escape to insanity

Being part of a corporate environment, you quickly find out just how easy it is to get inundated by e-mail. Especially when you work in a role directly involved with your company's website. Those sort of people are the ones more likely to use e-mail as their primary form of communication. At least that's the case on my team.

Some of the people in my department (and in all likelihood elsewhere in the organization as well) are so overwhelmed by the quantity of e-mail they receive on any given day that they're literally days behind on reading their e-mail. (so much for Inbox Zero.) These are the people who you begin to assume will never read your e-mail, or will read it well after it's lost any sort of relevance.

My former boss (who recently resigned to spend more time with her family, and whom we wish well) was one of those people. If you sent her an e-mail and walked down the hall to chat with her about it, it was likely already pushed down past the bottom of her screen by the deluge of other messages she'd received in that 15-second timeframe. She was that busy that any message to her had to be as absolutely concise and short as possible - anything over a sentence or two would never be read in its entirety. She simply didn't have the time for it.

To that end, I've worked from day one on crafting my e-mails (regardless of recipient) under the premise that she would have to read it. I'll type up a message as fully as I think it needs to be, containing all the relevant detail. Then I'll cut it to half its length. That's right, half, if humanly possible. If it still looks like she wouldn't read it, it gets cut in half again. I'll try to stick to five sentences or less if I can.

I've also recently started prefacing my subject lines with shorthand designations. (Sidenote about subjects - for the love of all that is holy, please, make sure that your subject lines are descriptive. You have no idea how many e-mails I get every day that have been forwarded for weeks, where the discussion has changed course three dozen times but the subject line hasn't once changed.)
If I'm asking a question where I specifically need an answer, I'll generally preface the subject line with [ ? ]. If I'm sending something I consider particularly urgent, in addition to marking it “important” within Outlook, I'll preface the subject with [ ! ] (yes, I realize this is redundant, but this gets used more when I have to send a message from our web-based content software, which only allows a subject and a message field.)

Then of course there are the more standard methods like using EOM, and the suggestion of using NRN for “No Response Needed.” The catch is that your recipients need to understand at a glance what these acronyms mean — otherwise they're completely invalidated — but once you get past the learning curve it may be worth it. My question is, are there any other useful e-mail tricks you use or have heard of to make communicating more efficient?

I'm genuinely curious what others are using or have found useful.

I’ve tweaked the code to my del.icio.us bookmarklet a bit, and thought it may be worth sharing if anyone else is interested.

The default bookmarklet is just fine as is, but many of the times I’ve saved a link, I wanted a way to auto-populate the notes field with some text from the source page, and the only way to do that was to copy and paste into the new window. This tweak lets you highlight some text on the page, and once you click the “post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet, that text will be automatically inserted in the “notes” field for del.icio.us.

It’s a very simple tweak, and I know I’m just lazy for needing or wanting it, but hey. Lifehacks are about coming up with solutions to eliminate or automate a task you do repeatedly, and this does that.

Drag this link to your bookmarks folder or toolbar: post to del.icio.us

I just made one of the geekiest purchases of my life. And given the fact that I currently own a shirt that says “geek” on it (and nothing else - just that word), that’s a pretty telling statement.

Anyone that knows me in person, or knows enough about me online to have a pretty good guess at my general interests, knows that I’m a big fan of Battlestar Galactica. I’ve been watching it since the original mini-series event, and been hooked just as long. It’s an amazing show. If you haven’t seen it, DO IT. There’s only four seasons (we’re in the middle of the fourth and final season right now) so you can easily catch up, unlike shows like “Friends” which ran for something like 73 and a half seasons. Or “ER” which is apparently still running, despite no one giving a damn about it.

Anyway… yeah. I was browsing through ThinkGeek and found one of the coolest poster sets ever.

Battlestar Galactica Propaganda Posters:

A rolled set of 5 posters, 22″ by 17″ printed on heavy 100 pound satin-finish paper, each depicting a motivational phrase and inspirational graphic designed specifically to keep humans alive, wipe out toasters, and keeping our Vipers aloft.

Hells yeah.

In the style of WWII-era propaganda photos, and with the clipped octagonal shapes to boot. I can guarantee these posters will be proudly hanging in my apartment for all to see. I am not ashamed of my geekiness.

So say we all.

(Photos will come as soon as I get the posters delivered and hung.)

Update (6/8/2008): the posters arrived in the mail yesterday! They’re currently laying unfurled on my kitchen table, flattened and anchored by a handful of books. Once they flatten out, I’ll start mounting them for display.

Update (6/9/2008): they’re pretty well flattened now. I’ve got some preliminary photos on Flickr:

I’ve been getting really into del.icio.us lately. If you haven’t heard of del.icio.us, well then… after you’ve extracted yourself from underneath that rock, click that link. Immediately.

The basic premise of del.icio.us is to allow you to save your bookmarks from anywhere in the world. (Well, anywhere with an internet connection. It might be a little on the difficult side to use del.icio.us from the middle of the Gobe or in an Amish village.) But that’s not the end of it - it’s a social community in a way, because you can browse other people’s bookmarks and see what other people are saving.

I recently liberated all my bookmarks from the confines of my Firefox installation using an excellent extension called, cleverly enough, “Delicious Bookmarks.” It let me export all my bookmarks from one to the other and even auto-tag them according to what other people have used.

It’s really quite amazing sometimes what you can find when you connect to other people’s interests. I’ve discovered some great links - anything and everything from recipes to try, to DIY solutions to organization, to various memes, to… whatever. As time goes on, I’d like to get more active on here again, and I think del.icio.us will be providing the fodder for most of my entries.

That is, if anyone’s still reading this.

If you’re already on del.icio.us, please feel free to join my network. If you come across a link you think I’d find interesting, by all means share it. You can suggest links for me by simply tagging them with for:tigerblade and they’ll show up on my feed.

Happy bookmarking!

Spurred by Philip’s post inquiring as to whether he has OCD, I clicked through to the OCD Assessment survey.

A few quick radio buttons later, I had my survey completed and clicked the ‘calculate score’ button. Philip said he scored a 41, and had mentioned how he routinely physically checked his car windows to make sure they were secure, stacked his child’s school books in tidy piles, and cleaned his keyboard daily. With only a 41 to show for that (which falls under the category of “you’re probably alright”), I figured I had to be sitting somewhere under that number. Maybe somewhere in the high thirties?

Nope.

I got myself a shiny new score of 60. Yep. 60.

Your Score: 60
51 - 100 It is possible you have OCD and that it is affecting your life. We recommend that you carry out a full assessment (you could try our full version) or seek diagnosis from a mental health professional.

Well. That’s fun. I’ma go arrange something in descending order of width and color. And then wash my hands for an hour.

Ouch.

This was just from filling up my little Forester. I can’t imagine having to fill up the tank on a Suburban or a Hummer or one of those other road tanks. Time to get a bicycle, I think.

You may have noticed, but the site is pretty much completely different now. There’s a reason.

I’ve finally given up and switched to a pre-made, commercially available (well, open-source) blogging software package. Wordpress recently released version 2.5, the blogosphere went crazy, and I gave in. For almost three years (almost exactly three years, actually) I got by with my own custom-built, hand-written CMS, but… it just wasn’t enough.

The CMS I’d written myself had gradually evolved over time and had eventually gotten to be relatively respectable, all things considered. I had even been working on a new version, based very extensively off a test installation of Wordpress, that was going to blow the previous version of my own system out of the water. However… the injection of a real-life job and a girlfriend shrunk my spare time considerably, and every time I sat down to work on it I just couldn’t keep up the interest long enough to get anything real done.

So… here we are, Wordpress-ed out and everything. I’ll be playing with this extensively over the next few days or weeks, getting the hang of how everything works together. Eventually I’ll ditch the pre-made theme and write my own theme, but for now… enjoy. There may still be a few kinks to work out. We’ll see how it goes.

One of my e-mail addresses has started receiving more than a healthy helping of spam in recent days. I’m not really sure how, and it’s not important anyway. There are probably a few different ways it could have happened; it doesn’t really matter that much to me.

What does matter is that it’s happening, and that I want it not to be happening. So… in the interest of trying to stem the flow, I’m going to completely disable the account for now. I’m hoping that after a week or two of bounce-back undeliverable mail, somewhere along the line my e-mail address will get removed from whatever lists it made itself onto.

What that means is that anyone who has that e-mail as the primary address for me is going to need to get that updated. As of this coming Sunday 6 April 2008 - one week from today - I’ll be disabling my ‘admin’ e-mail. Most people I know should have some alternate form of contacting me - phone, or another e-mail address.

So… heads up.

See you on the flip side.

Found this article by means of the same way I find all other articles on the vast wasteland that we call the Internet. Through Newsvine. From Newsvine, I got to the Movies group, to an article about movie adaptations that should be stopped, to another article on the same site that seemed to be completely unrelated.

The article itself, and the video that accompanies it, are funny by themselves. But it's the comment thread that made me actually LOL. Yes, I laughed. Out loud. For reals. I give you, A Completely Nondescript Guy Firing A Gun Really Fast.

Paul over at boagworld.com has posted a Christmas appeal, and I want to pass it along to anyone who reads this but not that.

For a while now I have been supporting a charity run by a friend I grew up with. They run a orphanage and school in the heart of rural India (Chinnia Kalvarayan hills,Tamil Nadu). They take in kids that have no family left and teach many others who would normally have little in the way of formal education. They give these kids a chance to change their lives and to become something more. In fact they have been so successful that the children are starting to look at higher education. For example one girl called Rachel is now training to be a doctor in China even though she had never been on a bus let alone flown to another country.

The trouble is sending somebody to study as a doctor in China is expensive and they have more kids that want to do similar things. That is why I am after your money.

So come on. Be mindful of those less fortunate than you this holiday season, and consider donating some cash to help someone who needs it.

Here's a direct link to the PayPal page for donations: Christmas Appeal