1500 CDT, 10-Oct-2006: RMA ordered.
1607 CDT, 10-Oct-2006: Shipment picked up, Fort Worth, TX.
0526 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Email from Cingular regarding tracking number received.
0550 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Pre-dawn cursed, laundry cycled, above email read with one eye open while other eye remained shut in protest of wakefulness after <5 hours sleep.
0552 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Tracking number viewed.
0553 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Reload.
0558 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Reload.
0615 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Reload.
0616 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Heavy sigh, command decision made to return to bed for brief stay.
0701 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Phone arrives at DHL station at HSV.
0720 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Alarm clock considered for defenestration.
0722 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Dryer re-started. Mental cursing of buying cheap-ass dryer seven years ago again ensues.
0723 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Reload.
0724 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Disbelief that overnight means overnight, for once.
0740 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Keys and wallet in hand, email dashed off to manager, “Will be late, must go slay DHL dragons.” Message received loud and clear: DHL has lost hardware for our organization before.
0810 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Counter jockey disbelieving that driver hasn’t already loaded phone on truck.
0811 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: User smirks, knowing that the DHL truck in his ‘hood runs late afternoons.
0813 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Counter jockey claims user is “lucky”, walks off, presumably to find part.
0816 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: Counter jockey returns with printout, services next customer in line.
0817 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: User considers punching out counter jockey, customer.
0818 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: User reconsiders, realizing that city jail unlikely to show Bruins-Thrashers on TV. [The inconsiderate fuckers.]
0822 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: User signs for phone. Counter jockey enters signout, then note that user picking up phone.
0856 CDT, 11-Oct-2006: User reloads tracking site, smirks at counter jockey ineptitude, heads for shower.

I’m gonna play with two timer apps the next month or so:

• FlexTime
• Meridian

If any of you have used ‘em, I’d love to hear your inputs.

An immediate benefit of my decision to time-shift much of the TV that I watch to the weekend is that I took time I’d have otherwise spent watching TV to re-wire my home network, moving the cable modem upstairs and finally re-connecting my wireless router [rather than the wired router I've used for the past month or two] to the network. It took a little doing—I had to call in to Knology to register a new MAC address, because even cloning what was on the old router wasn’t working, and I started a second call and had just gotten the tech support rep on the line when VOILA! it came online—but now I’m back up and running.

Of course, I lost the IP address I’d had since moving here in the process, but … no loss there, really. Now I must go downstairs and pick up my roommate’s network cable and bring it up here, as something tells me that he’d like to continue to have access.

I think the true test of whether software is worth me writing about it is when it reaches the point of ubiquity. For me, that happens in the Mac world when I find myself sub-consciously keying the strokes I’d use on a Mac here at my office PC.

Need an example? Let me provide it: Mail Act-On. I subscribe to the Getting Things Done modus operandi of dealing with email: either respond/act on it right away, or do one of three things:

• File it in an @Actions folder so you can process the action later.
• File it in an @Archives folder for later reference.
• File it in an @Responses folder so you can respond at your leisure.

Now, I don’t do this on all platforms and in all situations; here at the office, I pretty well have to file by project—partly beacuse I work so many projects at once, and partly because I stink at working the ability to edit Outlook subject lines into my daily workflow. But with my personal email, save for very few exceptions, I have stuff in those three folders.

Because I use those folders almost exclusively, it was a natural for me to start using Mail Act-On by setting up filtering rules for those three folders. Unfortunately, it was hard to do, because … what keystrokes do you use? The first letter is out, as you have Actions and Archives. The second letter is out, because you’d have Archives, and wouldn’t that make you think of Responses? Yeah, me, too.

I finally adopted the following:

• `c pushes me into @Actions.
• `v pushes me into @Archives.
• `r pushes me into @Responses.

I tried to come up with the letter that was “most representative” of the word. I finally got the system when I realized that c, r, and v were near on the keyboard. It works for me; you might use some other mnemonic, and I’m not going to fault you for it.

That said, I’ve come to use Mail Act-on for this seemingly trivial task so much that I now grouse that I have no analog here in the PC/Thunderbird world of my office touching of my personal email. It’s almost as hard on me as it is to transition between Alt and Ctrl keying of things in browsers. I have to do mental shifting every time, and it’s as jarring as going from driving a manual transmission to an automatic. [I'll make do, though.]

In any regard, if you use Mail.app, are good about filing your email, and are looking for keyboard shortcuts, I consider Mail Act-On to be essential.

I find it quite humorous that I found my copy of Getting Things Done tonight while rummaging through boxes looking for the deed to my house [which I got right before I moved, then packed in a box I'd be sure to remember ... riiiiiiiiight].

I find it frustrating that the deed was in a box that I’d already opened—in fact, I’d opened it the week I moved here!—and that I spent a couple hours each of the last two nights looking for it.

Oh well … at least I’ve got a good idea of the boxes I’ve got to go through. My living room, though, looks like a bomb went off. [Wait ... that's the whole house.]

Coordinating meeting availability is hard. The concept of an emailable text-based meeting scheduler makes it easier, but I’m thinking this would suck in an environment where most everyone is using proportional-width fonts and/or HTML in email.

As for me and my house, you’ll pry the fixed-width fonts from my cold, dead fingers.

Michael Sippey highlights a nugget from the 43 Folders discussion list:

First, double click the e-mail (or hit enter) to open it in a separate window. Then put your cursor on the subject line and start typing. That’s it. You can add your own reference – date, project number, whatever – or change the subject line completely. Whatever is going to be meaningful to you. Use as many words you like. When you’re done, Ctrl+S to save.

Oh my. As Michael says, “Go nuts.” Very few of my co-workers are good at titling emails, and … this will make my life much, much easier. [Why? I'm the guy who keeps archives of all of his email, and people know that, so they ask me for help pulling up data when they need it.]

43Folders has another kick-ass entry, this time on writing sensible email messages. This ought to be required reading here at the office. It would save so much effort! I just try to follow the spirit of this in every email I send, and slowly, I’m reforming my peers …

I, along with half the prod-pr0n nerds of the world, was sent over to read about The Multiple Self by Merlin Mann’s 43Folders. Me, I’m good with one of the early comments left on 43F: “Holy hell… 700 faulty analogies and bad metaphors are now fighting it out in my brain. Hopefully I can redirect that overwritten piece to my operating system’s /dev/null before too long.”

In any regard, if you can jot down things as you think them and re-organize that, you might get something out of it. Otherwise, it’s about like watching the output of top c—sometimes, you get honest-to-God good information out of it, and other times, you’re flipping out over things that might or might not be legit.

I do support the concept that we get crappy internal feedback that we don’t directly control and that needs to be attenuated as needed.

My plate now truly is lighter; the church emailed me back today to say that they understood.

:sigh:

I think the best thing that GTD has done for me is helping myself to recognize when I’m overcommitted. Aldersgate’s been wanting me to redo their site for some time, and there’ve been a number of SNAFUs that have only recently gotten fixed; now, with the house, I don’t have much time to be doing it, and besides that, they’re on a deadline, and in a few months, I probably won’t be a member there. I hate quitting stuff—I am a Morris boy, through and through—but there was just no way that I could see holding myself in their critical path.

I’m hopeful that I’ll continue to be able to do these sorts of decisions the more committed to a GTD-oriented system I get. Trust me, I have plans that are coming together for the new house.

I was feeling pretty sluggish a half-hour or so ago, to the point that I was all, “Screw this, I’m goin’ home.” My allergies are still nuts [hey, it's smart to buy Claritin ... it's smarter to take it home with you so you can take it before you go to bed], the quote I spent yesterday and today working is so piddling small that it’s not worth doing, and … just yeah. My motivation tank hit E. So I looked forlornly at my overflowing INBOX on top of my filing cabinet—which reminds me that I should photograph my office layout, save that pesky company policy about digital cameras at work— and decided to get it emptied.

It is empty now, and I have enough energy to sustain me through to the end of the day, I do believe.

Tips for Mastering E-Mail Overload. The best ones discussed include subject writing, message trimming, etc. I find myself lapsing from some of these at times at work, and there’s always pain and suffering as a result.

The sad thing is … reading through this, I almost was able to construct an argument radically in favor of top-posting. I’m not going to think any more about that, because I don’t want to light myself on fire.

Jeffrey Veen has it nailed in “Getting Over Archiving”:

Thus, I gave up on any sort of structured archiving … Before I had dozens of folders for people/projects/themes, etc. etc. Blech. Now, I’ve got a folder with thousands of messages that I rotate once a year or so. … The bigger point here, of course, is that people who think for a living are relying more and more on search rather than browse — and eventually personal social networks — to manage the overwhelmingly complex amount of data that they need to transform daily into information, and ultimately understanding.

I miss a nice hierarchy. I still maintain hierarchies at work because it does save time on things that I have to reference, but I don’t go past the project level down to the task level. [Some of my projects can be so small that some people see them as tasks, but because they have multiple steps, they're not tasks.] But in thinking on it, I’m finding little-to-no utility in hierarchies for personal mail, which is an absolutely crazy shift in how I think about email, because I’m buying into search rather than browse.

[And yes, Stephen, I use Lookout here at work, thanks to your urging. It works with my hierarchies because, well, I have lots of projects that have no clean edges, so there's bleed. But I can sometimes beat search with browsing. Sick but true.]

Now it’s time for me to find a mail app I like again … and to come up with a clean near-term archiving strategy manageable with IMAP, plus a better, long-term solution. Maybe I can ply Matt with vodka for his MySQL-managed mail database scripts.

Oi. I want to grieve here a little. I miss my hierarchies.

Merlin Mann nails it: “any idea that helps you to become more self-aware can usually help you to reach a goal or affect a favorable solution“. I am a proponent of self-awareness, although still a novice practitioner.

If I hadn’t already sold Chris on it, I imagine this would do the trick.