For some reason, the settings for my tdhedengren.com e-mail accounts didn’t migrate with everything else in the server move made by the good folks over at A Small Orange. Everything else did, but not these, which is weird. I heard about this just now, and have resolved the issue. Sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused, if you e-mailed me in the past 48 hours and haven’t heard back, please resend as the e-mail either have bounced back (which you probably noticed), or disappeared along the way.

Thanks for your patience.

I’m getting a lot of e-mails these days, and although I have a good system to handle them, I still find myself forced to delay answers to some things. I usually let people know when I’ll need some more time to get back to them, but sometimes I just can’t keep up.

So should I set up an auto responder, telling people that I’ve received their e-mail, thank you very much, and I’ll get back asap? More

I hate waiting for things to happen, people to react, stuff to be delivered. It’s necessary, like right now for instance, I’m waiting for a client to update some stuff so that I can get back to prettify his site. Necessary, but boring. Luckily, I’ll just multitask. More

Getting back online means having lots of stuff to catch up on. The obviously screaming inbox is one of them, reading another. Not counting work (wether it is blogging, designing or something else), that’s what I need to catch up on.

E-mail is my primary mean of communication. Being away for almost two weeks leaves me with a lot of spam and newsletter cleaning in my inbox (although filters help a lot) and 200 or so e-mails marked urgent reply needed. That’s a whole days work at least, so I’ll try and trim it down to 50 e-mails a day, and also take some extra time to get rid of the ones where a short reply is enough. Marking you e-mail with labels to help you prioritize is a good way to relieve you of some stress. Labels like urgent reply needed, research first and in due time will help a lot if you like me receive a lot of mail. I also label my e-mail after what project they correspond to. That will help me to find all the urgent reply needed e-mails that belongs to a certain design gig. Unfortunately I’ve been sloppy with my labeling so I have my work cut out for me… More

Three services really suck the juice out of my efficiency at work. I probably should turn them off, or perhaps really dictate the usage time, but since I work online I tend to need them every now and then. More