outlook with Gmail POP access. At home, if an actionable message comes through, I flag it to the task list. From work, I’ll star it through gmail.com. Generally, though, I don’t get *that* many emails that I need to work on.
As for IMs, I keep them closed as a habit. The only time I’m online is if someone’s emailed or scheduled to set up a conversation, or if I know I’m needed. IM of choice is Google Talk – everything gets searchably logged, annoying notifications can be turned off (and they are). I only use Skype because it’s an office standard.
Although, it should be said that I’ve been doing my absolute BEST not to get engaged in any extramural activities, and as such, my daily routine is fairly clear cut, and I’m getting things done anyway ;)
Oh, btw: Don’t underestimate Excel as a tool for planning/keeping track of things.
@Wogan – Nothing wrong with that method at all! I used phpcoder (notepad with syntax highlighting) for many many months to track tasks and also used the // method to denote completed tasks :) I also used Excel for a long time, but both of these methods existed when I was working as a developer, now being an Ops Manager, email becomes to focal point, so that’s why a lot of what I’ve been saying relates to email.
As far as IMs go, I’ve also been cutting down on that and have killed MSN completely (Thank heavens) and am now very infrequently on GTalk; Skype I keep open, a lot of clients interact with me over Skype, so I prefer to give them that channel of contact as it sometimes results in things happening quicker than via email.
This has been a great thread!