Category Archives: Productivity

If vs. Which

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Michael Schechter • 0 Comments

I received the following comment on ADN from Tully Hansen regarding my post on Inboxes:

Thinking about this very topic yesterday, I’m not sure there’s not an important distinction between the boxes you control completely and those that fill up without any intervention on your part.

It’s a fair callout and for many, it may hold true. If you don’t struggle to get things done, there may be no need to distinguish between the places where you consider and do your work. For me, it’s an important distinction, here’s why…

The Inbox

Whenever you’re dealing with an inbox, I have to ask if this is something I should do. Not should I do this right now, but should I do it at all? It’s a place where anyone can put work for consideration. My email inbox is often filled with things I have no intention or desire to do. The pile in the corner of my desk is a place for people to put things that they’d like me to look over. My RSS reader is full of things that I don’t want to read. My mailbox is a place where I’m never short of amazed by who seems to have somehow gotten ahold of my address. 

An inbox always forces you to question if you should do something. It’s a place to consider and eliminate your work.

The Action Box

When I go into an action box, there’s no if about it. This was something I wanted to read or want to do. The only question I need to ask is which should go first. Yes, sometimes priorities (or even interests) change and something drops off the list, but that’s what a weekly review is for. When I go into OmniFocus, there are only tasks that I need/want to do, when I open Instapaper there are only things I want to read. When I process the pile of papers on my end table at home, there’s only mail that requires a response.

An action box lets you focus on which you should do first. It’s a place to organize and complete your work. 

Inbox vs. Action Box

This distinction between “if” I should do something and “which” thing I should do is the reason I take the time to move anything that takes longer than a few minutes from an inbox to an action box. Trying to handle both at the same time is often too much for my meager mind. It lets me ask the right questions in the right places. It lets me focus on my intentions in an inbox and my priorities in an action box. It creates sacred places for putting the things that matter most, places that only I control and only I can screw up.

As the number of inboxes and the volume of crap in each inbox continues to increase, it has become difficult for me to do any kind of meaningful work there. This is the reason why I embraced the idea of creating a distinction between the two. This may do nothing for you, it may add an additional layer of work, but if if you find that there’s a conflict between your intentions and your priorities, you may find separating one from the other to be a useful tactic.

What do you think? Is there a benefit to this kind of a distinction or is it just moving work around rather than getting work done?

Filed Under: Productivity

Avoiding Inbox Overload

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Michael Schechter • 3 Comments

A conventional aim of productivity is to get you out of the habit of spending time in your email inbox. I’ve always been a fan of this philosophy. It went a long way toward getting me to take a more active and intentional approach to my work. Rather than living my life deciding what to do, I spend more of it doing what I’ve decided.

Lately my concern is moving away from the time spent in any one inbox and toward the overall number of inboxes we allow into our lives.

We tend to take the concept of an inbox literally. We have our email accounts and likely a physical space or two in our homes and at our jobs. But this only scratches the surface of our inboxes which, in my mind, have grown to include anywhere we need to visit regularly to consider or act on potential tasks. Using this definition, you can start to see how our inboxes are growing exponentially.

Each social network is an inbox, especially those with an actual inbox like Facebook. Our text and instant messages are an inbox. Our RSS reader is an inbox. Instapaper is an inbox. Our e-reader of choice is, you guessed it, an inbox. Our task managers even have an inbox. Even apps like Marco Arment’s The Magazine are effectively inboxes.

We’re even starting to see apps like Cloze that even aim to collect our inboxes. This is certainly a solution, but I think there just might be a better one…

Have Less Inboxes

We’ve grown cavalier about what we sign up for, this is especially true in the age of free and affordable services and applications. We’re so excited by new technologies and great sources of content that we take on far too many. We obsess about the message count in our email inbox, but we ignore the fact that our actual inbox count grows daily. This has to stop. When we get ready to pull the trigger on a new service or a new publication we have to recognize that we either have to check it regularly or feel guilty for not. We have to be mindful that we are often allowing yet another inbox into our lives.

Make Action Boxes

Much as Instapaper can be an inbox, if used correctly it can be a place of action. By being selective about what goes in, you can keep things to a minimum. It becomes less a place to consider and more what it’s meant to be: a better place to read. The same is true for your task list. I almost never use the inbox in OmniFocus. When creating tasks, I assign a project (even if it’s just adding it to a single action list), a context and usually a start date. This takes a little bit longer, but eliminates the need to have to check yet another inbox.

As you start to take a realistic look at the number of inboxes that you’ve allowed in your life, see which ones you can eliminate. When looking at what’s left, think of what you can do to turn an inbox to an action box. By separating the places where you consider doing work from the places you do it, you avoid distraction and find yourself better situated to get more done.

Inbox Zero or Zero Inboxes

Okay, no inboxes is an unrealistic idea. But a big misconception of Inbox Zero (or at least a big misconception of those who love to use the hashtag #inboxzero) has always been that emphasis of having no emails vs. spending way less time on email. The goal of inbox zero has always been to spend more of your time doing meaningful work and same should hold true for the actual number if inboxes we allow into our lives. Get rid of what you can, make better use of what remains, but don’t obsess. Spend less time dealing with all of your various inboxes and you’ll find you have far more time for the things that really matter most.

Have you become careless with your inboxes? If so, what do you plan to do about it?

Filed Under: Productivity

The Best Way To Learn Markdown

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Michael Schechter • 0 Comments

David Sparks has launched the latest MacSparky Field Guide. This time he is tackling the subject of Markdown along with Eddie Smith of Practically Efficient.

If you write for the web, you should learn to write in Markdown. It makes it easy to format your work to be converted to HTML for posting to the web. It also allows you to save your files as plain text, ensuring that they are essentially future proof. If you plan to learn Markdown, this is the way to do it.

Markdown itself is very easy to learn and use, yet it isn’t intuitive to decide how best to integrate it into your writing workflows. In this guide David and Eddie show you many of the possibilities that come from using Markdown. They also provide enough of a point of view that you won’t get lost in the possibilities.

The book itself is a blend of text, audio and video. It will help you get your head around the basics, gives you glance at some of the geeky goodness you can accomplish and tells you how some of the smartest people I know are using it to accomplish their work.

As with Paperless and 60 Tips (the two previous books in the series) Markdown is well written, easy to understand and the videos are well done. This time around David also added audio interviews to the mix. While they test the limitations of the iBooks format (I’d occasionally accidentally swipe or rotate the screen, both of which stop the audio. The screen would also time out during longer conversations) the audio interviews with Merlin Mann, Fletcher Penney, Brett Terpstra, Federico Vittici and Gabe Weatherhead are worth the cost of admission alone. As I listened, I found myself wondering if we will see audiobooks under the title MacSparky Field Interviews in the future (this is purely wishful thinking).

Bottom line, if you haven’t taken the time to learn Markdown or aren’t entirely comfortable with it yet, do yourself a favor and buy this book.

Note: David was kind enough to send me an advanced copy. I also used an affiliate link, because I’m shameless. That said, this really is a great book. It’s one that I will be gifting out regularly to anyone I know still using Microsoft Word.

Filed Under: Productivity

The Three Things #24

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Michael Schechter • 0 Comments

The Three Things, is a weekly series where Gini Dietrich from Spin Sucks, Howie Goldfarb and I share the one thing that captured our attention and that we believe to be worthy of yours.

OmniFocus Setup: Do Stuff! — MacSparky

Michael on Productivity: David Sparks changed the way I work. For the longest time, I was overwhelmed by my task list. There was just far too much on it and no effective way to find what mattered. I’d use due dates to highlight what was important, but this only led to everything having a due date (usually when they’re not actually due) and nothing being important. Over time, I learned a few tricks and tactics for finding the right actions, but this was always a struggle, there was always far too much to consider. Then David came along and started evangelizing start dates. This approach hides what you don’t need to think about, shows you what you do and let’s you save due dates for the few times there actually is one.

You’ll often hear geeks, especially OmniFocus geeks such as myself, suggesting a start date centered approach, in this video, David shows you how it’s done.

The Harlem Shake: What’s in a Meme?

Howie on Memes Gone Wild: I find this fascinating. Doing work for a client in the pool industry, it seems many college swim teams have done Harlem Shake videos. The University Minnesota did theirs in speedos in the snow. Ball State did theirs underwater ending with swimmers lunging on bikes into the water. This is a big issue with big media today. People such as Gunther Sonnenfeld evangelize the freedom of content to be changed, retold, and shared as a good thing. But many brands are afraid of their intellectual property going off message even at the cost of more revenues and fans. So glad the owner of that famous Hitler video hasn’t felt the same. Oh and this is a boon for Harlem even if they don’t think so. When was the last time the country went nuts of something with the word Harlem in it?

Mayer Culpa

Gini on Culture: Howie and I are reading the same magazine this week! I know most of you are tired of hearing about Marissa Mayer’s mandate that all Yahoos show up for work in an office, beginning in June. But what I found most interesting about this The Economist story is not that, but the stats from Cisco and J.C. Penney for and against having people work remotely. Did you know a third of Penney employees spend their time watching YouTube videos instead of working? And they’re all in the “office.” It goes to show this isn’t about where you work, but about HR, operations, and your culture.

Be sure to subscribe for free by Email or RSS to automatically receive future editions of The Three Things series and more from A Better Mess.

Filed Under: Productivity

A Wish For Mailbox and Dropbox

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Michael Schechter • 0 Comments

While on the subject of fantasy apps, Dropbox acquired iPhone email startup Mailbox today. At the moment, all this seems to ensure is that Mailbox will continue to have the resources and talent it needs to continue creating a world class email application.

While I’m tempted to rattle off my wish list for Mailbox, I find myself thinking bigger.

Take the storage capabilities of Dropbox and add in the fact that Mailbox already needs to pull your emails onto their servers. Then combine that with real talent and resources. While you’ll certainly get a better email application, this could also lead to a better email service.

What Mailbox is able to accomplish using the labels in Gmail is impressive, but limiting. A lot more becomes possible when you’re actually building a better inbox, rather than a better app on top of it. While it’s unlikely that this will come to be, it’s enjoyable to imagine what could emerge if both teams decided to push the limits and blend the benefits of their services. We just might find ourselves with a real alternative to Gmail…

Once again, it’s fun to dream.

Check out our Mike on Mics interview with Orchestra CEO Gentry Underwood from earlier in the year to learn more about Mailbox and their future plans for the app. Congrats to Gentry and the team at Orchestra, this acquisition is well deserved.

Filed Under: Productivity

My Fantasy List App

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Michael Schechter • 5 Comments

During this week’s Mikes on Mics with Greg Pierce of Agile Tortoise, my co-host Mike Vardy alluded to my fantasy wish list for a list app. While I’m a long-time Listary user, I’ve found most of the options I’ve tried to be lacking in one way or another. When it comes to list apps, I’m yet to find one that feels like a solution rather than a well done app with great features. Each app has its strengths and excels in the areas that they focus, but I’m yet to find one robust list app that offers easy creation of longer lists (groceries, books, items from the hardware store, etc), that are easy to reorder while taking as much advantage as possible of location. I haven’t tried everything, but I’ve given Reminders, Clear, Listary, Checkmark, Due and OmniFocus a pretty fair shake. At the end of the day, I always return to Listary because so much of what I receive comes as text messages and they make it easy to parse lines of text into individual tasks. Rather than having to convince my wife to use an app (best of luck to me), I just needed to convince her to hit return between all of the things she wants me to bring home from the store.

My Fantasy App

Ideally, you can create lists one item at a time or in bulk. These could be easily reordered and it should be simple to append items to the list or drop an item in between two others. It would also be great if you could grant shared access to specific lists with others using the app (this way I could share some lists with my wife, some with coworkers and keep a few running lists for myself). 

It would also be great if a location could be tied to the list (e.g. Groceries would tie to my local market). However, and this is something I think is missing, it would also be useful if when setting up either lists or locations that you could tie it to a type of store (in the case of groceries, that would be supermarkets). This way if you’re ever somewhere outside of your normal locations and have time to kill, you could find the types of categories that have errands (bookstores, grocery stores, hardware stores, drugstores, etc.). If you’re away from your local store, but have time to go shopping for groceries, it would use maps to find nearby alternatives. 

I know this is a tall order, but I did say fantasy. At the moment all of the apps have their own strengths: Listary excels at sharing and creating; Clear focuses on design and gestures; Checkmark prioritizes ease and location; Due kills it with the creation of time-based reminders, deferring reminders and persistent reminders (why every app doesn’t offer this, I’ll never know); OmniFocus has the clipper and Quick Entry on the Mac, as well as nested contexts and the built-in Reminders app that works so well with Siri. But no one has tied enough of these features together into an app that actually solves this problem (although they’d all likely use Siri if they could). Creating a robust solution is expensive, so I imagine that, for the moment, we will continue to see a more focused approach that offers apps with one or two killer features. We can certainly make due with what we have (Listary and Due still prove useful), but I’m hopeful that someone eventually comes into the space with a true solution for this problem.

Bonus Listening

If you’re at all interested in list applications, you should also listen to this MPU with Merlin Mann. He shares how he uses the location features in OmniFocus to have the ultimate errand running infrastructure. His approach wasn’t a fit for me, but he shares some compelling ideas interesting ideas. Much as I was tempted to try his approach, these aren’t kinds of lists I want to keep in OmniFocus. That said, it really got me thinking about the potential of OmniList… If the OmniGroup ever considered taking what they’ve created with OmniFocus and refining it into a list making app, it would be a happy day. A boy can dream, right?

Filed Under: Productivity

Attempting Email Templates in iOS

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Michael Schechter • 6 Comments

About four years ago, I decided to take on our customer service emails at my job. In addition to getting a better sense of our customers’ needs, I wanted to dive into service in order to refine our process. The endeavor would have been impossible if not for TextExpander and its ability to create long-form emails with just a few keystrokes. Over the years, the process has evolved to the point where, in many cases, all I need to do is type four keystrokes and enter in two pieces of information to create a long form email. We now have one TextExpander snippet that accommodates over 50% of the messages we receive.

While TextExpander works in many iOS applications, it doesn’t work with Apple’s Mail.app or popular email applications like Mailbox. Even if it did, it’s unlikely that there would be a way to take advantage of the prompts that make this workflow so effective. Over time, the software limitations of iOS caused my iPhone and iPad to serve as triage devices rather than a true solution for email. I’ll delete and defer messages and answer personal ones, but all of those service emails need to wait until I’m sitting in front of my Mac.

Attempting to Improve My iOS Email Workflow

With the release of the latest update to Launch Center Pro, I set aside some time to see how I could best emulate my customer service workflow. I decided I’d try out the built in iOS Shortcuts, TextExpander touch and Launch Center Pro to see which offered the best answer. Long story short, I found a better bad way. Now for the long story …

My Mac Workflow

As I mentioned, when on my Mac, I use TextExpander to respond to these emails. With a single snippet, I’m prompted to fill in the customer’s name and am provided with a field that allows me to enter specific details about their request. As a significant number of these requests are for the exact same thing, I use TextExpander’s ability to set a default prompt with our most common response. In many cases, I can enter the customer’s name, hit enter and send the message. In others, I enter the name, overwrite the default prompt, hit enter and then send the message. Either way, the process takes about ten to twenty seconds. It gives our customers everything they need and allows us to focus our limited resources on what matters most, offering better service on our products.

Adapting This for iOS

I’ve tried to make this work in the past and there’s no way to emulate the approach described above in iOS. Ideally, I like to reply to a customer email using a template that allows me to add a customer name and one custom section of text, preferably with the ability to set default text that can be easily overwritten to accommodate a range of requests.

Limitations in Mail.app, iOS keyboard shortcuts, Launch Center Pro and TextExpander touch have led me to wait until I’m in front of a Mac to reply to these messages. This slows down response times, so when the latest version of Launch Center Pro was released, I decided to take another shot at creating something a little closer to my ideal workflow.

iOS Keyboard Shortcuts

It has been a while since I gave the built-in option a look. Since I would be able to use this in any application, it seemed the logical starting point. As there is no way to build prompts, I’d have to manually go to where the name belongs. I would also need to find, select and delete my default prompt in the cases where it needed changing (or create a few variations for common requests). This seemed a worthwhile compromise, but unfortunately upon copying and pasting my email template into a new shortcut, I found that the built in keyboard shortcuts do not maintain line breaks. When testing it out, multiple paragraphs were merged into a single block of text. In other words, iOS keyboard shortcuts was a dead end.

Once I had eliminated the built-in option, I had to see if there was a workflow that would offer a more effective way to create these messages, even if it meant using multiple applications.

TextExpander Touch

Next on the list was TextExpander touch. I wanted to see if I could use the same application where I store the customer service email templates. TextExpander touch makes it easy to copy a snippet to the clipboard, but it doesn’t let you fill in the prompts. I could paste the text into an email, but then I’d have to delete the prompts or create multiple versions of my snippets without the prompts. Considering I’d have to:

  • Start replying to the email
  • Jump into the TextExpander touch app
  • Find and copy the correct snippet
  • Jump back into email
  • Paste the text
  • Add in the person’s name

This ended up not being a viable solution. I’d still be better off waiting until I was back at my Mac.

Launch Center Pro

After eliminating iOS keyboard shortcuts and TextExpander, I turned my sights to Launch Center Pro and their latest update, version 1.1. The new release enhanced TextExpander support and I wanted to see what was possible. At first I just created an action that added my customer service snippet to the clipboard. Unfortunately this did not take advantage of the prompts within the snippet. It functioned much the same way as the copy option in TextExpander touch.

Our email blasts essentially take the following form:

Hi (Customer Name),

This is the intro to our service email. We can certainly help you with (your specific request). Here’s everything you’ll need to know.

And so on…

Best Regards,

Email Signature

To achieve this I created an action that replaced the customer name and details of their specific requests with prompts. This was meant to serve in place of my TextExpander snippet. After triggering the action and filling in the prompts, the completed text would be added to the clipboard. I managed to make this work, but there were shortcomings.

The text field in Launch Center Pro is limited. There’s no room to edit, scrolling through is a pain and once you save, the format of your text changes. In other words, editing and versioning (duplicating an action and making minor changes) is a pain. This makes Launch Center Pro suitable for short bursts of text, but painful for multiple paragraphs. This limitation makes editing and versioning a headache, but when all was said and done, I had an action that allowed me to:

  • Start replying to a message
  • Jump into Launch Center Pro
  • Trigger my action
  • Fill in my two prompts (although there’s no way to set a default and the prompt auto-capitalizes, which can be a pain if your prompt is mid-sentence as mine is)
  • Jump back into an email
  • Paste in the text and send it off.

This was good, but not great.

Launch Center Pro and TextExpander

Before putting this little project aside, I decided to see if the new TextExpander integration in Launch Center Pro 1.1 could make things even easier. To overcome the limited text field in Launch Center Pro I created two new snippets using the text from our customer service emails. This allows me to use TextExpander’s larger text fields rather to make any necessary edits. From there, I used Launch Center Pro to tie everything together with the following action:

Hi [Prompt],[Prompt]

This allowed me to create actions that were far easier to edit. It also made it easier to create multiple actions in Launch Center Pro to simplify things further. While I still use the prompt above for unique requests, I was able to create a group of actions that replaces the second prompt with all of our most frequently asked questions.

In most cases I:

  • Start replying to an email
  • Jump into Launch Center Pro
  • Trigger the relevant action from my group
  • Fill in the customer’s name (and the additional prompt when necessary)
  • Go back to the email
  • Paste in the message and send it off.

It’s not my ideal solution, but it lets me do a bit more of the heavy lifting on my phone when needed.

Bottom line, the latest integration between Launch Center Pro and TextExpander offers slightly more efficient ways to create email templates in iOS, but it’s yet another case where the simplicity of iOS adds complexity to my work.

Filed Under: Productivity