Massive Mileage

How to master a big, noisy inbox in Outlook

Here's the situation: at work I'm receiving hundreds of e-mails per day and while I need to be somewhat aware of most of them, only a few are truly relevant for me and require some sort of action.

Generally, I like to have my Inbox clean, with 50 or less e-mails in it, so I'm forced to constantly e-mail maintenance. In Outlook, this requires a fair amount of brainpower as I need to think about how to file an e-mail into the correct folder (that's why I love Gmail's folder-free archive system). This interrupts my workflow and adds to the stress level.

In the past I've been trying many ways of automate e-mail maintenance and here's what I ended up with:

• A filter moves all e-mails that are not send to me personally or coming from certain persons into other folders.
• I check these folders day times a day for important stuff and mark them all as read afterwards.
• On my inbox I have three search folders:
  • Incoming for all unflagged e-mails
  • Follow up (which Outlook creates automatically) for all flagged e-mails
  • Completed for all completed e-mails.
• I'm trying to keep to keep the Incoming folder empty at all times, by flagging or deleting all e-mails as they come in. This is a fairly mindless and quick task as I only roughly categorize the e-mails. I use the different flag colors for marking e-mails as important, project-related, support-related etc.
• The follow-up folder is where I do my e-mail-related work in: reading e-mails answering and flagging them complete when I'm done.
• Once a day in the morning, I clean up the Completed box by filing e-mails or deleting them. Focusing on this task rather than doing ad-hoc during the it's much more efficient and less painful.

So what does this do? First, by separating e-mail maintenance from handling the actual content it's easier to focus on the task at hand. Second, the delay between receiving an e-mail and processing it, helps against the dragging feeling of being driven by my inbox rather that doing what is important or urgent.

It requires some discipline, though, as it's easy to be dragged away by an incoming e-mail. But generally I feel much better at work and haven't had any problems so far by not reacting on an e-mail in time.

Still no sync: Filemaker's Bento 3 announced, available immediately

via www.tuaw.com

I've always been intrigued with Bento, but only if I can use it on my laptop and desktop. The new version 3 announces file sharing in a LAN, but I think what's really needed is synchronization between two Macs. Since it's working between an iPhone and a desktop version, it should be straightforward to sync between two copies of a Benot database.
So I need to wait a little longer before I use it.

Remember the Milk vs. OmniFocus task management

I'm a big fan of todo list and I've been using them for a long time, basically since my first PDA, the HP-95. Since that time, I usually lived with whatever the device I was using provided.

Until the iPhone came out. Because among its many innovations is also Apple's persistent refusal to include a task manager that syncs with iCal or Outlook. The App Store solved this problem, however, and there are many alternative task manager.

I chose the most expensive, OmniFocus. It goes for $20 for the iPhone plus $80 for the desktop version. For this money you get a task manager that is only a Gantt chart short of a full-blown project manager. Recently, I switched over to Remember The Milk (RTM) a web-based task manager, which is $25 per year if you want to use the iPhone app.

So which one is better?

• OmniFocus supports projects and nested actions, distinguishes between sequential and parallel execution and allows to specify a custom sequence of actions. This allows setting up complex workflows. RTM has only tasks and lists, which kinda like work like projects, but in the end you just have a pile of independent tasks.
• OmniFocus uses contexts to separate actions, e.g. those who can be performed at home vs. the office. RTM has tags that can be used assigning context or whatever else you like. It also supports locations via Google Map, which OmniFocus only does on the iPhone app.
• OmniFocus has a start date of actions which helps to get future actions out of the way. RTM lacks that feature.
• OmniFocus allows flagging actions – I dearly miss this feature in RTM.
• RTM syncs nicely and quickly between the iPhone app and supports working offline via Google Gears. OmniFocus has various syncing options. I liked the one via the Internet, which requires a WebDAV server (e.g. MobileMe), but is pretty slow on the iPhone.
• The RTM iPhone app reminds you via push notifications. OmniFocus has some sort of setup of reminding via calendar, but it's so cumbersome that I found it not worth looking into.
• RTM allows interaction with other users via sharing, publishing and sending. Elke and I just started exploring those features, so more about this later.
• Also, RTM integrates with Gmail and iGoogle, something that OmniFocus can't.

RTM updated its app last week and got rid of the weird way you could select a single task and multiple tasks at the same time. Instead there's a nice text box that allows to quickly add a task with all attributes in one go.

What both apps are missing, is a compelling overview page (no idea if anybody finds the "Overview" tab in RTM helpful). In OmniFocus you can create custom perspectives, but I've never found a setting that really satisfied me. Also I miss a way of scheduling tasks/actions, but haven't seen a task manger who has such a feature.

So which one is really better? I think that RTM is pretty much what I need, but with OmniFocus one can carry task management to the next level and, for example, implement GTD by the letter.

How I rate songs and albums in iTunes

ITunes allows an up to 5-star rating for every song and album. I know many iTunes users wouldn't go through the hassle of rating all their songs, but for me this is an important tool on selecting the music I want to hear. As of this moment I have 7,492 songs in my library and I need to select those that get a place on my iPhone. Also, I want random playlists, where I like every single song. And the best way of accomplishing this is by rating each and every song.

Obviously my library is biased towards songs I like, so a rating has mostly a positive meaning as there's no point of separating bad and very bad songs. So here we go:

• 1 star goes to songs I don't want to hear. These would be candidates to be deleted from the library if it was worth the effort. An example is No. 1 Song in Heaven by the Sparks, which makes me feel like drowning in melted candy. Interludes that only make sense in the context of an album also go into this category.
• 2 star goes to songs I don't dislike, but which fail to hook into my mind, so that I forget them 30 seconds after they have finished. That doesn't mean it's a bad song, but I would only play it in the context of an album or a genius playlist.
• 3 star goes to songs I like and which I would put in my playlists.
• 4 star are my favorites, outstanding songs that I would just search and play by themselves.
• 5 star are the rare songs that have a special effect on me, such as this one.

Since some time iTunes also allows ratings on an entire album. By default it calculates it from the average ratings of the songs, but I need it for with slightly different meaning:

• 1 star goes to albums I plainly dislike. There may be an outstanding song on there, but I most of it I don't like.
• 2 star goes to albums I wouldn't listen to on my iPod or iPhone, but maybe as a background soundtrack at home.
• 3 star is for a good album I like sometimes to listen from begin to end.
• 4 star is for an outstanding album. These are the ones that are synced to my iPhone. Since space is limited, I try to keep all 4-star albums below 10 GB.
• 5 star is for all-time favorites.

I do regularly review my ratings as my musical preference changes. Since this can be done on the fly on the iPhone or iPod it doesn't take too much effort. Also I have the ongoing project where I try to listen to each song at least once a year, also for adjusting the rating when necessary.