How clear is your in-box? If you’re a fan of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” approach (or GTD, for short) you know how important it is to keep clutter out of your in-box. And… If you use GMail’s “priority in-box” feature — it’s easier than you think.
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The Roche Group — a big player in the healthcare industry — has made the decision to take all of its 90,000 employees into Google’s cloud. These folks have an enormous IT budget, lots of talended people on staff, and still they had complications and glitches that got in their way. Collaboration and communication was problematic. To quote the original blog post: For the last two and a half years, our two different email and calendaring platforms have often been an obstacle for effective collaboration. To end these platform interoperability issues, the Roche Corporate Executive Committee made the decision that [...]
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If you’re a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to getting a handle on the wild ride that is your life, or even Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero, then you know how important it is to keep your attention on task, and not let urgent-but-unimportant interruptions run your life. Here are a few steps you can take to gain control of your in-box in pursuit of more effective use of your time.
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Gmail presents a flood of related messages all tied together in one conversation, chronologically. Before you scroll down and manically start hitting ‘reply’ first make sure you’re not responding to the middle of a conversation that’s gone on lots longer than you realized! There’s a trick to making sure you’ve seen all the messages in a conversation so that you don’t reply to message 37* if message 43* has already addressed the issue.
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Sometimes you get an email that’s directly to you and to nobody else. That kind of message tends to require a different level of attention than one that comes to you as part of a wider distribution list, like a newsletter or an email support group. And somewhere in-between are those messages where you’re directly addressed, but so are others, either in the TO: or the CC: fields. Sure would be great if you could distinguish these types of messages at a glance…
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If you’ve discovered the different in-box styles that Gmail provides, you’ve probably wondered about this “importance” stuff Gmail keeps babbling about. That is, Gmail flags some messages as important, and presumes the rest are unimportant. What gives?
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There are several ways Gmail can display your inbox. Try them all!
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Sometimes you can have a conversation in Gmail that has dozens and dozens of messages… but only a select few are really important to you. How do you make it easy to find those when you look for them later?
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GMail — the catchy name for Google’s Web Mail — is designed to be easy to use, and highly functional. If you use Microsoft’s Outlook, you should take a look at GMail. GMail has many strengths, including tight integration with Google Calendar, simple synchronization across all your devices, it’s accessible from anywhere, you get great collaboration features and tools, and lots more… Here’s a quick run-through to give you a taste for GMail.
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Large organizations often have the resources to handle their own server farm with its own climate control, hardware configurations and networking issues. For the rest of us who work in small teams — family teams, business teams, religious teams, friends — there are Cloud services: that’s where professionals handle all the infrastructure nightmares, and you can piggyback on their expertise, letting them handle the headaches. There’s a good chance folks just like you — neighbors, allies, competitors — are already taking advantage of Cloud services. If you’re wondering how your competitors and allies are benefitting from the Cloud, here are some examples.
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