Posted by Paolo
Thu, 13 Sep 2007 03:16:00 GMT
Well, not a great post today but I wanted to report a great video I discovered trough www.presentationzen.com. I hearthly share its content so… go on!
I have a bad relationship with emails. It’s not that I don’t like them but I think that checking the inbox too often is a compulsive action, not a necessity.
I hate those email clients which notify me when a new mail arrives. It’s distracting… it’s totally unproductive… I mean, the power of emails is that you can receive them when you’re offline or busy and you can read them when you want to. I said WHEN YOU WANT TO.
Whenever I find myself hitting F5 on Gmail I feel like a dog waiting for a cookie. And even when people are not compulsively checking their inboxes… they’re probably scanning their past messages in order to organize their days.
Scanning messages over and over again. Not a good practice if you want to get things done.
Are email clients becoming our new to-do managers? Should we spend so much time on our email inbox? Should our lives be email driven?
On this subject Merlin Mann gave us a great presentation inlined here:
Posted by Paolo
Mon, 07 May 2007 18:49:00 GMT
I’m kind of getting into GTD during this period, but I find myself very lazy at organizing my stuff. I find it pretty difficult to stick with a specific tool for managing my todo list. Basically I don’t want to use yet another tool, and I feel I would only need a quick and dirty solution to track my todo items and my very next actions.
After trying a bunch of tools I came out with this simple solution: I store todo items in my GMail account. Nothing new or very smart, but it works pretty well. Let’s see how to do it:
- create a new contact named todo whose email is your_account_name+todo@gmail.com (eg:
paolo.dona+todo@gmail.com)
- create a label todo
- create a filter that matches to:(your_account_name+todo@gmail.com) and do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “todo”.
Once you’ve completed these little steps, you can start using your brand new todo-list manager. Oh well, I haven’t told you how to use it yet… so:
How to add a todo item?
Send an email to your todo contact (It’s just yourself!) and it will be automatically archived, this way it doesn’t clutter your inbox.
How to see your pending items?
Click on your todo label inside the left Labels box.
How to mark a todo item as finished?
Delete it. (YOU said it’s finished :-P)
How to mark a todo item as a “next action”?
Star it.
How to see you next actions?
Run this search: label:todo is:starred. Actually I’m using the saved searches greasemonkey script to save this query and have it available as a next actions link just under my Labels box.
Conclusions
This approach is very simple but I see a few key benefits in it:
- Gmail is always open in my browser, I don’t need to keep another window or tab open just to see my todos.
- I can add filters that automatically populate my todo list. For example my Google Calendar reminders get labelled as todo so I can see them in my todo list. The same happens with Basecamp or Highrise todo item/task notifications.
- You can play with labels and easily let todo items belong to projects, locations etc (GTD style).
- You can reply to your todo items to add comments or further details to the activity they refer to.
Feel free to share your ideas on this.
Socialize it: 
Posted in Tips & Tricks | Tags gmail, GTD, productivity, todo | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Fri, 09 Jun 2006 03:19:00 GMT
Being a promising startup, we’re facing the problem of having office space.
Here in Italy most companies won’t trust startups that do not have an office.
It’s just matter of culture. They just think how good can they be if they cannot even afford a lousy apartment?.
That’s not the point. Or, well, it is the point but you should face it from another point of view.
We’re three people, used to work like animals.
We’ve been working together for many months and each one of us has set up a pretty confortable desk and work-space in his own house.
We’ve got high quality broadband connectivity at home that let us work during the night (how long will we keep having a daily job?).
We spent so many hours chatting and conferencing we actually don’t see why we should spend money to have an office. We can already be highly productive working this way.
I should point out a few other things that are pushing us in this direction…
- We do usually get together for lunch or dinner, so we can discuss face-to-face
- We make heavy use of web collaboration tools, not all people feel comfortable with them
- We’re not currently hiring
- Our applications are hosted so we do not need to take care of our own hardware or other physical stuff
- We like the freedom of working or resting at any time (even if we always end up working way too much)
- We do not care about the typical Italian prejudice :-)
That said, we aren’t going to have an office at the moment.
Maybe someone else has already faced this dilemma in Italy. We’d be glad to hear advices from them!
C’mon! Let us know what you think!
I’m about to take a nap now… after all, it’s just a few steps away :-D
Socialize it:
Posted in The outer world, Web | Tags office, productivity, startup, web | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Wed, 31 May 2006 21:29:54 GMT
Here at SeeSaw we’re very interested in productivity and stress-management topics.
Maybe it’s just because we’re not geniuses, maybe it’s because we believe in sustainable productivity.
It’s nice to see someone proposed a 28 Hour Day instead of the so-old-economy 24 Hour one. And guess what? That’s not just for fun!
It seems that a free running sleep is easier to adapt to a 28h day than a 24 one.
Mmmm… I’ll dig on it and… zzzz …will let you know.
Socialize it:
Posted in The outer world | Tags productivity, sleep, stress | no comments | no trackbacks
