posted at 09:58:30
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Email

There's a lot of talk at the moment about Barack Obama having to ditch his Blackberry (read the full article "Say Goodbye to BlackBerry? If Obama Has to, Yes He Can" at the New York Times site) when he becomes President and I'm not sure what all the fuss is about.

Having recently sat down to dinner with someone who had "Blackberry Twitch" - you know the sort, the Blackberry's in their pocket and they're itching to look at it but know it'd be considered rude so they develop a nervous tick - and also been to dinner with someone who checked emails whilst they ate (excuse me?) surely it's better to have a focused, non-Blackberry twitching President? I mean, can you imagine him sitting in the Oval office talking to some official whilst browsing his emails? Me neither.

It's probably for the best when you consider that the current administration has potentially lost 5 million (yes, five million) emails - some of which may contain dodgy dealings of White House Staffers:

I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost," Perino told reporters.

The administration was already facing sharp questions about whether top presidential advisers including Karl Rove improperly used Republican National Committee e-mail that the White House ....

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Sep

17th
2008

Four Hour Work Week in the Real World? Dream on

posted at 15:43:04
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
GTD/Productivity

I've recently started reading the Four Hour Work Week* (hereafter 4HWW to stop me getting RSI) by Tim Ferris and, even though I'm only on page 97 I'm already a bit annoyed by this book.

In the chapter I'm currently on, Ferris talks about regaining time by only checking email and voicemail at designated times of the day such as 12pm and 4pm - and he stresses not to check email first thing in the morning. Doing so will save you x amount of time per day - but would this actually work in the Real World? I can't see how it could.

Now, I don't know if it's the type of job that I'm in that's leading me to the conclusion I've come to, or the fact that

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Sep

16th
2008

How not to use email at work: Sexist chap wants female skivvy. Er.. I mean flatmate

posted at 15:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Email

I've written before about the need to be careful about what you send in an email at work but the story that I've seen in several UK national newspapers over the past couple of days really takes the biscuit.

Paul Eley sent what sounds like a harmless email around his workplace asking for a new flatmate. Nothing wrong with that in itself - until you realise that he only sent it to female colleagues and that the content of the email was, shall we say, inappropriate at best:

Hi Everyone

I am looking for a new flatmate as my old one has now left. Could you pass this on to anyone you might think would be interested.

I don't need any rent from any potential flatmate, so it will be rent free. The only thing they would pay for is their own food.

I am looking for a girl flatmate between 18 years old and 26 years old. Preferably someone who is very tidy and reasonable nice to look at.

Instead of paying rent I would expect them to do the following.

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Sep

1st
2008

What your email response time says about you

posted at 09:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
GTD/Productivity

I read an article in The Daily Mail called "Email etiquette: What your response time reveals about your personality".

From the Article by Liz Hull:

It's usually considered polite when a friend or colleague replies to your email promptly.

But such a swift response may have a downside - it may mean the sender is stressed or has low self-esteem, according to research.

Now, I'm not sure about you, but when I get an email if I have the time available (and I'm at a computer obviously!) I reply straight away as:

It's polite
I hate the inevitable follow-up "did you get my email" conversion/phone call/email/post-it

But then maybe that's because the article goes on to say:

Women, in particular, felt more pressure to respond quickly to a new email than men, she said.

I think the most worrying point of the article is:

The research reveal....

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Aug

28th
2008

Move over Entourage, Here comes Apple Mail!

posted at 18:31:19
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Blogging

I've written before about my massive issues with Gmail and Entourage and today I finally gave up and decided to move to Apple Mail.

I had toyed with the idea of using Thunderbird again as I've managed to use that as a "Getting things done" tool quite successfully but I'm now playing with iGTD (more on this at a later date) to manage my tasks and iGTD integrates with Apple Mail so I thought I'd give that a go.

Why is swapping email clients never that easy?

My first problem was that I couldn't find a way of getting my contacts out of Entourage so I ended up manually copying them into Apple's address book. It was a pain but at least it meant that I could get rid of unused addresses (although I have since found something that says it can import addresses from an Outlook PST File - Look under the "Switching section).

I then set up my Gmail account - which seemed to go without a hitch (uh oh!) and the mails imported successfully using the IMAP settings I found. It was then I started fiddli....

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Jul

28th
2008

Coping with Email after a holiday

posted at 09:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
GTD/Productivity

Yes, it's that time of year again when we all jet off to sun ourselves and get away from the daiy grind for a precious few days.

I've recently gone back to work after a week off and getting back to the office is always a chore - especially when you have an inbox bursting with emails all begging for your attention. I've written before about how I manage to keep my inbox empty but it's always a bit of a nightmare on the return back to the office to see all of your hard work down the drain.

So, how do you cope with it? Here's a few simple tips to help you regain control of your inbox:

Tell people you're going away before you go - That way they know you're not going to be contactable so won't bother or try and chase up emails they sent even though you can't reply

Set up an out of office auto reply - Ask people to contact another member of staff with urgent enquiries. Also, if people realise you're away then they're less likely to email you again - bonus!

Ask your co-workers to keep an eye on your email - You can set a shared account or just allow them access to your machine (depending on your company's security policy). Ask them to sort out anything that can b....

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Jul

1st
2008

What have you done to Gmail, Google??

posted at 09:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Rants

Updated: See the end of the post for the apparent solution

I've written before that I'm having issues with using Gmail over IMAP with Entourage and judging from the comments I'm not the only one (can't link to the commentor as they didn't leave a URL!) and now I'm having issues with the regular GMail web interface as well.

Originally I thought it was because of a dodgy extension I was running that was causing GMail to hang every time I clicked on a label but as it's happened on 4 different machines now I don't think an extension is the issue. I'm getting really fed up of having to force quit and restart Firefox every time I initially log in and click on something.

Seeing as I don't use the keyboard shortcuts, when I noticed they'd added a "basic html" version I though "Great, I'll use that one" but, guess what happens. Yes, GMail crashes FireFox when I click the link. Not only that, when I do get the basic html version up, Google never remembers that's my preference so I have to go through the same rigmarole every time I fire up the website.

I've written before about how I like to

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