• 26th August 2008

  • Managing your email

  • For the last ten years or so the growth of email has been exponential . Email itself has actually been in existence for about 40 years but didn’t really grow in popularity until the arrival of the world wide web in 1990.

    For many older users such as this author it used to be a cumbersome command line driven affair requiring you to have a magic combination of commands, strings of characters and a healthy dose of good luck (Compuserve anyone?!). With the explosive takeup of the World Wide Web, a more user friendly method of sending messages and documents was needed and as such, the first embryonic email clients were born. These included the frankly awful Pegasus mail and a whole host of generic mail clients by such leviathans as AOL (remember them?) and the aforementioned Compuserve. If one were to look back at these mail clients now they would seem unusable in comparison to the modern raft of clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Evolution etc. – they were simply a conduit for you to download your messages from your (normally dialup) internet connection and send generally unfunny jokes to your ever burgeoning address book of contacts. As such, it was considered more to be something that home users would be able to take advantage of rather than businesses.

    In time however, the ‘big boys’ of the software world cottoned on to the fact that email was going to be the next big thing – in January 1995 Microsoft released Exchange Server Beta 1 – the evolution of this is well documented elsewhere but let’s just say it is now very popular indeed. Similarly Lotus, Novell and a glut of others wrote and published their own mail server software. This brought email into the corporate mainstream. Fast forward a few years and it is now de facto that every employee, in every company has an email address......which is where this document comes in. Email is cheap and easy to use – some would say its ease of use is what causes the information overload that I will be discussing in a moment – no longer do people have to write a letter, put it in an envelope, buy a stamp and wander to the postbox. You can now get a message to someone from the comfort of your own desk and in a fraction of the time the ‘old school’ way would take you. The result of this is information overload – think, how many emails do you get a day? Now of these x emails, how many are actually really important ? How many (spam notwithstanding) were vital to the smooth running of your day? Here are some tips to tame the beast that is email.

    1. CHECK YOUR EMAIL LESS FREQUENTLY

    This initially will sound counter-productive and even counter intuitive but bear with me! If you are in the habit of sitting, poised like a panther waiting for the envelope icon that signals the arrival of a new email in your inbox or if your hands have now morphed to be Blackberry shaped then STOP! Wait a second and let’s think about this. Of all the time you have in an average day, the vast majority of this is going to be taken up by you checking, reading and probably feeling the need to reply to all emails – maybe it’s a pseudo politeness thing. This is a big waste of time – think about it. What else could you be doing that is a lot more productive than stopping every time you see a new email and making sure that you deal with it there and then? Have you ever received an email that if you did not respond to it immediately something bad happened? My guess is not many of you can honestly be nodding right now. If you are, get a new job! A far better approach to managing email and a method that normally results in better replies and thus better trains of communication is to allocate certain times during the day where you ‘do your email’. You can approach this in whatever you want – some folks like to grab a cuppa and then sit back and go through emails and look out for important ones and then leave less important ones for later. Others like to methodically go through every unanswered one and do something with it – it’s personal choice here. A good middle ground is to try and keep your inbox as clean as possible. If there are mails in there that you want to keep, make a folder called ‘Old’ or ‘Archive’ etc. And drag the mails in there. Your inbox should only reflect that which is ‘current’ – not a historic reflection of your life and how many times you got an invite to go The Dog and Duck on a Thursday night two years ago. Think about it, when you get letters at home you open them and decide what you are going to do with them. Junk mail goes in the recycling bin, never to be seen again. Bills get replied to (occasionally....) in order of importance and other letters you respond to at your leisure. Now make a comparison with your email inbox. Why are you keeping the message from Aunt Gertrude that she sent two birthdays ago? If it was on paper you wouldn’t keep it. Get rid of it! It’s clutter. Junk mail? Can it – don’t keep it. Take a look at your inbox now and apply this analogy to it.

    2. KEEP YOUR EMAILS BRIEF

    There have been a myriad of studies into the human capability to retain interest in something that you are reading so I am not going to pretend to know more than the eminent folk who perform these ‘vital’ studies for us. To simplify this concept put it like this – if someone sends you an email and you click on it to open it and it scrolls over more than one page, most people are filled with a sense of gloom – do I really have to read this? The result is that people skim read the subject matter and more often than not miss the key information buried deep in paragraph 12. If this much information is really needed then pick that small black thing up on your desk, dial the requisite digits and call the person that you would have emailed the tome to. Rule of thumb here – if there’s a lot of information that you need to convey do not put it in the body of an email – put it as an attached document. In the email itself briefly describe what is in the attachment – that way your target market can see if it is in their best interests to read thoroughly the information or if it is ‘someone else’s bag’ . See? I just saved you some time without really doing anything.

    3. ANSWER YOUR EMAILS AS YOU ARE READING THEM

    Now some of you will quite rightly point out that this technique overlaps with my first suggestion (for it was that good a suggestion) and you would be correct. What I mean by answering emails as you read them is this – if during your allocated email time during the day you have twenty emails that are going to need replying to, do as many as you can right away. It’s all too easy to read an email and think ‘Ooh – I must remember to reply to that one’ and then go off and do something far more interesting instead. Some of you, unlike me may well have a great memory and actually will remember to reply to said emails which is a start. However what you will do is waste your time by having to re-read the email so that you correctly form your response and cover all the points raised in the initial mail. Remember what I said earlier about wasting your time? This is a big time hog. Do it once and it is done – don’t revisit something that you could have done the first time. Obviously this isn’t always possible if for example you are awaiting a third party to contact you etc. But try to do as much of this as you can.

    4. BE FRIENDLY WITH YOUR REPLIES!

    This may seem obvious and you may be indignantly muttering to yourself that you are always ‘nice’ in your email composition. Let me shatter that illusion - you aren’t (unless of course this gets as far as the Dalai Lama – there’s always an exception to every rule and at a guess he would be it). If somebody has taken the time to be courteous and friendly to you then reciprocate. If you receive an email that is an informative reply to a question you have proposed and that someone has taken a lot of time to compose for you, a tacit reply of ‘Thanks’ is not really going to engender them to do this again for you. As I said earlier, emails are cheap – you don’t pay by the word so what’ wrong with ‘Thanks very much for your reply – it will really help me.’ ? Takes a few seconds longer but makes a whole world of difference whether you realise this or not.

    5. ORGANISE YOUR EMAILS INTO FOLDERS

    Another overlap from a previous suggestion some might say. Pretty much every email client will let you create subfolders from your inbox. Ditto they will let you create rules such that emails from your friends can then be redirected into your newly created ‘Friends’ subfolder – guess what this does? If you are the twitchy email user referenced in point one you will know that the envelope icon refers to an email in your ‘Friends’ folder – it’s thus not earth shattering that you jump on it and reply the living hell out of it. If it was then let’s be honest, your mate would have called you or sent you a text message. You can do this to the nth degree or as little as you want. I personally have quite a few subfolders and rules setup such that I know which mails coming in are important enough for me to check and reply to. I have a folder called ‘Clients’ – guess what mail goes in there? I also have another one called ‘Friends’. Now picture the scene – I am doing my first run through of email during the day and I see an email in my Friends folder and one in my Clients folder – which one do you think I am going to check and act upon first?

    Another use for creating folders is to deal with the emails that you were not able to respond to immediately. Make a folder called URGENT – if something is (you’ve guessed it) important, drag it in here so it is marked for your attention. When you have dealt with it, apply all of the other rules (ie do you need to keep it/can it etc.).

    These are 5 simple rules that really will make your email experience more productive and stop you becoming obsessive about your inbox. Other simple ideas are to keep your mailbox (note this is different from Inbox – you’d be amazed how many people get mixed up here) nice and tidy – empty your deleted items every time you log out. They are deleted so you do not need to keep them – no really you don’t – if you have deleted them then they are gone, banished for ever. Archive your sent items. Similar to my keeping your inbox clean methodology, why do you need absolute instant access to a message you sent to your mate two years ago about what time you were meeting them for the football (the answer here is that you don’t.....just to allay any confusion).

    To summarise, the fewer emails that you retain in your live mailbox the better. If you fire up your client and it tells you that you have 20,000 items in your mailbox then by my reckoning that’s about 19 900 too many. I hope this article helps but feel free to email me (keep it brief) if you want to discuss further.

  • 10th August 2008

  • Windows 7 – to Upgrade or Not.

  • For those of you who have been hiding under an IT rock since Windows Vista lumbered on to the scene an incredibly painful 2 and a half years ago (no really pub quiz fans – it was the normally inauspicious date of January 30th 2007), or for those of you resolutely refusing to upgrade to Redmond’s ‘finest’ and sticking with what you know in Windows XP whilst smugly mocking your cutting edge buddies, it’s decision/leap of faith time pretty soon.

    Windows 7 (catchy – it’s the 7th iteration of Windows you see) will be upon you sooner than you could possibly imagine. Before you XP users start taking sharp intakes of breath and muttering ‘never again’ it has been widely reported by impartial sources all over the internet that 7 (as I now like to call her) is a quantum leap forward with regard to the Windows family of Operating Systems . Quantifying a quantum leap here is of course tricky but it does seem that the Redmond company we all love to pay has actually listened to customer feedback, good, bad or indifferent from users of Vista and has attempted to sort out the main complaints without sacrificing ease of use. This is commensurate with what they did in developing Windows XP as a follow on from the leviathan that was Windows 2000.

    So to help your decision here I have taken the unselfish step of installing Windows 7 on a virtual machine on my Vista riddled PC to play with. The version I have is the RC (Release Candidate – one step before ‘Gold Release’ ie the real deal) and I have to admit first impressions are relatively good. Certainly installation is very easy – unfortunately this will not inspire those who upgrade to Vista as this too was unerringly simple even for those users who seem to type with their knuckles – clicking Yes, Next and erm, Next was pretty much all you had to do – amazingly few people managed to get this wrong. 7 is pretty much the same here. Boot off the DVD and after a remarkably brief pause you get the new shiny ‘Welcome to Windows’ screen. Click Next again and it’s ‘what would you like to do today’ time. You can choose upgrade (if you are some sort of weirdo who doesn’t value your data – remember folks , this is to all extents and purposes a beta release so we are not gonna be doing this in a hurry) or perform a fresh install to dual boot. As mine was in a Virtual Machine we only had the option of a clean install. This however was where I hit the first stumbling block. As with its ugly sister, Vista it’s very hard drive hungry and this is where the limited scope for customising your install is an Achilles heel. I had allocated what in my youth was a huge amount of disk space, 10Gb for this install - 7 was not happy with this. She wanted a minimum (natch) of 15GB.......for just an Operating System. After several choice words that would never make it through a profanity checker I aborted the install and resized the Virtual Machine’s disk to a more ‘comfortable’ 20Gb, lest I wanted some applications on my new OS (don’t worry workers – the new fancy version of Solitaire is already in that 15Gb so no need for extra space here). So off we went again – this time 7 pretty much commented that she liked what I had done with the hard drive and was happy to continue. So was I, so I complicity hit ‘Next’ several times and sat back and sipped my extra hot double skinny latte. Amazingly I did not have time to finish said hot beverage before I was prompted to reboot. All of a fluster I hit OK to reboot her thinking that this was going well and I would soon be testing such high end apps as Notepad and Solitaire (3D now!). Not so – the first reboot is not the last. So, a few reboots later, a few user information bits and bobs and there I was – sitting in front of a shiny Windows 7 desktop. This is where my ‘glass half empty’ persona expected that something must be wrong as it had all gone way too smoothly. I was half right with this assumption. 7 may well have looked like it was up and raring to go – however user input (this means clicking stuff for the non technorati amongst us) was a touch sluggish – I say a touch sluggish it was more like ‘did I actually click that’. After a bit of research I found out that similar to Vista, the first time boot runs a full system index in the background and is thus obviously going to be less than spritely. So I continued with my now ‘not extra hot’ latte whilst it did its thing.

    So then – the acid test. After she had finished indexing (she told me this). I gave her another go and I have to admit, even though she was running in a Virtual Machine with a limited amount of memory (1.5Gb) she was remarkably chipper and spritely. The annoying as hell wait in Vista when you click on something only to return half an hour later for it to just about be opening up Notepad is now a distant and heinous memory. All good so far but what use is an OS on its own? Let’s get some popular apps on there I thought. So I fired up an installation of Office 2007 and let it install – guess what? The annoying user security popups that blighted Vista (you know the ones, are you sure you want to change the wallpaper on your desktop as it may kill a small kitten etc.) are GONE!!! Hallelujah! The install went fine and 7 even did the honourable thing of checking for updates for me. By this time we were out of latte but the smooth experience made this a none too traumatic moment. Off we went to use the machine in anger – to send emails, to install printers, to write documents, to pretend to know how to write a formula in Excel – common or garden stuff to me or you but hey, you have to test this stuff to do an honest review. And guess what? It was lightning fast. By this I mean it was as fast, if not faster than an XP machine (disclaimer – your mileage may vary here but hey, I was impressed). Incredible. An upgrade that actually made the machine run better it sounds like.

    Extended testing got me a few bugs and I did see the new lilac screen of death (LSOD) with the usual error message gibberish that means absolutely nothing even to the IT geeks here at FMI but let’s not forget that a) this was a beta install and b) it was running on a virtual machine on my ageing PC. 7 actually ran better than the host OS (Vista) on my PC. All good thus far for this user but caveat emptor – as with the information that everyone summarily ignored when upgrading to Vista I suspect that you really do need to check the Hardware Compatibility List for your PC before hitting the upgrade button.

    Windows 7 is out pretty soon – we have the full version here but I have not had chance to set a machine up with it to test ‘the real deal’ but check back soon and hopefully I will have had time to test it further.

    Over and out for now.