TDH: Portfolio » e-mail

E-mail Issues Resolved

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:45:06 +0000

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.

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Handling The E-Mail Flood

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:57:59 +0000

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?

No, I don’t think so. First of all, I find auto responders totally annoying myself. This is 2008, not Modem Era, most e-mails reach their destination these days. Sure, they can get caught in spam filters and such, but chances are your server’ll send the auto reply anyway, so that wouldn’t help much, now would it?

Second, so just because I got your e-mail I’ll get around to answering it? That’s not for certain at all, it is even possible that I’ll ignore it, archive it away after I’ve taken in the information, and that’s that. Why would I do that? Well, I get lots of press releases for starters, and I most certainly won’t answer all of those, and then there’s the “would you check my blog out” flood as well. I do answer those, usually, but some requests are rude, and unless I’m inclined to tell the sender so, I’ll not follow that up.

So what is the solution to my e-mail problem? Well, first of all the sender needs to learn some patience, but I will also have to get better letting people I do intend to send a reply to know that I haven’t forgotten about them. That’s something I can work on.

My system for handling e-mail will, incidentally, be outlined on the upcoming blog Feeling Productive.

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Three Things To Do While Waiting At Work

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:55:12 +0000

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.

Flip through my notebook. I’ve got a bunch of ideas jotted down there, it’s always a good thing to remind yourself of your own brilliance, or just refreshen the memory, whatever.
Update my todo list. Moving stuff around for a better workday is always a good thing. And crossing things out is so sweet, although I rarely forget to do that…
Answer e-mails. I get a bunch, and some of them are labeled Quickie. That means it’ll take less than 2 minutes to answer them, so I’ll do that.

Naturally, there’s a bunch of things you can do to fill the void while waiting, but these are things I did just now. That, and writing this blog post. Now, however, the wait is over so it’s back to work!

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The fine art of catching up

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:00:04 +0000

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…

The other thing I always need to catch up on is my reading. I write about a lot of things professionally so I can’t afford not staying up to date in various topics. For my day to day reading I use RSS feeds, like most bloggers I guess, but when the feedreader says 100+ unread posts and you know it’s really more like 1000+ you have to prioritize. Feeds are great for staying in the loop, but when you’re outside of it, go visit the sites! I’m choosing a few at a time and scan through their posts, following as few links as possible since I don’t really have time to continues reading. Opening in tabs in Firefox really helps here. I used to powersurf with several browsers before, with their own set of tabs per topic so to speak, but I find that this increases the risk of crashes and since you don’t want to backtrack more than necessary this method isn’t recommended.

Finally, I probably need to talk to a lot of people. Short stuff can be sorted out via e-mail or IM, but if I fire up Adium at this point I won’t be getting any reading or e-mailing done, so it’s Skype or nothing. Sometimes I even revert to the old school telephone, although I still haven’t got one installed here…

All in all, catching up online is stressful, time consuming and sometimes tedious. Still, it needs to be done so do try to make it as easy on yourself as possible when presented with the situation. Like I do.

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Handling the big time thieves in your work

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 10:22:20 +0000

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.

Instant messaging, IM for short is time thief #1. Google Talk is always up, as is Skype and Live Messenger (that’s MSN). On the one hand I need these services to conduct my work, dish out assignments and get in touch with people in general. Skype is even my premiere choice for phone services, both in and out of the office. Then again it tends to be a bit to much casual chit-chatting, and suddenly I’ve lost two hours worth of work. This is a tough one.

Thief #2 is Bloglines, but I’m getting better here. I subscribe to a whole lot of RSS feeds, and Bloglines collects them. It’s very easy to check in and see who has updated and what it is, which can lead to surfing and reading stuff I should save for later, interrupting work. Yes, it’s good for me knowing stuff gives me stuff to write about, but I really should cut down on checking Bloglines to two or three times a day. I’m almost there.

Finally, there’s e-mail. Ah, wonderful e-mail! I really hate a cluttered inbox but it always ends up that way anyway. Granted, I get a lot of e-mail, but I have organization in place and should set aside 15 minutes four times a day to make sure I don’t fall behind. That would also stop me from “just checking my inbox” which I do way to frequently and it sure interrupts my workflow.

Discipline is the key to handling the modern workplace’ many communication methods. Ironically, it’s these new technologies that I think drags down our efficiency the most. They are time thieves and you really should have a solid plan on how not to be robbed.