September Edition of the Carnival of Productivity And GTD

Welcome to the September 2010 edition of The Carnival of Productivity And GTD. We're really impressed with the submissions that we've seen for this edition. We would, however, like to see more GTD related submissions.

As we posted in the last edition of The Carnival of Productivity And GTD, we've decided to put the Better Life Blog Carnival on hold for a while to see what changes we might make or how we can bring it back into the line up. We've scheduled the next edition of the Family Life Blog Carnival towards the end of October. The Carnival of Productivity and GTD will return in 2011. The Holiday Spirit Blog Carnival for 2010 will be kicking off towards the end of November. We're thinking about adding a couple of more themes to the blog carnivals that we host, possibly one on Social Media topics and charity, possibly in 2011. As always, we'll need to see about our bandwidth! We're pleased with the number of entries that we're receiving for all of the carnivals, we do wish to challenge you all to look at things from different angles and perspectives. We love to see useful articles that can really help people. If you have any suggestions for topics you'd like to see covered in future editions, feel free to leave a comment. If you have a post that you'd like to submit, please do so via the submission from link. Thank you to everyone that submitted posts! Remember that by subscribing via your RSS reader or via email, that you won't miss the next blog carnival hosted here and you'll know when new material has been posted. Without further adieu, here is the September 2010 Edition of the Carnival of Productivity And GTD....

Time Management And Productivity

Debbie Dragon presents How Work at Home Moms Can Make Room for Me Time posted at Empowering Mom.

Eliza Fayle presents A trick for making life manageable | Silver and Grace posted at Silver and Grace.


Charles Chua C K presents 10 Advantages of a To-Do List posted at All About Living with Life.

Chris presents Why Wise Men Abandon Their Goals posted at Martial Development.

Charles Chua C K presents 30 Productive Things You Can Do at Home in the Evening When You Stop Watching TV (First of a two-part list series) posted at All About Living with Life.

Organizing

Wise Bread presents Organize a Room for $10 With No Extra Effort posted at Wisebread.

Handling Email

Khalid J Hosein presents Inbox Zero – Whip Your e-Mail Habits into Shape posted at KJH World, saying, "Start checking your e-mail less. Once an hour or less is where you should start. Your goal - an Inbox with zero e-mails!"

Learning

Victoria Kennedy presents Open Courseware & Public Domain Books on the iPad ? The Ultimate Guide posted at Masters Degrees, saying, "The iPad has an optional iBooks application that can be downloaded from the App Store, which displays books and other ePub-format content downloaded from the iBookstore. But, how does the iPad fare in the e-book department, and is it friendly to open courseware and public domain books?"

Joey Bishop presents Top 50 Free Open Source Classes on Computer Science posted at Masters in Computer Science, saying, "Computer science is both an interesting and growing field to get into. Here are 50 free opencourseware classes that can help you learn more about computer science."

Motivation And Inspiration

Bobbie Walker presents 50 Amazingly Motivational Speeches On YouTube posted at BSN Degrees, saying, "The listed speeches – representing a broad spectrum of political, national, religious, racial, social, economic and sexual perspectives – may tread familiar territory, but still seek to promote action and innovation in viewers."

Carrie Oakley presents Top 10 Commencement Speeches on YouTube posted at Online Colleges, saying, "Often driping with overused clichés regarding never giving up, never letting people down, reaching for the stars, achieving dreams, maintaining integrity, and other overused, overly broad “inspirations” that end up dismissed the second the speaker steps away from the podium. Unsurprisingly, more daring types who choose to use their time to go completely against expectations and leave an impact using humor or frank discussions of tough subject matter such as death, cancer, and the dire state of the economy."

Monte Stonewall presents 10 Amazing Female Firefighters posted at Fire Science Colleges.

Must Have Applications

John Laugherton presents 25 iPad Apps Every Engineer Needs posted at Masters in Engineering, saying, "The following 25 iPad apps that every engineer needs includes a broad range of generic tools, productivity apps and references that can provide engineers from all fields with support with a single tap of a finger."

stanya16 presents 10 Killer Online Tools for Web Designers posted at Web Design Colleges, saying, "What are administrator jobs like, what are their salaries and how can you prepare yourself for a job as a health administrator? This ultimate guide to health administration careers can help you learn the answers to those questions."

Roger Elmore presents Top 10 Must-Have iPhone Applications for Travelers posted at Hospitality Management Schools.

Hoven Keith presents Top 25 Little-Known Web Startups Revolutionizing the Way We Communicate posted at Masters in Communication, saying, "The information age has changed the way we all communicate. This is a list of 25 little-known startups leading the charge."

Family And the Environment

Graham Alice presents Going Green While Pregnant: 100 Ways to Help Your Baby & the Earth posted at MedicalCodingCertification.com.

Other

Mazarine presents Wild Woman Fundraising Lean Fundraising posted at Wild Woman Fundraising, saying, "This post details how to apply lean manufacturing processes to your office, to make yourself even more efficient and productive."


That concludes the September 2010 edition of The Carnival of Productivity And GTD. You can submit your blog article to the next edition of The Carnival of Productivity And GTD using our "Submit an entry to “The Carnival of Productivity And GTD” submission form". Links to past editions, as well as the current scheduling of future editions can be found on our The Carnival of Productivity And GTD index page. Thank you to everyone that submitted articles for this edition! If you have any topics that you'd like to see covered in a future edition, or any feedback in general, feel free to leave a comment. Be sure to stay tuned for the Family Life Blog Carnival, as well as the normal articles that are posted here. Thank you.

Photo credit: "Hourglass" courtesy of iprole.

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Are You Using Multiple Inboxes in Gmail?

Do you have one or more gmail accounts? I discovered multiple inboxes last week and am really enjoying it. Setting this up allows you to have a view of your inbox, drafts, and various labels that you can select in a quick view.

To set it up you'll need to "enable" the Labs tab from "Settings". It is pretty far down the list of options, more towards the end. Pane 0 and I are your "starred" and "drafts" are in by default, while Panes 2-4 are open and you can add whichever of your labels that you'd like to see in your multiple inboxes. The box after "Pane" should start with "is:" followed by what you want to be displayed, so you'll want to make sure that it matches the "labels" that you want to be displayed.

Some of you might wonder what "Labels" are? Gmail doesn't have folders but offer "Labels" instead. If you have a type of email, from one person or organization, or a theme, then a label would help you keep it organzied and aid in finding it later. On the left side of gmail, just below "Contacts", you'll find your "Labels". You can select "Edit labels" from there to create and edit them or you can select "Labels" from your settings.

So now that you've set up multiple inboxes you can see your inbox, drafted emails, starred emails, and some of your "Labels", you can see your email in a glance. Have fun. What other goodies are making use of from gmail?

Make Better Use of Your Subject Line

Composing an email with Gmail, from my account

As I get more and more email (especially at work) I have come to appreciate better use the “Subject” line. The subject line is one of the first things that people notice about your email and so often it is filled with subjects that barely even relate to what needs to be done with the email or the theme of the email. You can get a lot more response from your emails when you make better use of your subject lines and it can help to make your emails shorter, which most people will appreciate.

The subject field is one of the places that you can easily build credibility with your readers. Since this is one of the first things that people usually notice about emails (probably right after who sent it), why not make the subject actually fit the “subject” or theme of your email? If your email is about an important or “hot topic”, then your subject line should say so. This will help your email stand out from all the other emails received by your readers and will help it to get noticed. It is also a criteria used by many people to determine what order they read (or don’t read) emails.

Try to indicate any action that is needed within your subject line. You can do this any number of ways but the simplest way it to state what is needed from your readers? You can also state something like “ACTION REQUIRED…”. This helps to set expectations of your readers, because they know right up front that they need to do something and what they need to do. This can also get the attention of your readers because some readers will scan for emails that give cues that something is required of the reader.

Do you have a question to ask of your reader(s), why not ask it in your subject line? Your readers will see your question quickly and can respond quickly because they know that an answer is needed from them. If it is a simple question you can put in the subject line and end it with “…? EOM”. “EOM” stands for end of message. This tells the reader that there is nothing to read in the email. This allows you to write quicker emails and get your answer quicker because you don’t need to put greetings and some of the other things that you might usually include in your email. It is short and to the point. If you need to explain your question, this can be done within the body of your email. How many emails have you sent where you only needed the answer to a simple question?

I’m sure that you’ve probably received emails with subject lines that looked like this “FW:FW:FW:FW:….” or maybe “RE:RE:RE:…”. With these emails that have been forwarded or replied to many times, why not remove some of the “FW:”s or “RE:”s? You only need to leave one in to make the point that this email is part of a chain. While you’re at it, why not clean up the email a little bit and remove parts of the chain that don’t add value to the discussion that has already taken place. Most email programs will indent each time the email has been forwarded or replied to, so that it is easy for people to see that your email is part of a chain. You can take out a bunch of the forwards or replies so the email is shorter and easier to read, especially if this allows you to keep the contents of the email within a normal computer screen or monitor and the reader doesn’t need to scroll through the email. The more the reader has to scroll, the less likely they are to read emails. The only time to remove forwards or replies that don’t and any value to the mail is based on who the people are that forwarded/replied were. If your department manager or a company executive is in the email chain, you want to make sure that people see that.

Sometimes you’ll send emails that don’t require any action from your readers. In these cases why not indicate this in your subject line. You can write something like, “FYI:…”, this tells your readers right away that they email is for their information and that you don’t require any action from them. If you do send a joke of funny email that you can also do something like “HUMOR:…”, this will help your readers to prioritize their inbox. Try to develop your own cues that you can use to get a good deal of your message across within your subject line. If there is a social event, how about something like, “SOCIAL EVENT:…”, this lets your reader know that this isn’t the standard meeting that should probably attend.

In a world where so many of us are deluged with email, better use of your subject line will be appreciated and is more likely to get you the results that you seek. Do you have any special way of using your subject lines? If you have any other comments, I would love to hear them. If you liked this article, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS or email, share it on del.icio.us or on Digg and pass it on to anyone that you think might appreciate it. Thank you. :)

On Deck…

I’ll be publishing posts about…

• The next in my series of weight loss strategies
• My next Spotlight on the web.
• More on productivity, web 2.0, social networking, family, parenting, health, and other things that you can use.

Other Posts That You Might Also Like to Read…

• Does Your Approval Process Work For You Or Against You?
• The Customer Is Always Right
• Lessons Learned
• Keep Your Projects Simple Stupid
• Why Not Create Tasks Right From Your Inbox?
• Treat Others The Way That You Wish To Be Treated
• Easter Greeting…14 Principles for Dealing With Other People
• Are Your Assumptions Holding You Back?
• Who Mentored You
• GTD Overview
• Keep Your Projects Simple Stupid
• Why Aren’t You Working Your “Someday/Maybe’ Projects?
• Is It Time To Review Your Insurance Coverage?
• Should One Parent Stay Home After Your Child Is Born?
• Teaching Our Kids About Money
• Heart Check

Why Not Create Tasks Right From Your Inbox?

Figure 1.A folder in M.S. Outlook 2003

If you’re like the multitude of people out there drowning in emails, almost any tip to help you get your inbox and email under control would be welcome. For many people it would make your life a lot easier if you could just drag your emails into a task that you could track, follow, and most importantly, Do. Well this is possible within M.S. Outlook, an email system that many of you are probably using at your company. In particular, I’m using M.S. Outlook 2003.

I was recently listening toThe Productivity Show, one of a few podcasts that I listen to, and Randall Dean was the guest. He suggested dragging your emails from your “Inbox” in M.S. Outlook to your “Tasks”. This was just one of the ideas he mentioned in episode 33 of the show. I decided to give it a try and have been very pleased with the results!

Email, while a commonly used form of communication today, does not lend it self well to creating actions that you can do. Many people’s inboxes are flooded with emails that they have to take the time to process and figure out what to do with, often these emails stay in people’s inboxes, being looked at several times before anything is done with them (if all). By turning your email into a task, it immediately becomes something that you action, follow, and most importantly, Do.

Figure 2. "The New Task"

When you have an email open (in my case I’m viewing this through a preview pane), you can drag and drop it into your tasks (see figure 1). Your email will now open up as a task (see figure 2). It should be noted that the original email remains in the folder that you dragged and dropped if from. By default, the subject of your task is the same as the email. You can change this so that it is more useful to you, maybe you could describe the action that you need to do or tailor it so that it is more quickly understood. Since your task copies the email into its body, it is easier to find the original email in the future if you need to reference it. From your new task you can easily tell

• who sent it to you
• the name or subject of the email
• the time that it was sent
• the contents of the email

When looking at the area above the body of your email within your new task, you’ll notice that there is a line and a blank area. This blank area is a great place to make notes about what you need to do and track the progress of your actions, something that most email as such doesn’t allow you to do. You can assign a “Start date” and “Due date”, as well as a “Reminder” to help you better keep track of your task. You can also assign a “Status:” and a “Priority:”. Your status options include: “Not Started” (the default choice), “In Progress”, “Completed”, “Waiting on someone else”, or “Deferred”. I like the “Waiting on someone else” status because you can quickly see that you are waiting on someone else and what you might need to chase them about. If the email is something that you want to delegate or you believe belongs to someone else, you can create a task and forward it to someone else.

After you have created and saved your new task, you should move the original email to its proper location, so that it doesn’t clutter up your inbox and distract you from the other emails. You can easily move your original email to a folder if you wish by using the keyboard shortcut [Ctrl, Shift, V], or you move it via other methods. If capturing the task is all that you need, then you could also delete the email as well!

Now that you can easily create tasks out of your actionable emails, you should find it easier to process most of your email, and you’re now better able to track, follow, and Do the things that are actually needed from your emails. How do you manage your inbox in M.S. Outlook? Do you have any other tips that could be used with M.S. Outlook? If you have any other comments, I’d love to hear them. If you liked this article, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS or email, share it on del.icio.us or on Digg and pass it on to anyone that you think might appreciate it .Thank you. :)

On Deck…

I’ll be publishing posts about…

• The next in my series of weight loss strategies
• My next Spotlight on the web.
• More on productivity, web 2.0, social networking, family, parenting, health, and other things that you can use.

Other Post That You Might Also Like to Read…

• GTD Overview
• Keep Your Project Simple Stupid
• Why Aren't You Working on Your "Someday/Maybe Projects?