I realize not all of us have the freedom to do whatever we feel like doing all day at work. But assuming you have some wiggle room on what you do and when I find letting your mood dictate that is a recipe for a productive day. I have a variety of things I can…

I have a major habit of emailing myself. I don’t consider it a huge problem really, but it is just dumping something at my future-self to deal with without much structure. So I’ve been weaning myself off it.  I use Things for my to-do lists, which are structured, and have due dates and context. So…

You work at an ice cream shop and scoop ice cream cones by the hundreds? You’re gonna get good at it. You’ll get a feel for the scoop and how it grabs the ice cream. You’ll get a feel for how big you need to make the scoops depending on what you’re doing with them.…

Vaishnavi Rao has a couple of Gmail-specific email productivity tips. I didn’t know about the Google Labs feature for viewing sender legitimacy. That seems like a good one to have on.  If you haven’t heard of it, the “Send & Archive” is a massive one. It’s a default setting now after spending many years as…

Reposting from my other blog, because this blog is way better for it.  You know those “introduction” emails? Someone thinks you should meet someone else, and emails happen about it. Or it’s you doing the introducing, either by request or because you think it’s a good idea. Cutting to the chase here, those emails could…

Great list: Spend 95% of your time researching the person you’re emailing, and 5% writing the email. Introduce yourself quickly but specifically, and ask specific questions. Ask one or two questions. Not three! You’ll feel like adding a third because your email looks too short. It’s not. Google your questions first. Don’t offer to “hop…

This company The Radicati Group, Inc. produces “quantitative and qualitative research on email, security, instant messaging, social networking, information archiving, regulatory compliance, wireless technologies, web technologies, unified communications, and more.” Looks like one report will run ya about $7,500, but they publish summaries, including the email one. It has some interesting stuff in it: In…

Quinn Norton for the Atlantic: Email has changed since [the 1970s], but not much. Most of what’s changed in the last 45 years is email clients—the software we use to access email. They’ve clumsily bolted on new functionality onto the old email, without fixing any of the underlying protocols to support that functionality. The article…

Fascinating little 10-minute podcast from Planet Money’s The Indicator that put a data-driven dollar value on some of the biggest internet services. When economist Tim Harford was planning a trip to China, he realized he would not be able to access a lot of the online services he has come to rely on: no email,…

This seems like the nuclear option! Your email is so out of control that you literally give up and start over completely fresh. This might be fine for Beyoncé, but her success seems a little more locked in that yours or mine.  This also seems awful dangerous to me. How many people are going to continue…