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E-mail

Leaning into online struggles

October 17, 2011

The fourth time I got a call from the principal’s office, I knew I had to rethink our school year. One of our kids was having a tough time in class, and I had already made several visits to the teacher, the classroom and the principal’s office. Not only was I worried about my kid, [...]

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Why I like to check my email

September 26, 2011

Recently I’ve been trying to follow my friend Leda’s advice on taming the compulsive need to pull my iPhone out any spare moment: the eight seconds in which the grocery clerk is running a price check, the twenty seconds it takes to walk to the bathroom, the thirty-seven seconds between ordering my Americano and receiving [...]

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8 ways to beat the urgency trap in online communications

June 15, 2011
Clock with email at sign

In a thoughtful post about The Pitfalls of social media, Aleksandr Voinov writes Social Media exerts pressure on us to do things immediately and respond to everything immediately. I’m not sure about you, but sometimes I like to think things through and discuss it with other people before I respond. Your Twitter and Facebook accounts [...]

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Are you a parent traveling on business? Here are 15 tips for taking the kids

June 3, 2011

When I first wrote this post in October 2006, LilPnut was only a few months old, and didn’t even have his twitter handle yet. (Who can blame him? Twitter had barely been invented.) Almost five years later we have lots more experience traveling with the kids, and are much less ambitious about integrating business and [...]

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10 ways spam taught us to focus our attention

April 2, 2011

First seen in 1978, spam has become the vaccine for your attention span. It’s the toxin that has stimulated our immunity system’s defenses. Thanks to spam, we’ve had to find technical, social and personal ways of keeping our eyes on the 22% of e-mail that isn’t pure junk, and to avoid the 78% that is.

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How many e-mail clients do you need?

March 23, 2011

Jodie Tonita is a lovely person. She is passionate, funny, kind to children and small animals, and an amazing hula-hooper. Unfortunately she was sent by our alien overlords to ensure I never do my actual work. As evidence, check out this message Jodie left on my Facebook wall: I realize that it is theoretically possible [...]

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Using your e-mail signature to fight inbox overload

February 28, 2011

It’s day 5 of my vendetta on mandatory e-mail replies and I’m feeling the pain. On the one hand, I’m as committed as ever to changing the attitude that every e-mail needs a response — an attitude that is totally out-of-step with every other channel of online communications, and a major contributor to personal stress. [...]

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Don’t try this at home: Implementing the e-mail vendetta

February 24, 2011

Today I declared war on e-mail. Well, not all e-mail: just the tyrannical assumption that we should all reply to every single message we reply. In a blog post for the Harvard Business Review, I called for a vendetta on the mandatory universal reply. That means challenging the expectation that every answerable e-mail will get [...]

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9 essential tools for getting tasks out of your inbox

January 7, 2011

If you want to try out my system for moving Google Docs notifications or other “task” e-mails out of your inbox and into a better context — perhaps your task management system — you may want to start by downloading or signing up for some or all of the tools I’ve used for this purpose. [...]

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AFTER e-mail: 5 steps to moving task management out of your inbox

January 6, 2011

If  watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the 8th time was the highlight of your holiday season, you obviously missed my awe-inspiring but tragically neglected 10-part series on 7 days to Inbox Zero. The day after I posted my initial promise to blog my way to empty, I woke up with the horrible realization that I [...]

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5 life lessons you can learn from emptying your inbox

December 31, 2010

You’ve probably got a handful of e-mails that are still in your inbox because you are, on some level, avoiding them. These e-mails, more than anything else, illuminate your core personal or professional blocks. Forcing yourself through them — the way you have to in order to empty your inbox — is not just a path to e-mail efficiency, but a very meaningful exercise in character-building. Here are some of the lessons that may lie waiting in your inbox.

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