Zach Nielson recently had a helpful post on using email well. Most of the points go to the issue of what I would call “email etiquette.” Some of the best tips are: “don’t confront people over email,” “work to have a balance between email and personal contact,” “learn people’s style,” and “hesitate before hitting reply all.”
Most important: When sending to a large group, use blind copy.
We are accustomed to think of “doing our work” as involving simply one thing — the doing of the work.
In reality, there are five stages involved in getting our work done. Ironically, the actual “doing” of our work only constitutes one of the five stages. But if you don’t do the other four well, you won’t be able to actually do your work well, either.
These five stages are at the heart of the GTD process that David Allen outlines in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (see especially page 24). They are:
I won’t go into great detail at this time, but here is a quick summary of each of these stages.
First, you collect what has your attention. You take all open loops that are currently around you or on your mind and gather them into one spot (your inbox).
Second, you process what they mean by deciding what to do about them. This is what it means to go through your inbox (whether email or physical or an electronic inbox in a program like OmniFocus).
Third, you organize the results by putting any longer-than-two-minute actions on the appropriate list (or working file if you are handling email and the email itself will serve as the best action reminder).
Fourth, you review the options to decide what to do — that is, to decide “what’s best next.”
Fifth, you actually do. You work on the action item that you’ve decided.
It is important to keep think of these five stages as distinct. As Allen writes, “I have discovered that one of the major reasons many people haven’t had a lot of success in ‘getting organized’ is simply that they have tried to do all five phases at one time.”
A major theme of this blog is that productivity is not simply about making ourselves more productive, but making others more productive as well. Writing better emails is a big way that we can make other people’s lives a little simpler and a little better. And it will save us time as well.
Writing good emails means writing them in a way that makes it possible to understand your point right away. It means writing your email to have high impact with minimal time investment on your reader’s part.
The most influential resource on my thinking on this area is a book with the unfortunate title, The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You. Here are 3 principles for writing better emails from this book and some other resources I’ve read.
Make the subject line descriptive so the person knows right away what the email is about. Don’t use a headline such as “Interesting,” “Good Article,” or even just “Proposal,” because they don’t provide anything specific about the content.
Instead, a good subject line would be something like: “Proposal for New Hires in 2009.”
The very first thing should be a brief greeting, such as “Hi, Fred. Good job in the meeting today.”
But then move right to your point. State your point, as specifically as possible, in 1-3 sentences. If you have ideas that you want Fred to consider, for example, say that you have ideas for him to consider and state specifically (and briefly) what your main idea is.
Don’t just say “Fred, I have some ideas for you to consider,” and then spend 3 paragraphs getting to your main idea. Instead, state specifically what your idea is. For example, say: “I think we should consider hiring an additional widget manager next year because of the planned 23% increase in production. I am wondering what your thoughts are.”
After you’ve stated your main point, then provide the details.
This is key, so I’ll say it again: Give your main point, and then provide the background.
This is different from a detective story, or a novel, or any other type of writing where the discovery is part of the fun. With email, there isn’t time for this. And especially when doing work email, there is a business purpose to your email. You need to save the other person’s time by telling them your point right away, and then only after that providing the details in the event that they need to see things fleshed out more.
When providing the background, keep your paragraphs short. Wall of words are hard to read. Be short and to the point. And keep it relevant. Use bullet points when possible.
If the background section gets longer than a few paragraphs, it is a good idea to close by summarizing the action step(s) again.
Last of all, a word on forwarding: If you need someone’s opinion on something, don’t simply forward them a long email thread and say “what do you think?” Instead, summarize the main action you need from them right at the top, and then summarize the main point of the email thread.
Try to make it so that all the thread is needed for is to provide the details, if the reader feels that they are necessary.
One of the most helpful books I’ve read on organizing is actually Organizing for Dummies. It was comprehensive — it covers just about all areas — while also being very clear.
I don’t agree with everything in it (I differ from the approach she takes to filing in some ways, especially the categories). But there was one huge take-away from the book that applies to just about everything you have to organize.
This huge take-away is the acronym she uses for her organizing process. The acronym is P-L-A-C-E:
This process is really, really useful. And it doesn’t just apply to organizing space, like your garage. I implement a variation of it even when organizing ideas, websites, files, and so forth.
First, purge. Get rid of what is unnecessary. You don’t want to organize things you don’t need.
Second, “like with like” means to group like things to together. This is the principle of good writing we learned in high school English, and it applies to all forms of organizing. This is the central organizing principle of anything.
Third, access means that you put things you use more frequently to be closer to access than things you use less. For example, if you are organizing your kitchen, you probably have lots of hard-to-access spots. You put the pans you hardly use in those places, not the pots you use every day. Or at your desk: things you use every day should be at your fingertips, like an effective cockpit.
Fourth, contain. Don’t leave things scattered about, even when they are grouped. Contain them into contains. Drawer dividers in a drawer, plastic tubs in your basement storage, and so forth. And again, this is a broadly applicable principle. Web pages, for example, apply this principle. The various elements of a page are grouped, and then visual characteristics “contain” the various elements to help guide your eye and make the page easy to process.
Fifth, evaluate. When you are done organizing, step back, consider what you’ve done, and see if everything feels right. Change what can be improved.
I posted the other day on how to organize your RSS feeds. The other part of the picture is organizing your internet favorites.
By having both of these organized well, you can save a lot of time and make your online workflow more enjoyable.
As with my RSS feeds, I did an experiment about a year ago by not organizing them. I just left them in a long list (at that time in Internet Explorer), testing to see whether that would provide quicker and more direct access.
What I found was that I had to spend a lot of time hunting through that list for the bookmark I wanted.
So I’ve concluded that it is indeed more effective to organize your bookmarks. However, you need to do it right. This is a basic principle in regard to all filing: if you don’t create the categories right, you won’t want to use them.
But if you do create the categories right, you’ll not only find that things are easier, but will probably find that it creates additional insight and creativity. (Strange, but true: It makes you ask: what’s missing?)
Here are three other benefits of organizing your bookmarks:
For example, if I need to pay my credit card bill, I go to my “financial” category and click on my credit card site. Then I might want to check the latest news, so I just click into “news” and then one of my news sites (yes, even with RSS I still sometimes visit the actual sites). Then I can quickly go over to my “workflow” category and bring up the dashboard for my blog to write a post, then to my “travel” category to hit Expedia and book a trip I have to take, and so forth. It’s all very quick and easy.
I actually find it kind of fun to have all of the bookmarks of my most-used sites right at my fingertips. It’s enjoyable to be able to have them all at immediate access and to quickly jump over from one category of site to another, as needed.
I realize that subscribing to the RSS feed usually is the best way to do this. But there are still some sites that work best by actually visiting them. By having my bookmarks organized, it keeps it on my mind that there are various types of sites that I want to keep visiting, and it does this without cluttering my interface.
For example, I came across the site Innocentive last spring. It is an idea marketplace where “organizations with challenging problems” can connect with “smart people with creative solutions.” It provides a supplement to the traditional R&D approach by utilizing the extend “smart world” to help solve business problems.
Great idea. So I want to keep up with how the site and works and come to understand it a little better. I don’t just want to go look at it once and then forget about it. Having it in one of my bookmark categories ensures that once in a while I’ll remember to go back to the site and take a further look.
I mentioned above that a lot of the usefulness of this comes down to using the correct principles of classification in creating your categories. I’ll be doing future posts on setting up files well, so I won’t go into that here. For now, here are the categories that I group my bookmarks into:
Here are a few notes on the categories:
“Workflow” is where I put the online tools that exist for accomplishing the primary tasks of work and life. For example, it contains my links to: Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Analytics, my blog, the admin panel for my blog, and a few other things.
“DG” is where I put online documents or websites (Basecamp projects, etc.) pertaining to my job. Now, one might ask why “Google Docs,” for example, is not in “DG,” since I mostly use that for work. The reason is that the stuff in “workflow” is mostly platforms that can be used for work or life. Stuff in my work folder (DG) is stuff that is specific to my work.
The “Projects” category is at the end is for temporary bookmarks that are relevant to a project I’m working on. It’s a good working place to put stuff that I need to access a lot for a project, but which I then can get rid of. Sometimes that stuff might just go well in my work folder; it really depends on how I want to use it and how much I need a certain project’s stuff kept all to itself for ease of use.
The rest of the categories are probably pretty self-explanatory. But there are principles behind these groupings, which will be discussed in future posts on filing in general.
To create the categories, in Firefox go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks. Then create them by creating them as folders within the “Bookmarks Toolbar” folder. In Internet Explorer, go to Favorites > Organize Favorites and you can create the folders there. Once you’ve done this, move your bookmarks into the categories.
(I assume you will probably be creating some new categories as well, and not using some of the ones that I have. But hopefully the ones I’ve listed give you a good idea of how to do the categories.)
The key to making this work comes down to where you put the categories. You don’t want to have to open up that left sidebar to reveal your favorites.
Instead, you want these folders to be manifest in the bookmarks toolbar, which shows across the top of the page. I use Firefox, but you can do this in IE as well, and I think in Safari too (at least I hope you can if you are a Safari user). Here’s what I mean (I’m really sorry if the image is low quality; I think you can still get the idea):
The bookmarks toolbar is that line across the bottom with the labels “workflow,” “DG,” “family,” etc. When you click on one of those labels, the bookmarks in that folder reveal in a drop-down from there. It’s really handy.
To make the bookmarks toolbar display, in Firefox go to View > Toolbars and highlight “bookmark toolbar.” Now, all the category folders that you created will show up in the bookmarks toolbar across the top of the page.
In Internet Explorer, go to to View > Toolbars and select “links.” Then, make sure to also deselect the “lock toolbars option.” Now, you’ll see the word “links” show up somewhere up top in IE. Take that and drag it where you want it to go. When I look at my IE, it looks like it puts this on the same line as the menu toolbar. Make sure to drag it on to its own line and extend it across. Now make your favorites show on the left side (click the “star” that makes them show) and drag the folders up onto the links bar. Then you can close the favorites side bar and not have to use it.
Alternatively, if you’d rather just use the favorites sidebar in IE instead of the links toolbar, that might work out just as well. In Firefox I found this cumbersome because it treats the side bar a bit differently.
So now we see a way to organize online book marks in good categories and how to make those categories quick and easy to access.
As I’ve mentioned above, this is part of the larger question of filing in general. I’ll be doing posts in the future on how to set up your files. (Yes, even in the age of good desktop search, there is still a critical place for good electronic filing, as well as effective filing of paper-based stuff. Good filing is fun and effective!)
In my post yesterday on how to get your email inbox to zero, I encouraged readers to email me their questions on email and effective practices that they use. I’ll then do some posts next week answering the best questions and highlighting some of the best ideas from people.
A helpful way to illustrate my system might be to summarize how I use it to handle these email questions I receive so that I have access to them next week when I write the posts, but still have them in an organized spot in the meantime.
Here’s principle number one for me in this: I’m not keeping those emails in my inbox.
Those who read the post yesterday could probably finish this post today for me. What I did is create a new folder in with the “working folders” that I encourage people to have. The constant folders in there are “answer,” “hold,” and “read.” But you can also create temporary folders in there for support material that you need to keep on hand for a bit, or which you need to collect for a task in the coming days.
So I created a folder called “WBN Questions” in in with my other working folders. Whenever I get a question, I send a quick thanks to the person and then move the email into that folder. Next week when I write the post, I’ll go into that folder, review the questions again, pick the best ones, and write my post.
When I’m all done, I’ll delete the emails (though I never permanently empty my deleted bin, so I’ll still have them on file), and then delete this temporary support folder.
[UPDATE: The content of this post has been updated and turned into a PDF article.]
It’s possible to get your email inbox to zero every day, even if you get 100 emails a day.
And it’s not super complicated, though it does take effort and some discipline. But I don’t think lack of effort has been the main problem. I think the main problem has been not knowing how to manage email effectively.
Many people have simply never been taught the best practices for keeping email under control. For example, we can quickly fall into the trap of using our email inbox as a small to-do list (really bad), and sometimes we even end up using our inbox as a holding tank for major project items (far worse). The result is that we go through our days with a sense of having a thousand “open loops” continually before us.
The goal of this article is to outline some very simple practices that will enable you to manage your email in a way that is effective, simple, and maintains a sense of relaxed control. You should be able to take this article and use it to get your inbox from whatever point it is—even if it’s at 15,000 emails—and get it down to zero.
It shouldn’t take too long (if you have 15,000 emails, maybe you should just delete everything more than a month old and start over!). And you’ll be able to keep it there. Or, at least, if you don’t keep it there, it won’t be because you don’t know how.
We’ll cover a 5-part process for getting your email inbox to zero and keeping it there. The five areas are:
(Here’s a pdf of this article for those who prefer reading in that format.)
I just posted above a detailed article I’ve written on how to get your email inbox to zero every day. The process works really well. I find it entirely doable to get my inbox to zero at least once a day, with the exception of days when I’m away from my computer or when I shut email down to focus on large projects, and in spite of receiving some pretty complicated emails.
(Although this doesn’t mean that there are never any days, or weeks even, when you need to let things go completely haywire, or just say “enough!,” which I think is just fine from time to time — more on that in future posts.)
Now, the article certainly doesn’t answer all questions that can arise. In addition, I’m really interested in hearing what approaches you have found effective in dealing with email.
So here’s what I think will be most interesting of all:
- Send me (or put in the comments) your questions on email. Send the toughest ones you can think of, especially anything that has been a consistent snag to you, or any unanswered questions from the article. I’ll then do a post next week giving my answers to the most puzzling and most helpful questions and we can also discuss them further in the comments if desired.
- Send me (or put in the comments) some of the email strategies and tactics that you’ve found most effective, and I’ll feature the most interesting or useful ones in some posts.
The redesign of any ministry website presents the organization with an incredible opportunity. It is an opportunity to serve the body of Christ by providing abundant and easy-to-access content and an opportunity to provide a foundation for more effectively accomplishing the goals of the organization. The way to make the most of this opportunity is to make sure that the outcome of this redesign is an effective website that is built on the basis of sound principles.
Why Is an Effective Website Important?
An effective website lies at the foundation of organizational effectiveness. In a real sense—at the human level—the success of any ministry today depends in a large measure upon the success of its website. Successful organizational strategy can no longer be carried out apart from an effective website and an intentional web strategy.
The reason is that, in this day and age, the web has become the main way people interact with and experience many organizations. This is even more true for teaching-centered ministries, as the internet has become the primary way people obtain, use, and share the content that these organizations provide. The more effective a website is, the better the experience website visitors have with the organization, and the more motivated they will be to spread its message and content to others.
What Makes for an Effective Website?
When most people think of a “good” website, they think first—and perhaps exclusively—about its graphic look. If a site looks nice, it is considered a success. But web experts such as Jakob Nielson, Steve Krug, and others have shown that the graphic look of a site is not the most important factor.
This comports with experience. We have all been to sites that look nice but are nonetheless frustrating to use. Specific information that we can reasonably expect to be available on the site is difficult to find, or the navigation tools are confusing and therefore inefficient. Despite an attractive look, such sites provide a negative experience, making us disinclined ever to visit the site again.
An attractive look is certainly very important, and any ministry’s new site must look great in order to serve visitors and reflect well on the gospel. But no one visits a ministry site primarily for the aesthetic experience. Your visitors are focused, goal-oriented, and likely quite busy. They want to identify as quickly and easily as possible—and at whatever level of detail may concern them—what can be found at the site and how to find it. In other words, they are interested in what has been shown to be the single most fundamental component of an effective website: usability.
Websites exist to be used. Sites that are easy to use enable visitors to accomplish their goals more effectively and with less frustration. Ease of use creates a more pleasant experience for visitors, makes them more likely to return, reinforces the credibility of your brand, and makes it more likely your visitors will share your site with others.
Graphic design does not create ease of use. It builds upon ease of use. Absent good information architecture and an adherence to sound principles of usability, attractive graphic design is insufficient and ineffective.
An effective website, therefore, is created when good graphic design is joined to high usability. Most of us recognize good graphic design when we see it. But usability is not nearly so well understood.
In essence, usability comes from (1) good information architecture, and (2) adherence to sound principles of usability and layout. Information architecture has to do with the way the site is structured—what the main sections of the site are, what the sub-sections are, what categories are used to group the content, and so forth. The primary importance of good information architecture cannot be overstated. In allowing a visitor to find his way around the site easily, good information architecture keeps him from getting lost (one of the worst of all sensations on the web), keeps him oriented, and enables him to move easily and confidently from one place to another.
Good information architecture reveals your content so that it can be maximally accessed; more than that, it interprets your content. Particularly at the levels of Topic (e.g., Atonement) and Resource Type (e.g., sermon, article, poem, etc.), solid information architecture provides the visitor a grid for how to think about your content, thus enabling him to find, understand, and remember it better. Sites this easy to use are returned to frequently and talked about widely.
Good information architecture, however, is not achieved by organizing a site according to what “seems best to us.” Rather, there are established principles of classification and organization that assure effective architecture. Likewise, there are also general principles of usability and design that reveal and govern how to build the mechanics of a site correctly. These principles of usability and design are the second component to making a site usable. As a few examples: site navigation should always highlight the section the visitor is in so that he can tell at a glance where he is; every page on the site needs a title; only links should be underlined; and “click here” should never be used. Defining these principles (along with some 100 others like them) and following them in the creation of the site pages, is essential in creating an effective, usable website.
While I disagree fundamentally with the perspective Obama has taken on the three core issues of economic policy, foreign policy, and social policy, it is also important to acknowledge that he ran a very smart campaign and should be congratulated for that.
And far more important than that: It is not necessary to fully agree to also very gladly acknowledge the historic importance that, for the first time in our nation’s history, an African-American has become president.