Projects Possible

Projects Possible has decided to host a Blog Carnival on Email Productivity. 

To set the stage I think it is important to understand what a “blog carnival” is.    If you look at the Wikipedia link you will see that a “blog carnival” is a blog event.  It is described a really nothing more than a collection of permalinks on a particular topic.  It is likened to a “magazine” in that the host, acting as the editor, compiles the stories into a post and lists all of the links to the blog articles that were submitted.  The readers of the post have a plethora of information at their fingertips on a specific topic, and the blog authors have a link back to their blog.

The Email Productivity Carnival is anticipated to be a monthly compilation of blog posts related to email productivity and email tools that increase productivity.  Submissions will be accepted through the last day of the month and then I will edit them and create a posting in the “Carnival” category on the Projects Possible blog approximately 1 week later.

Article or Post Suggestions:

• Reviews of software applications
• Tips and Tricks
• Email Etiquette
• Feature and Functionality of Mail Clients

The Email Productivity Blog Carnival is posted on Blog Carnival if you would like to submit links.   You can also submit links by clicking on the Contact link at the top of all of the blog pages.   Comments on this post might also work but there is no guarantee that I will get them included in every posting…

Check back around March 8th for our first posting…

In this day and age of email overload I find that I am having to contribute to the overload because individuals that I have exchange email or telephone calls with have committed to do something that invariably it gets buried in their hundreds if not thousands of email. Ultimately they forget the deadline unless I offer a gentle reminder.

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.

For those that have been tracking my progress with Xobni I have to say that today is a sad day.  After multiple attempts at trying to figure out if there was a way around my problem - nothing could be found - I really didn’t have much choice but to perform the uninstall. 

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.)

I get my fair share of email every day… currently in the 150 - 200 range and that is after they’ve gone through our corporate mail filters so that number does not include spam.   I use Xobni and ClearContext IMS as plugins on my Outlook in order to increase productivity and still I find that I have a difficult time getting my email Inbox to empty every day.  Certainly not for lack of trying but I am just inundated with what I would call poorly thought out, and carelessly constructed email messages.

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 posted about my initial Xobni impressions a number of weeks ago.  Recall that Xobni (zob-nee), inboX spelled backward, is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that provides you with nearly instantaneous access to “the most important information in your email”. This message is a follow-up to that message and provides more insight on my continued use.

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…

VOIP or Voice Over Internet Protocol is telephone service via your high speed Internet connection.   You basically sign up with one of the many Voice Over Internet Providers, they send you a piece of hardware that you connect to your network, you plug a phone into this hardware and like magic you have dial-tone.   Well at least that’s they way it’s supposed to work or at least they lead you to believe it will be that simple.

I’ve had experience with MULTIPLE VOIP providers including VONAGE, VoIPYourLife, Comcast, and now ViaTalk.  In all cases I’ve had issues that have obviously caused me to switch to some other provider.   I can’t help but wonder if I should just go back to my Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS).  At least with Qwest I never had to worry about picking up the phone and not getting dial-tone.   I didn’t have to worry about fading into never never land in the middle of a call to find out I had been talking to no-one for that past 3 minutes.  I didn’t have to worry about echo that was so bad I thought there were 3 of me on the call and I could have a complete conversation with myself and understand every word.  POTS, at least here in WA is quite a bit more expensive that VOIP, but the fact remains that I just seem to get much better quality of service.

So you’re probably asking yourself why does he have a VOIP line in the first place?  I love VOIP features.  Features that Qwest can’t give me.  I like Voicemail messages emailed to my Outlook Inbox as attachments or better yet as an RSS feed.  I love being able to configure simultaneous rings to multiple phone numbers for incoming calls.  On the fly configurable custom call routing is pretty cool.  (I always send 1800 and 1866 numbers to Voicemail.) Web based account management is also pretty cool. If I forget to forward my phone I just logon to a website and in a matter of seconds my calls are forwarded.   Taking your phone service with you is also pretty cool… You have a high speed Internet connection and you are good to go.  And did I mention price?  POTS service is expensive and when you start adding all the features it gets worse!

VOIP today is much better than it was 3 years ago… VOIP tomorrow I’m hoping will get even better!  Until then I will keep what I have and complain diligently to tech support every time I have a problem.  Eventually they will figure out that they can use Configurable Call Routing and make sure that I always get a busy signal or get routed to Voicemail.

I stumbled upon the Xobni (Zob-nee) website when I was looking for email productivity tools.  After reading all of the pages, watching the video (see below) and signing up for the beta I was a bit disappointed that I could not immediately begin trying out what appeared to be a great tool.  They did however offer a “priority” beta and all I had to do was put their logo on my blog.  I’m thinking that they wanted to get links back to their site to increase their search engine rankings.   I finally got my invitation a few days ago and now I have an opportunity to comment on my initial impression.

The download and installation of the Xobni application was quick and relatively seamless.  Xobni does need to perform an initial synchronization with your email and on my machine with tens of thousands of pieces of email dating back to 2003 this process took about 35-40 minutes.

Once the installation was complete,  I had a new, minimizable window attached to my Outlook that was providing me with absolutely amazing analytical data about the emailer and other “associations” that are tied to the piece of email.

For this Initial Review I will highlight just a couple features that I have been using daily if not multiple times a day.   Remember my goal was efficiency and productivity and I can honestly say that in just one week’s worth of use, Xobni delivered!!! 

1. Search - As many of you know, I use 2 Outlook Add-ins.  I use Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) specifically for it’s Search capability.  What I don’t particularly like about NEO is that it really isn’t integrated into Outlook, it is a separate application that loads on top of Outlook.  With Xobni, I now have search capability available to me ALL the TIME in the Xobni side window.  Unlike an Outlook search, the Xobni search is also lightning FAST.  Additionally, the Xobni search results are displayed in a single pane and match not only email messages, but individuals as well.  Extremely impressive to me and in the first day of my installed Xobni I probably used that feature alone at least 2 dozen times. 
2. The Xobni email tab -  There are two tax on Xobni.  On this tab you get a graphical representation of when (times of the day) you exchange email with the emailer, other people who exchange email with the emailer, conversations being held with the emailer, and files that have been exchanged with the emailer.   This tab really helps see what is going on with the person.  In my first day of use I was able to determine if I had sent specific files to individuals that I should have sent to them.  
3. The Organize Tab in Xobni is like a small dashboard of what is going for ME in Outlook.  You will see on this tab section your Upcoming Appointments, and Tasks.  There is also a section at the bottom of the tab showing people that you haven’t emailed with recently so you can “stay connected”.

I must say, in just a few minutes of my beta review, Xobni is going to be an Outlook tool that I will NOT be able to live without.  It makes my email time so much more productive, but beyond that it really helps to make it more organized.  The toolset and functionality is something that I wish that ClearContext would have thought of so that I could get it all in a single interface.   Since they didn’t, Xobni is where I am at and I hope they are successful.  I know I will be a customer!  Get signed up to download the beta here.

As a project manager, I am always looking for great tools and utilities that will help me to become more productive and improve customer (internal and external) experience.

I know about the standard stuff that we use like Microsoft Project, Mindmapper, Excel, Outlook and the like.   What I would be interested in is hearing what you’ve found that you believe to be absolutely indispensable.  For example, I have posted reviews on an Outlook addin that I use called ClearContext IMS.  This tool helps me become a much more effective and productive email manager.    I’ve also posted about Excel and some of the things that I try to do with Excel to make me more productive.

 What do you do?  What little tricks have you found that help you out as you work on projects…  Share them with us!

There are a LOT of theories and ideas floating around to help with time management and productivity.  Classes and seminars are offered, books are published, and websites and blogs are posted all to try to help us better manage our lives.  For this author there has been no one method to help with time and productivity management.   In fact before I knew about these methods I was trying to come up with things on my own that many of these methods suggest.

In today’s posting I am going to give some insight on how I manage my projects using Microsoft Outlook, ClearContext’s IMS, Nelson’s Email Organizer (NEO) and Excel.   My goal has been to try to get everything I do that is work related consolidated into a single location and while Outlook is getting pretty close, my work environment requires some additional reporting structures that keep me away from my single trusted system.

For those of you familiar with Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, or Total Workday Control (TWC)by Michael Linenberger it is all about changing the way that we work.  This can be as simple as the little things like grouping like things together and working on them all at the same time to much more complex and time consuming changes like rebuilding your workspace, developing filing systems, etc.   The key for me was to latch on to an idea or two and work with them, integrate them into your life and then add more once I had mastered the ideas I was working on.

When I started managing projects I found rather quickly that the medium that people wanted to use for communication was email.  I quickly went from an email box of 20-30 pieces of significant email every day to 200-300 pieces of email every day.  Combine that with customer face time and limited access to email and I soon found I was not keeping up.  I needed a solution that could help me manage and find things much easier than I had in the past.   The solution I found at the time was Nelson Email Organizer.  This is a great tool and one that I use to this day for email searches and correspondent management right from within Outlook.  NEO It was my first attempt at managing each piece of email in my Inbox, giving it a home, and knowing and being comfortable with the fact that I was going to be able to find it again if needed.   Another KEY feature of NEO for me was the ability to search across multiple mail stores.  Remember that 2GB limit that Outlook used to have?  My solution to that was to create separate Archives and move messages into those archives.   The down side to that is the messages were no longer search-able in Outlook unless I loaded each of the archives one at a time and performed the search.  Because NEO creates its own set of indexes that are super fast, this restriction was removed and I could keep years worth of email and search through 10s of thousands of messages in a matter of seconds.

NEO and Outlook worked well for me for quite awhile but NEO didn’t help me with managing tasks and so I went on the hunt once again for web solutions for project management.  Ultimately I stumbled across GTD (Getting Things Done) and TWC (Total Workday Control).  Take a look at the graphic.  The concept with these systems is that as messages come into your inbox you need to make a decision about them.  Ask yourself if you need to do something with this email… If not you probably just need to file it away as a reference or better yet if it isn’t going to be needed just delete it. (NEO would help me with this so this was nothing new.)  The other side of the equation however is more difficult to deal with.  If I need to do something with it, what is it that needs to be done, who should do it, when should it be done, etc… all start entering into the picture.   As you can see from the graphic there really are 3 choices… I do it now, I delegate it to someone else, or I hold onto it until a future date.  It was something that hit me as being so simple yet almost unbearable to manage.  That is where ClearContext’s IMS product entered the picture for me.  With IMS not only are the non-actionable items manageable but the actionable items become manageable as well and all linked to the appropriate projects and people.  I downloaded it, installed it and I’ve never looked back.  Keep in mind that I don’t claim to be a GTD or TWC guru and I don’t do all of the things that I’m supposed to do nor will I probably ever do them all.  I don’t even use all of the functionality that exists within ClearContext’s IMS product (yet).  That isn’t the point.  The point is I use what works for me and as I fine tune my process I may also find I use more of their concepts or in the case of the software their tools. 

The last tool that I have started using pretty extensively is Excel.  I find that I can use it to keep track of a lot of information in an organized form and have at my fingertips information about each project that I use on a day to day basis.  With Excel I am able to streamline common project tasks information on the items that are repeated for each project that I work on.  The members at Excelforum  have really helped me in this end goal by helping me to create scripts that help me keep track of tasks that are completed, scripts that help me to create new task spreadsheets with limited numbers of key-presses, and most recently with a script that helps me to create Outlook tasks for each and every item  of a project that I need to be tracking.

While my methods are not perfect… the goal is and has always been to increase my productivity and reducing the amount of work that I have to perform.   I’m always looking for great new ideas so if you have any to share please do so.   In the next few weeks I hope to share with you some of the scripts that I use in my Excel workbook.  I also encourage you to read my reviews on ClearContext or better yet go to their website and download the application and give it a try.

By my own admission I am NOT a Microsoft Excel expert.  I know enough about the application to make me dangerous. 

I use Excel pretty extensively in my day to day work activities, and in my continuing effort to streamline my day I decided that I needed to add some functionality to my project management spreadsheet.  This spreadsheet has really become my single point of information for all of the projects that I work on and I wanted to enhance it even further by integrating it with Outlook.

The integration that I had in mind was to read through the TASKs that I have detailed in my Excel worksheet and IF there was a due date to create a task for me in Outlook using this date as the due date and various other information from the spreadsheet as my subject.   I certainly didn’t have the expertise needed to complete this task on my own so I headed out on the Internet to find a solution.

Google is a great thing! Within a matter of minutes I had any number of resources available to me from my search terms about Creating Outlook Tasks from Excel.   Many of them included quoted scripts that gave me a head-start on what I wanted to do but ultimately none of them quite met my specific criteria.  I decided what I should probably do is simply pose the question to the experts in some of the forums that Google was pointing me to.

Now keep in mind that your mileage may vary at these sites.  I’m simply telling you of my experience.  I’m sure with the thousands and thousands of posts that each of these sites have that either would be a good place to get solutions.

I went to http://www.excelforum.com/to start with.    This particular site had helped me a number of months prior with a question I had about populating a cell with a date when I clicked on a check-box.  Within a matter of hours I was up and running with the script that I needed to perform this task.  My Outlook task on the other hand did not get the same type of response.   I was provided with virtually the same code that I had found doing Google searches and when it came to customizing that code my post sat unanswered.

A few weeks later I decided that I would try to reinvigorate the project and again get on my trek to higher productivity.  I Googled again and this time I found a post at http://www.ozgrid.com/forums-  It actually had a few Google hits that led me to believe there were people there that knew exactly what I was wanting to do.  I can tell you that on this site you need to heed the warnings of reading the RULES. And that the rules are Strictly enforced.  You have plenty of opportunity because they are part of the main page, you hear about it in the registration, and even when you are ready to post.

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