As you all know I use ClearContext’s Outlook Addon to help me manage my email… and below you will find a snippet of an article and a link to help with the management of vacation email.  If you don’t use ClearContext I would encourage you to take a look while you are there… they have a free version that you can download to give it a try.  Once you’ve gone ClearContext you won’t go back… at least I never did!

“Here are some tips to help you cope with an avalanche of email after a vacation:

Use ClearContext’s AutoAssign rules to quickly categorize and file messages. We all receive informational messages from the usual suspects; email that we like to review such as newsletters and company updates, but is not time sensitive. Upon your return, create some rules to quickly file newsletters, bulk mail, non-critical corporate updates, etc.. Put them out of the way and review at your leisure after you’ve had the chance to catch up on your important email.

Delete or file unimportant messages. After you’ve cleared out the informational emails, use ClearContext’s Prioritized view to see your email listed in priority order. Utilizing CC’s default scoring parameters, the gray messages at the bottom of your Inbox can almost certainly be deleted with little or no review – all of these emails are from unknown senders, are not addressed directly to you, and are likely spam. If you’re worried about bulk deleting, move them to a review file for consumption after you’ve had the chance to…”

ClearContext Corporate Blog: Vacation Email Triage.

In my workbook I created a worksheet called phrases that simply consist of a motivational phrase on each row.  You can have as many of them as you want.  I then went into the VBA Editor (Alt+F11) and inserted this little snippet of code into “This Wookbook”.  Now each time I open the workbook I get a random phrase off of my phrases worksheet.

Photo courtesy of: tinyfroglet

Private Sub Workbook_Open()

   Dim MyValue

      With Worksheets(“PHRASES”)

         LR = .Cells(.Rows.Count, “A”).End(xlUp).Row

         Randomize

         MyValue = Int((LR * Rnd) + 1)

         MsgBox (.Cells(MyValue, “A”)), vbOKOnly, “Thought of the Day”

      End With

End Sub

Email is my nemesis.  I use tools like Clear Context and Xobni to help me manage the email that I have but it still seems to be absolutely overwhelming at times.  In my blog perusals today I found a great article on Dr Dewett’s Weekly Column entitled Feeling Bogged Down by Your Email.  The strategies he outlines all make great sense…

1. Send Less Receive Less
2. Say Less to Say More
3. Sort Email Using the 80/20 Rule
4. Ask to Opt Out of Some Lists
5. Manage your Email Time Explicitly
6. Put the Burden on Them
7. When in Doubt – Save!

I do many of these today and let me tell you from an experience standpoint #1 and #5 have been huge in getting through the piles of email that I receive.

Take a look at his posting and if you’ve got other ideas and advice to offer I would love to hear it!

It was pointed out to me by a reader via email that I haven’t really kept you all in the loop with my Xobni saga… So this brief post will hopefully get you all up to speed and give you some insight of what I am working through and still hope to get resolved.

Unfortunately, I still have Xobni uninstalled.  There are two primary hurdles that still present themselves which I am currently unable to get past on my primary work machine.

First, I periodically use a Satellite connection through a VPN to connect to our corporate email Exchange server.  When I operate in that environment with Xobni installed, my Outlook become unbearably slow.  What is unbearably slow… well let’s just say that I could type a complete sentence pick up the phone, look up a phone number and dial that number and when I look at the screen the sentence will not be visible in its entirety.  (In all fairness to what I consider to be a great application this slowdown does not seem to exist on my high speed (DSL) connection when connected through our VPN.)  Since I spend about 40-50% of my time in that satellite environment I can’t deal with the extreme slowness.

Second, is that I still have the issue of improper shutdown of Outlook.  This causes corruption in my mailstores which take absolutely forever to rebuild when I restart Outlook.  Things that I have tried to do to resolve this problem…

Archive messages – I have nearly 100,000 messages and I have now broken them all into separate mailstores by year to get their file sizes down.

Upgrade to Outlook 2007 – Recently I made a change to Outlook 2007 thinking perhaps there may have been an issue with 2003 an the interaction with other applications.  (I had another selfish reason – I wanted the ClearContext beta and right now it only runs on 2007)

Rebuild the mailstores with ScanPST – I have rebuilt each and every one of the mailstores (archives included) thinking that any errors that would be found and corrected may ultimately resolve the shutdown problem.

Uninstalled other Outlook applications – This would include my most favorite application of all ClearContext.  The problem doesn’t seem to be tied to addons because I had the same result.

In fairness again, you should know that I have a second machine that I use for personal mail and it does not have this Second problem.  I don’t carry this machine up to the lake house so I have no idea if it has the first.

I have been in email contact with the Xobni support department on these issues and have tried multiple things believing that there may be a solution in place.   Support for the most part is quite responsive unfortunately they just can’t seem to figure out how to resolve these two showstopper issues for me.

So the bottom line for me is to periodically install the app and see if I am able to close down Outlook without either a C Runtime error or an Outlook error indicating that things didn’t close properly.  Once I consistently get shutdown happening then I will try it on the Satellite connection.

On a side note, even though I have these two problems I would encourage you to try Xobni if you haven’t.  The search capability is absolutely incredible, and the contact information and management is what Outlook should have done!

They just entered into open (non-invite) beta so the application is available to all.  (Make sure that if you experience either of my two problems that you let their support department know about it!!!)  You can see their press release here or better yet just go to the Xboni website and download it.

1. Shut off auto check
2. Pick off easy ones
3. Write less
4. Cheat
5. Be honest

When you are there you might also check out the little Related area just to the right of the article.  You will find a couple of other great nuggets of email productivity information there as well. 

Remember that email should be a tool that enables communication.  What I am finding in this day and age is that while people certainly communicate it is becoming ever more difficult to get things done as you read through the avalanche of email with useless, unnecessary communication. We’ve reached communication overload because it is so easy now.   Stay productive by incorporating a few of these useful tips.

I recently read an article on Itzy Sabo’s – Email Overload blog called Nagless Reminders.  The strategy that he outlines is actually great!  Rather than send a reminder of a committed deadline making you a "nag" simply reply sometime near the deadline with a "Thank You".   The key here is not replying immediately but replying near the deadline.   For example if you receive a commitment on Wednesday from someone to have something done by Monday, don’t thank them on Wednesday… thank them on Monday morning… the commitment just got pushed to the top of their list and you reminded them in a way that wasn’t "nagging".

That of course puts the responsibility on your to send the "nagless reminder".   You could simply create an outlook task to do this… chances are you already have a task in place for the item that needs to be completed anyway.  Something that I do is use ClearContext’s Defer feature.  When the commitment arrives I simply Defer it until I need to offer my nagless reminder.   This takes it out of my Inbox so I am not constantly reminded that I need to remind the person and "magically" it appears again when I told it to.  Productivity to the MAX.   I don’t forget about it and I don’t have to NAG the person I need to Thank for getting me what I need when they said they would.

In a nutshell, my environment – Outlook 2003 connecting to an Exchange server over a VPN (Virtual Private Network) periodically runs into a situation where when I close Outlook it would technically NOT close.   It disappears from my screen but if I look in the Task Manager the processes are still running.  To make matters worse when I would terminate Outlook (End Task) or do a shutdown, I would end up with a mailstore error that Outlook would want to rebuild the next time I started the program.   Have you ever had to rebuild a mailstore that has about 80,000 messages in it?  Let me just say that it is NOT a quick process.

Xobni tech support (Tyler) was quite helpful and indicated that they were aware of this error and were working to get it resolved.  He suggested that I uninstall until the mid-February time-frame when they expected they may have a fix, and apologized for Xobni’s bad behavior.

It’s a “Sad Day” because I had grown so accustom to the application being available to find people and conversations that I needed.  As I’ve said in previous posts Xobni has become part of my work-a-day world and not having it means that I will need to resurrect my prior searching and contact solution NEO (Nelson Email Organizer).  Neo is a great program in it’s own right, and one that I paid for years ago, it just isn’t integrated into Outlook like Xobni is and is missing some of the functionality that I’ve gotten used to. 

I’ve set an Outlook task for mid February, when I will once again go and download my newest web favorite, productivity enhancing application and hope that they’ve fixed my Outlook 2003 issues.

(Before you comment about upgrading to 2007 – Let me tell you I work for a corporation that has not certified that application for our use.)

In just today’s email I ran across the following types of email:

1. 1.  The email storm as I like to call it.  Someone has requested a piece of information from members of the team and rather than the members of the team just sending the information to the one that requested it they hit the REPLY ALL and send their piece of information to everyone that was on the original distribution whether they needed it or not.
2. The attach attack which occurs when again there is a large distribution of individuals and the sender attaches file after file after file to the email.  I had one today that had 9 MB of attachments that were sent to 12 different people and in reality only 3 of those people needed the attachments in the first place.   Wanna know where you disk space is going?  Look at all of those unnecessary attachments.
3. The Carbon copy the world email. This is one of my favorites.  It might also be called the CYA or Cover Your Ass email, or the hidden agenda email.  You find it most commonly in situations where there are issues or problems or things aren’t going the way the sender wants them to go so they try to get the buy-in or approval from anyone and everyone that they can think of.   The one I had today was addressed to me and had 11 carbon copies… and by the way it ultimately created an email storm.  Totally unnecessary and usually it doesn’t produce the results the sender had hoped for.
4. The Indecisively addressed email. It should be a general rule everywhere that if a message is addressed TO someone that this is the person expected to reply.  If you are a CC (Carbon Copy) the message is for your information only and if you feel you need to reply you should reply to the people in the TO and the person that sent it to you… (Don’t create an email storm)  Don’t send me an email with me as the CC and expect me to have any action items or tasks to do in that email.  When I’m the CC it gets much less attention.  Figure out who you are addressing and make the message TO them.
5. The storyteller… Email should NOT be your foray into novel writing.   Get to the point and make it early!  Don’t make me wade through paragraphs of history or dissertation to get to the final paragraph of what it is that you want.   Chances are if it is more than a couple hundred words it isn’t getting read!
6. The conversation stealer is another favorite of mine.  In this email you will have a subject line that is relevant to the message and a reply comes back but there is now an added subject or content in the body that is not related to the original thread at all.  It’s almost as if they feel as if they have your attention so now they need to unload all of the other things.   My typical response to these pieces of email are “Thanks for the reply and the information I needed about XYZ.  Regarding the others… please address them in a different email thread.”
7. The marketing mess.  In my email environment about 80% of my email is exchanged with INTERNAL employees.  The other 20% is with external contacts.  Marketing in their infinite wisdom seems to feel as if we need to let EVERYONE including all of our internal employees, who already know,  about the latest and greatest widget or upcoming conference.  Let’s all put tag lines and hyperlinks and images into our email signatures.  Talk about a waste of bandwidth.   Xobni or ClearContext if you are reading this maybe you can develop a way for us to remove things like “q1marketingimagesig.gif” from our mailstores.
8. The pick up the phone and call email.  These are the ones where you can see they are getting volleyed back and forth back and forth and the medium just isn’t helping the matter.  Pick up the phone or walk across the hall and discuss it.   If you’ve had to clarify yourself in email more than a couple of times you better do something different… the email method is NOT working.

And those were just in today’s email.  The sad thing is I am seeing the same ones day after day after day.  Perhaps we need to be licensed to use email and the Internet.  You pass a course and a test and you are a certified email and Internet user.  You can put letters after your name and everything.   Come on people let’s start thinking before we press the send button!!!

I think it is important as I continue this post that I point out that Xobni is still beta software.  As such a problem or two is to be expected… after all you aren’t a “beta tester” for nothing.  You are helping to identify the “bugs” to make a better product when it is finally released.

Overall, great experience with the tool!  The capability offered in the Search engine is absolutely amazing to me.  I am used to the Outlook 2003 searches where you put something into the search dialog tell it to find it and then come back after lunch and hope that it is finished finding what you are looking for.   With Xobni the second you start typing in the search bar results are being found,  and not just results in email, but results in your contacts and even on the web.  I am amazed at how quickly this search operates and it is every bit as good as the search that I have in NEO and I don’t have to load a new program in order to take advantage of it.  

I have been playing around with multi-level searching and so far my results have not been as promising.   An example of this might be that I know I received a message from John Doe.   I search for John… and then from the contact results I click on John Doe.  Xobni is now showing my all of my email conversations with John Doe and the files we exchanged as well as John Doe’s phone number.   What I would like to do is to then use the search box again but ONLY display results from my John Doe match.   I do not see this as an advertised feature anywhere but the way Xobni builds the windows it is just something I would have expected it to be doing.

Xobni has two features directly below the phone number.   One of them is to Email the person the other is to schedule time with the person.  On my version of Outlook both of these do the same thing.  I get a new email window popping up inside of Outlook and the contact information for the person is displayed.   The only difference between the two is the subject line.  I would think that since we are integrated to Outlook that if you wanted to schedule time with someone that it would open up an Appointment window rather than an email window.  I’ve left support an email related to this behavior.

When I first started using Xobni I kept forgetting about the Organize Tab.  Rather than having to shift over to the Task page in Outlook or the Calendar Page in Outlook you can just click on the Organize tab and on one screen you can see both of those pieces of information.  What I don’t particularly care for on this display is that you see all tasks and they are alphabetically sorted.   Most people I know do not manage tasks alphabetically.  I’m a due date kinda guy.  I haven’t been able to figure out how to get them into due date order and I have a few hundred of them.  Great however if you are looking for tasks for a specific person or customer because searching works here too.

I’ve run across a few other small annoyances but none of them are severe enough to make me want to uninstall the application.  I did that over the weekend and found that I missed the phone number, conversation and searching capability so much I had to re-install it.   I’m thinking they truly have a winner here and will probably have to pry it from my dead fingers now that I have grown accustom to using it.   You can check them out at their website…

Now when I need to start a new period of time or a new project I simply Add the worksheet(s) to my Excel workbook, go to the template worksheet, copy the entire thing and then paste the copy into the worksheet that I just added…. Very simple process. 

If you do this periodically and just with one worksheet it isn’t too bad to do it manually but if you find yourself needing to copy more than one and you are doing it regularly here is the snippet of a script that might give you some ideas of how you may automate this process.   This script is attached to a button called “Add Project” in my workbook and what it does is:

1. Prompts me for the next Sheet number to assign
2. Does a little bit of error checking
3. Copies my “Sheet Template” to a new worksheet and places it BEFORE Sheet99 in my Workbook
4. Changes the name of the worksheet to “Sheet##” using the number I entered above for ##
5. Places the number I entered in step 1 into the C6 cell
6. And then it protects the worksheet.
7. It then repeats the process using my “Info Template.

Sub NewWorksheets()
  Dim ans As String
  ans = InputBox(“What is the next sheet #?”, “New Sheet Number”, “”)

If ans = “” Then Exit Sub
  On Error Resume Next
  If Worksheets(“Sheet” & ans) Is Nothing Then
  ActiveSheet.Name = “Selector”
  ActiveSheet.Range(“D36″).Value = ans
  Sheets(“Sheet Template”).Copy Before:=Sheets(“Sheet99″)
  ActiveSheet.Name = “Sheet” & ans
  ActiveSheet.Range(“C6″).Value = ans
  ActiveSheet.Protect
  Sheets(“Info Template”).Copy Before:=Sheets(“Sheet99″)
  ActiveSheet.Name = “Info” & ans
  ActiveSheet.Range(“I3″).Value = ans
  ActiveSheet.Protect
 Else
  MsgBox “A sheet with that name already exists. Sheet not added.”
  Exit Sub
 End If
  On Error GoTo 0
End Sub

A very quick and painless process and I know that it is correct every time and that I have the values placed into the fields that I need them in.  Since I use this to keep track of individual project information I could be adding projects at any time and this script really streamlined the process for me.  You can also learn how to use HYPERLINKING to navigate through a workbook like this on my other post located HERE.