June | 2006 | mashby

June 30, 2006

The Power Of Focus

Out of focus picture Like I said in a previous article, I was fortunate enough to attend the GTD | Roadmap seminar last week, and I have to say that I had a bit of an epiphany. There were a ton of “ah ha” moments, but one of the things that stood out is that focus is important. Granted you have to be able to shift focus quickly in today’s fast-paced-information flood that we’re all living in, but regardless of how fast we have to shift our focus, we still have to focus nonetheless.

As I’m beginning to implement the various aspects of GTD, I’m noticing that since my brain has been set free of having to remember everything, I’m able to focus better. For example, when I’m working on a project, I’m able to stay on task… or when Holly comes home, I can really listen to what she has to say. In the past, my mind was running on all the other things I needed to be doing. So while Holly’s talking, I’m thinking about 100 other things left on my mental to-do list.

June 29, 2006

Palm TV Ads Online

I’m a HUGE fan of the Palm OS operating system, aka Palm Pilots. Have been since 1997 when I bought a used Pilot 1000. As a rabid fan, I’ve collected as much Palm stuff as possible. One of the things that I dug up many years ago were some television ads that Palm did. Not being a huge company with a huge marketing budget, television advertising is not something that Palm has done a lot of. Many of their ads never made it to TV, but were used for trade shows and the like.

This morning, I was reading Mike Mace’s article “We need a new mobile platform. Sort of.” and he made reference to the Palm Ad “A Perfect Day” and the fact that he couldn’t find the video online. I decided to do my ~~civic~~ geeky duty and upload the video to YouTube.com. Not wanting to stop there, I decided to upload all the videos I’ve collected over the years. 8)

The playlist and the embedded player below, have the videos in date order as best as I can tell. There are 6 videos in all — enjoy.

June 28, 2006

Turbo Charging My E-mail With GTD

A man pumping a GTD dumbbell with a thunderbird tattoo on his bicep Yesterday I wrote about the process I went through to migrate from multiple e-mail accounts to just one übur inbox. The new system is definitely an improvement, but there were a few snags that kept me from reaching a true state of e-mail bliss. The chief snag has been my archive and after attending GTD|The RoadMap seminar, I got fired up to do something about it.

The Problem
Part of migrating all of my accounts to one account was also migrating my archives as well. Being a big fan of hierarchies, I continued my old habit of nesting folders within folders. It’s just the way my brain works and it just makes sense to keep all of my NPUG e-mail in one folder and all of my Clients e-mail in another.

Of course sub folders have problems too. Thunderbird doesn’t allow you to search globally across all folders and it also makes it tedious to archive mail, as you can see in this image (opens into a new window). In addition, I read the 43Folders series Inbox Zero. Those series of articles, as well as my own frustration, led me to believe that there had to be a better way.

June 27, 2006

Approaching E-mail Nirvana

Meditation with Thunderbird Back in April, I wrote about how I was going to migrate to one über inbox. Instead of having multiple IMAP inboxes, I would consolidate to just one. One inbox, one e-mail archive, one set of filters. Well, in the space of about a week, I successfully completed the project and this is an update of how I did it and what it’s been like since.

Step 1: Setup E-Mail Forwarding
The first step in my journey was to setup all of my accounts to forward to one primary account. This is a fairly straightforward step, but it did force me to clean up the number of e-mail accounts I had. Over the years, I had built up a number of addresses I no longer needed. I had accounts for one-time use, and many more that were simply no longer being used.

So I deleted the ones I no longer needed and then I set the ones that I wanted to keep to forward to the über inbox. For example, michael@npug.org forwards to my main account michael@ashbygroup.com.

Step 2: Setup Filters
Now that I had all my e-mail forwarding to one account, I next set about creating filters for all the e-mail that was coming in. The first set of filters that I created were contextual, all e-mail from me@mashby.com label as personal for example. Next, I created filters to file certain e-mails to particular folders. E-mails from mailing lists would go to their respective folders, etc.

Month / June 2006