Freshness and Innocence: Pictures of the Week: 16 May 2010

Email don't eeeeeeeeee mail

One fine morning, I came to my office, boot up my laptop and opened my mailbox. There was nothing unusual, I had 200 unread mails, I had no idea which mail was important and need an reply and which mail could wait for some more time. The mails were from my sales team, service delivery team, customers, calenders and so on. For me all looked same until somebody rang to my phone and told me that I messed up in one of the mail communication.

I was really frustrated and was looking for some magic to happen. I even decided to close down my email address, I even searched one in gmail but did not find any.

Another fine morning, I was introspecting where I was going wrong. What I found was that there was "lot of clutter" in front of my eyes when I open my inbox. I clearly knew that I just want to read "urgent and important" mails first whenever I look my inbox.

So I turned on to google labs and found a life saver feature of gmail called "Multiple Inboxes". What I first did is to enable this feature from my Gmail --> Settings --> Labs and then route all the unread to the top Inbox. It helped me a bit because I had all my unread mails in front of my eyes. But still my unread mails kept on increasing and many time over shadowed my other important mails.

Then I realized another important thing, that for many of the mails like alerts from calender, alerts from social networking sites, webinar alerts, I used to follow same pattern ie read and mark them read. It suddenly gave me a instant idea and I labelled my mails into two classes: Alerts and Non Alerts. Now I could just see all the alerts in one click and either create events in my calender or added to my task list and then mark them either read or deleted.

Offcoarse labelling into Alerts and Non Alerts is continous process as new kind of mails will keep on coming but as I find new kind of mails that make to do same pattern of action every time, I use to label them so that I could follow same pattern on multiple mails at a time.

Other useful features of gmail that helped me to manage my mails are:

1. you can view calender, tasks, documents along with your mails. check out Settings --> Lab

2. you can add event into you calender via mail. check more actions

3. you can send invitation in your mail while replying or forwarding

4. you can add a email into tasks and assign date to each task

I also follow following guidelines in my email communication:

1. Always acknowledge a mail within a day. If you have not finished the task what was supposed to do, just communicate that too.

2. Keep the mail unread until acknowledged.

3. Be friendly in mails and each mail is an opportunity to build relationship.

4. One phone call is worth 10 mails. know mail limitations.

5. Wherever possible, always says thanks to conclude the mail thread.

In summary, by removing "clutter", label mails as per pattern of actions and continuous labeling had made my life easy by better managing my mails.

What about you?

In general, the approach have two important concepts; spatial display of emails, actions you perform on emails.

Spacial Display of Emails

The mails should be displayed to you as per their priority (define your priority). The are following type of priorities,

1. Urgent & Important:
2. Non Urgent & Important:
3. Urgent & Non Important
4. Non Urgent & Non Important

I feel that all the "Urgent and Important" mail should be displayed on most visible part of your inbox, preferably requiring no scrolling.

Most of the mails have following states based upon your actions performed:

State 1: Unread

State 2: Read but not replied

State 3: Read & Replied but need to take action

State 4: Read, Replied, taken first action but need to keep track of mail chain.

State 5: Deleted

State 6: Archive

Important Heuristics:

1. The most important thing is that your unread (State 1) "Urgent & Important" mails be always be in front of your eyes. You can use multiple inboxes to filter and display "Urgent and Important" mails always at the top.
2. There will be some mails that can automatically be categorized into above four categories for example emails from your customer should go to urgent and important, alerts from social networking sites should go to urgent & non important (offcoarse it is controversial :) and I am going to make some guys very disappointed). You can use filters and labels to categorize these mails automatically.
3. Action based categorization of mail. Generally I read all the social networking alerts mails in once glance and mark all of them read in two clicks.
4. The categorization is continuous process and you should do it atleast once a week.

Where new technology can help?

New advance technology can help in better email management in the following ways:

1. Automatic labelling based upon your history of patterns of actions that you perform on eac mail, contacts, subject etc.
2. Context aware email system based upon my preferences, interests and profile.

Colorful Angle: Pictures of the Week: 8 May 2010

Sometimes life ask for an escape, an escape from day to day work, places and same way of looking at things. Sometime colorful way of looking at things can bring wonders and fresh energy to same old work, place or environment.

This week pictures try to convey the same.

Black and White: Pictures of the Week: 3 May 2010

Probably it is law of nature that everything has always two sides: Heads and Tails, Black and White, Christ and anti-Christ, Positive aspect and Negative aspect. Similarly, every opinion has two sides, my side and your side. Every problem also has two sides, the problem itself and the hidden opportunity. Many times we get biased with only one side of looking at things.

The theme of this week pictures try to inspire to always look at other side of the picture as because then the picture will be complete and more beautiful.