Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

GTD: Inbox Zero email

GTD Inbox Zero email
If you have email (and the fact that you’re reading this means it’s highly likely you do), one of the best ways you could invest 59 minutes this weekend (or any time, for that matter) would be to watch the web video of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero talk, which he gave at Google late last month.

Merlin is the man(n) behind 43 Folders, a productivity blog that was among the influences that introduced me to David Allen’s Getting Things Done in 2005. After you watch this presentation, you’ll likely want to learn more about GTD, too. Merlin’s Inbox Zero section on his blog is a great resource, or you can go to David Allen’s site, or buy the book…or you can read more about my GTD experience here.

But this video is a great introduction to GTD concepts and their practical application, because it provides immediately useful tips for dealing with what is the single biggest time drain for “knowledge workers.”

Some of Merlin’s key points include:

  • Process your inbox to zero every time you check it. Don’t just check your email and leave messages in the inbox.
  • Think “verbs” with your email. You should do one of five things to every message in your inbox, and these are in order of desirability.
  1. Delete (or Archive for possible future reference in a single general reference folder)
  2. Delegate to someone else
  3. Respond quickly (five sentences or less, following David Allen’s Two-Minute Rule)
  4. Defer for later action
  5. Do it, or capture a placeholder for future action (put it on your calendar.)
  • Do not use your inbox as a to-do list. If you keep your inbox tidy, it won’t accumulate. If it starts to pile up, the pile continues to grow.
  • Develop The Processing Habit. Aristotle said “We are what we frequently do.” Getting at PDA doesn’t make you more organized. You need to actually apply the system on a routine, habitual basis. Make sure the system you implement is simple enough that you can regularly do it.
  • Do Email Less. Shut your email off for a while. Don’t have automatic minute-by-minute notifications. Check email once per hour at most, so you don’t have interruptions. Or, as Tim Ferris suggests, limit email to twice a day, at 11 and 4. I will have a post later about how Facebook can help make Tim’s tip more practical for people who need to be more immediately accessible, and for whom half a day delay in responding to messages is
  • Develop email templates for your responses. If you are answering the same things repeatedly, develop some core responses or boilerplate.

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Facebook: The Spam Killer

Facebook Spam killer

Some people love the canned meat produced in my hometown, but no one like its electronic namesake.

USA Today reports, well, today that the email spammers have developed a new trick in their mission to overwhelm and annoy us with their marketing messages, taking advantage of the formerly trustworthy PDF.

This is yet another reason why Facebook’s “astonishing” growth rate will continue. It enables people to create an alternate universe in which email spam ceases to exist.

If someone spams you in Facebook, you can “block” him, which is the opposite of poking. It says, “I never want to hear from you again. I don’t want you to search for me, or message me, or anything.”

This creates a powerful incentive for civility within Facebook. And it also enables Facebook users to get away from generic email and into a world in which nearly every message is a wanted message.

Like the federal “do not call” list that has made it possible for families to eat in peace without calls from telemarketers, Facebook’s system can enable you to get rid of much of the annoyance of junk email. And no anti-spam federal legislation was required.

This is one reason why college students don’t use email much. They mainly have it to sign up for Facebook, and to communicate electronically with old people. Jeremiah has a good discussion of Facebook supplanting email here.

This is another reason why Facebook will not only become acceptable for B2B communication, but will, I believe, become the preferred means for people to connect professionally without the clutter of generic Viagra ads.

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Free WiFi at Airports

free wifi at airports
In a previous post, I commended the Las Vegas airport for offering free wifi for its patrons, and also alluded to Rochester, Minn. providing the same. Today I’m in the Jacksonville, Fla. airport where the wireless internet also is free. Good deal!

That got me to thinking that there must be a directory on the internet someplace that has a listing of airports where the wifi is free. Sure enough, here is the free wifi at airports directory.

You might want to bookmark that page for when you are traveling, because this makes it a lot more convenient to get to the airport in plenty of time to get through TSA. With free wifi, you can arrive early and then continue working (or updating Facebook…I couldn’t break my string of mentioning Facebook at least once in every post.)

This becomes a GTD tip, too. It extends the range of places where your “@ Online” context is valid.

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Facebook: Covering the Planet in 5 years?

 Facebook covering planet

Newsweek’s cover story on Facebook has an interesting quote attributed to a company cofounder:

Karel Baloun, an engineer who worked at Facebook until last year, recalls vividly the baldly stated prediction of one of the company’s cofounders: “In five years,” he said, “we’ll have everybody on the planet on Facebook.”

Is that just a lot of hype? Let’s do the math:

According to Newsweek, Facebook has 35 million users today and has “an astonishing growth rate of 3 percent a week.” Assuming 35 million users as of 8/20/2007 and continued 3 percent per week growth compounding, that would project to 62 million users by the end of the year, 108 million by the time I turn 45 in mid-May and 162 million a year from now.

Let’s take it a little further. By New Year’s Day 2009, Facebook would have something over 285 million users, and would log its billionth account around October 22 of that year. User 2,000,000,000 would sign up on April Fools Day 2010, with the total reaching 3 billion by Independence Day, just a few months later.

If that weekly growth trend continues, Facebook would have 6 billion users in January 2011, which would make that cofounder prediction of blanketing the planet in 5 years come true.
Of course lots of factors could intervene to diminish Facebook’s growth rate. As the old prospectus boilerplate says, “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” But even if Facebook’s “astonishing” growth rate were cut by a third, to 2 percent a week, it would have 400 million users by January 2010.

Here’s a PDF of the Excel spreadsheet I used in these calculations.

Facebook Growth Rates

I also uploaded the spreadsheet to my Facebook profile using the file sharing utility MediaFire, so if you want to play with different growth scenarios you can friend me and then get the file yourself and plug in different rates.

At any rate (if you’ll pardon the pun), you can see why Mark Zuckerberg turned down $1 billion for Facebook (I’ll bet he’s calculated the growth trends, too), and why many investors consider it worth more than MTV. With friends inviting friends to join, and with companies like MediaFire developing applications that extend its usefulness (I don’t have to worry about sending large email attachments anymore), Facebook’s “astonishing” growth is likely to continue.

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Facebook Newsweek Cover Story

Facebook Newsweek Cover Story
The cover story in Newsweek‘s current issue is about Facebook and how it’s a) not just for college kids and b) the hottest internet property since Google. Here are a couple of key summary paragraphs:

Zuckerberg himself, whose baby-faced looks at 23 would lead any bartender in America to scrutinize his driver’s license carefully before serving a mojito, eschews talk about money. It’s all about building the company. Speaking with NEWSWEEK between bites of a tofu snack, he is much more interested in explaining why Facebook is (1) not a social-networking site but a “utility,” a tool to facilitate the information flow between users and their compatriots, family members and professional connections; (2) not just for college students, and (3) a world-changing idea of unlimited potential. Every so often he drifts back to No. 2 again, just for good measure. But the nub of his vision revolves around a concept he calls the “social graph.”

As he describes it, this is a mathematical construct that maps the real-life connections between every human on the planet. Each of us is a node radiating links to the people we know. “We don’t own the social graph,” he says. “The social graph is this thing that exists in the world, and it always has and it always will. It’s really most natural for people to communicate through it, because it’s with the people around you, friends and business connections or whatever. What [Facebook] needed to do was construct as accurate of a model as possible of the way the social graph looks in the world. So once Facebook knows who you care about, you can upload a photo album and we can send it to all those people automatically.”

I’ll have more to say about this article later; for the last few weeks I haven’t been talking about much else on this blog, as you see here. For now, just go here and give it a read, and also check out the related articles here, here and here.

What do you think about the Newsweek cover story?

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