Yesterday I described how I managed my to-do list in the early days of email. Some of the workarounds I came up with were no longer necessary after my company migrated to Microsoft Outlook because the developers of Outlook included nifty features that allow users to convert emails into tasks and manage them as part of their overall to-do list…
Category: Productivity
My Email Management Saga – Part 1
When I was in my 20s I had a steel-trap memory, but that started to change in my 30s. As my memory became less reliable I felt increasingly at risk of embarrassing myself by forgetting to do something I had promised to do. That made me intensely interested in learning how to keep track of everything I was responsible for without relying so much on my memory…
Ubiquitous Capture
I blogged last week about Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a book of advice for would-be writers. I finished reading it yesterday. One chapter that resonated with me, called “Index Cards,” describes how Lamott jots down any observations or insights that might later inform her writing. “Whenever I am leaving the house without my purse…”
Ike Was a Life Hacker
This week I started reading John Dickerson’s new book, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency. I’m enjoying it. One of the insights Dickerson offers early in the book is that Dwight D. Eisenhower was what we would today call a life hacker. “He thought about not just what he did but how he did it,” Dickerson writes, “and developed systems to make himself more efficient.” . . .
Dealing with Email Overwhelm
For several years my retirement gig involved showing knowledge workers and executives how to use little-known features of Microsoft Outlook to better manage their email and organize the large number of action items that arrive in their email inbox. Yesterday one of my former clients pointed me to a video demonstration of a new product…