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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.

You know I am always looking for productivity tips and tricks, particularly in the area of email since I am literally inundated with hundreds of them a day.  In the area of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) - 43 Folders shares their 5 tips.   Elegantly simple yet absolutely right on track…  I can honestly say that I practice all of these and with great success.   My favorite is 1 and 5.  Check less often and if you have no intention of doing anything with the email just file it! - either the circular file (ie. delete) or into a folder.

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.

Welcome to the March 8, 2008 edition of the email productivity blog carnival.

Email is a strange thing.  The more you send the more you get which causes you to send more and you end up in this vicious cycle where you can’t seem to get caught up.   If email is part of your work this can result in literally hundreds of email exchanges in a day.   The purpose of this Blog Carnival is to highlight what others are doing to become more productive with their email and to keep email as a friendly medium not something that you HATE to visit every day.

Email Etiquette

On my blog here - ProjectsPossible you will find the post: Email Overload and Reminders - The Nagless, Productive Way! This post highlights a real effective strategy of getting a response to things that you need without really looking like you are nagging the person that you are needing to get it from.   I use this one all the time.  It works great!

Email Utilities and Addons

This category lists posts that point us to other programs that we can install that will help us in our goal of increased email productivity.   They will fall into the categories of spam filters, information management, searching, indexing, or in some cases the email program themselves.

Spam is a nasty problem, but then so are all of those mailed pieces of junk mail that I never open and just toss into the recycle bin.  Nesher presents 30 Top Freeware Spam Filters as posted at Freeware Reviews.  This post also has some interesting statistics about spam.   Scroll to the bottom for the link to the 30 Filters.   I have used Spam Bayes and I find it one of the best out there. 

Nesher also presents another list: 40 Free Disposable Email Address Services to Fight Spam posted at Collection of the Web Freebies, saying, “The best way to avoid spam in your mailbox is not giving your address to the potentially spammers. Free disposable addersses will assist you to keep your address safe.”  I’ve never really considered this as an option because usually when I leave my email I am wanting a response back or something similar and I don’t want to have to go to a ton of different email addresses to find what I’m looking for.   Again the rateitall link is at the bottom of the page.

For those of you that use your email to make money, Robbie presents Money Talks: Using Autoresponders posted at MMS Make Money Online.  The purpose of these autoresponding programs is to make sure that when someone does send you an email that they receive some kind of information or exchange in return.   For example if someone is seeking general information they could send an email to a specific address and an autoresponder would send them a brochure.   Personally I think there is a fine line between a true autoresponse and spam.   Take a look there are a number of suggestions.  Some better than others for sure.

Email and Creativity

In this category our lone entry goes to Madeleine Begun Kane she presents Spam Haiku posted at Mad Kane’s Humor Blog.  You can’t take life too seriously and Madeline has done a great job in the area of Spam Humor.

Email Tips and Tricks

The Art of Personal Productivity presents How to Answer E-Mail Overload posted at The Bubble Planner.  The methodology mentioned here is very similar to what you will find with the Getting Things Done movement.   File It, Delegate It, Do It, or Defer It.

Our last posting for this month comes from Guy Patterson. If you use a Blackberry and Microsoft Exchange this How-To article provides you with the “need to know” information to get encryption working.  Blackberry & Microsoft Exchange Email Encryption How To - Nullamatix - Technology Made Simple posted at Nullamatix - Technology & Security Made Simple.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of email productivity using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: email productivity, blog carnival.

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 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.

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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