Folders are slowly going away

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Over the past decade or so, and more noticeably in the past few years, younger users are ignoring the concepts of “files” and “folders” when it comes to saving their work on a computer.

A recent article in The Verge dug into this, and an early example in the article sums it up well. When helping students track down their files, it led to an interesting exchange:

She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

In a world of search, why worry about where a file lives?

Gmail Folders

I first noticed this in my own work back in 2009, when I advised readers to give up using folders/tags in Gmail. Why worry about it? You’ll spend dozens of hours a year carefully sorting your emails into folders and subfolders, and the time you save as a result will just be a fraction of that.

Roam and mymind

I’m noticing this in new tools as well. You know I love Roam Research, and it literally doesn’t have a way to save things in a traditional hierarchy. You link from one item to another, and use search to find the rest.

The popular bookmaking app mymind works similarly. There are no folders or organization to deal with. They even promote that their system is “For those who move too fast to be bothered with folders, labels and systems.“

Google Photos

Yet another example is Google Photos. While you can organize your pictures into albums (and you can make a case that it’s worth the time to do that), I’d wager that 99%+ of photos in Google Photos are just loose. Even with no tags or folders, thanks to Google’s AI I can quickly search for “beach” or “campfire” or “Kelly Mellen” or “Nashville” and Google can come up virtually every photo I’ve taken that matches that criteria.

Teams are different

When it comes to files for teams, though, I think things are a bit different — at least for now. When it comes to organizing information for our team, whether it’s in a familiar setup like Google Drive or something newer like Notion, we try to keep a well-constructed file hierarchy. It’s one thing to keep my data un-foldered, but for a team it’s still good to have everyone follow the same idea. Tools like Roam Research are still very single-player focused, though I suspect that will change in the coming years.

I encourage you to read the full article over at The Verge, but they end it with my exact sentiments in this quote from professor Peter Plavchan:

Get ready. “This is not gonna go away,” he says. “You’re not gonna go back to the way things were. You have to accept it. The sooner that you accept that things change, the better.”

We don’t all have the same amount of time

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I used to believe that “we all have 24 hours in a day” and while it’s technically true, it’s really not.

Shailja Patel said it very well in a popular tweet from a few years ago:

Use public transport? Your 24 hours are not the same as those of private jet owners.
Do your own cooking, cleaning, child-raising? Your 24 hours are not the same as those of someone with a full-time domestic staff.

The counter to that is that “private jet owners” have worked hard to get to that place in life, and have therefore paid with past work to have more time available today, and that’s likely true to a degree. Many people work very hard to build more time into their schedule in the future.

Perhaps you have a lawn care service, which gives you a few more free hours every weekend. Or, short of a private jet, even having your own private car can be a huge advantage over someone that has to rely on public transportation and likely spends a good deal more time on their commute because of it.

You may have largely earned your spot in life, but chance always plays a role. You might have caught a break 10 years ago when someone else didn’t, and your life is very different as a result of that.

Seth

I mention Seth Godin on here quite a bit, and to be honest, I’m a bit jealous of his life. How does he find time to blog every day, publish an in-depth podcast every week, write a book every year, and produce tons of other content inbetween all of that? He MUST have more time in his day than I do — and he does.

I’m busy running a digital agency, which chews up a good portion of every day (and I love it), giving me less time to produce all of the types of content that Seth does. I’m ok with that. It’s not accurate for me to say “Seth and I both have 24 hours in a day, so I should be able to produce the same amount of content that he does”. Our lives are very different, and he simply has more time available for thinking and writing than I do.

Using Shailja’s example above, I’m sure there are people that are jealous of the time that I have available. My children are largely self-sufficient now, and my wife is a tremendous help with daily chores (she does much of the cleaning and almost all of the cooking). That gives me more time than many other people have.

We all have 24 hours every, but we certainly don’t all have the same amount of time.

Hotshots shouldn’t get bogged down on tasks

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

In his new book, “A World Without Email“, author Cal Newport pushes people to consider how administrative work affects performance. In particular, he says:

Why bother hiring a hotshot if the bulk of their time is spent doing administrative work?

I don’t know if “hotshot” is the right word, but I completely agree with his logic. We’ve worked hard to hire employees that are smarter than us (and they surely are!), but it’d be silly to hire talented people and then watch all of their time disappear into email and task lists.

That’s not to say that we’ve solved it, as there is always plenty of administrative work to do, but it’s something we’re continuing to refine. Brooke, our project manager, doesn’t let anything fall through the cracks, so we’re increasingly making her the point person for all tasks that need to be done. While she is keeping things running smoothly, that allows our talented staff (Ashlea/Development, Joanna/Design, Robert/Strategy) to focus on their best skills.

In fact, that really points back to Cal Newport’s older book “Deep Work“, on finding time to really focus on your core competencies. We’ll never get there 100%, but the more we can push toward it, the better we’ll all be.

Efficiency needs a purpose

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I write about productivity and efficiency quite a lot on here, with hundreds of posts that go back well over a decade. I believe that being efficient in your work can pay huge dividends. A fun example is when Google released the “Send & Archive” button in Gmail back in 2009, and I estimated that it saved me roughly 24 hours per year in time savings. Little things can add up.

However, it can also come at a cost if you try to optimize things simply for the sake of optimizing them, which I’ve been guilty of doing many times. As Peter Drucker has said:

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

While being efficient at a given task is important, two other possible ideas should come first:

  1. Delegate the task to someone else.
  2. Don’t do the task at all.

There are many things that you need to do every day, and learning to knock out those tasks efficiently is a wonderful thing. Even better, though, is deciding that a task isn’t worth doing and turning your attention to more important work.

Follow-up is crucial

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 3 minutes

A few years ago, we were all working in our office when a local company stopped by with a box of bagels and coffee for us. We didn’t know them, but they were reaching out to local marketing companies to let people know they exist (they were photographers, so potentially a good partner). They seemed nice, and it was a sweet gesture!

That afternoon, I connected to a few of them and looked for a time when we could chat further. They never replied, and never reached out separately. I still don’t understand how they were so organized and thoughtful to bring the food, but then completely disappeared.

I’d love to chat

Another time, also a few years ago, I attended a business luncheon where one of the sponsors was a local independent realtor. While we don’t often work with realtors, I certainly enjoy making those connections as you never know what might happen. In fact, she said “Please connect with me on LinkedIn and I’d love to meet any of you for coffee”.

I did, and suggested a few days/times, and… nothing. I’ve seen her at other events and we’ve had good conversations, but she never replied to that message so I didn’t push it. Again, though, this was someone that went though intentional effort and expense to create these connections, and then failed to follow-up

Follow-up can be bad

Of course, repeated follow-ups can be bad. I get spam daily from people that say things like “Hey, just bumping this back to the top of your inbox so you can call us for all of your blah-blah needs!“. That’s spam, that’s annoying, that’s bad.

It can also be a little frustrating at times. If we’re working with a client and need a photo from them, we trust them to send over the photo when they get around to it. Many times, of course, we have to follow-up a few times with reminders. It’s not that they’re intentionally forgetting to send, but in most cases it’s a chaotic inbox that makes things hard to keep up with.

There is one person I know that when I email her, if I don’t hear back within a few hours I just need to try again later. Her inbox is so out of control that once the message gets buried behind a few more, she’ll never get to it. It’s not a good look.

In the end, though, the fact that so many are bad at following up has been a great thing for our business. Simply keeping up with potential (and existing!) clients can put you at a whole new level.

Two tips

I’ll leave you with two quick tips, one from each side of the table.

For you to not be a slacker like the examples above, inbox zero is likely your best bet. Even if you can’t do that, if you’re able to stay organized, you’ll take care of what’s important. Really if you can just control your inputs, you can often stay on top of things.

To help with others, the “snooze” feature in many email tools can be your friend. When I send an email outside of my team, I often send it and then snooze the thread for a few days so it’ll pop back into my inbox as a reminder to check back in again. Depending on the situation, your task management system may do the job too, as you’ll continue to have that open loop to finish a task that requires your client, and you can just kick that forward a few days at a time.

What tips do you have to make sure you stay on top of the replies you need?

Missive email

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 3 minutes

For the last few weeks, all of us at GreenMellen have been using the Missive email app and and it’s been great. Missive is an email program that works with your existing account (Gmail, Office 365, iCloud, etc) and adds some neat features. Here is a quick video that shows what it does:

We aren’t using all of the features that it has, and we likely never will, but there is really one key feature that is killer — comments! It’s weird to think of comments in the area of email, but the way Missive handles it is brilliant.

As an example, if Ali and I both receive an email from someone, we generally need to discuss who is handling it. We can do that via Slack or Text, and that’s fine, but with Missive we can do it inline with the email. In our inbox, just below the email itself, I can leave her a comment and we’re done.

Back to the inbox

Better yet, if Ali were to archive an email and then I commented about it, Missive pulls the email back to her inbox so that she sees the comment. It’s not unlike replying to her email privately (and leaving the original sender out of the loop), but it’s SO much easier to do.

Give access

Perhaps the most impressive thing is that if I tag a teammate in a comment, the entire email shows up in their inbox (including my comment), even if I was the only one that it was originally sent to!

This has been super helpful for times when a client emails me with a question I don’t know. I can write a comment like “@ashlea is this an easy fix?”. The full email will pop into her inbox (along with my comment), she can simply leave a comment back saying “yes it is”, and I can write up my response to the client.

I can even give access to drafts that I’m writing, and others can edit the drafts in real-time, similar to how Google Docs work. As you saw in the video above, you can have teammates add attachments to your email and help you put it together. They can even send it on your behalf, with a warning message from Missive reminding them that they’re sending as someone else. It’s really impressive.

Separation

The real key to all of this is the separation of emails and comments, which it handles well. The concern we all have when writing private emails inside of larger threads is mistakenly leaving the client on an email when we shouldn’t have. This solves that problem perfectly.

It still needs to be a great email client

At the end of the day, though, the stuff I mentioned above accounts for perhaps 10% of the emails I receive. If I’m going to use Missive full-time, it needs to do a great job with the other 90% of my work as well – reading, writing, forwarding, archiving, deleting, etc. So far it’s been pretty solid. Some benefits include:

  • Multiple appearance modes: light mode, dark mode, some inbetween.
  • Solid keyboard shortcuts: they have their own, but can also pull in the standard Gmail shortcuts.
  • Great app support: it works on the web, but has apps for Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android.

We can always go back

What’s really given me the confidence to switch is that it’s really easy to switch back to Gmail if we want. This isn’t some whole new system — it’s essentially just a wrapper on top of Gmail. If we decide to stop using it, we can just stop using it and go back. No worries.

So far it’s been great, and time will tell if we stick with it long-term or not! If you have a team, I encourage you to check it out for yourself.

The rabbit trail of yak shaving

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

You may have never heard the term “yak shaving” before, but you’ve likely done it. Joi Ito summarized it well here:

You start out deciding to tidy your room and you realize that in order to do that you’ll need some more trash bags, so you need to go to the shops, which will involve you getting out the car, but the car needs gas, so you’ll need to go to the gas station first, which means you should probably find your gas discount card, which involves finding your keys, which are in the room somewhere…

A similar example can be found in the show “Malcolm in the Middle”:

Sometimes there can be a bit of good that comes out of some yak shaving, if you’re ever able to get to the end of the line and start working your way back.

Usually, though, the better solution is to ignore the new issue that popped up (at least for now) and focus on the task at hand.

Everything has a place

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As you may know, I’m a big fan of the “inbox zero” concept. Things come into my email inbox, I deal with them, and I clean it out. I find that when people struggle with keeping their inbox clean, they tend to fall into three groups:

  1. People that aren’t at a computer frequently enough during the day.
  2. People that have dreams of replying to emails that will never happen (and should delete more emails right away)
  3. People that use it as a filing system, to-do list, or otherwise just don’t have any good place to store their ideas, notes, and tasks. I think email can be a wonderful tool, but it’s not meant for any of those things.

Today is a look at the “processing” phase of the digital efficiency framework. Things may come at you from various places (phone calls, Slack messages, ideas in the shower), but they can all be treated similarly. Here is how to set up systems to handle anything that comes your way.

The key to remember is that all inputs must process to zero. These inputs can come from email (a lot of them!), notes to yourself, phone calls, sites you read, etc.

When it comes to inputs, particularly email, many items just need a response or a forward or a quick task done. You should knock those out and archive the email. In many other cases, though, there are a variety of things that could be done.

When it comes to processing the stuff that comes your way, there are really six types of things you need to deal with.

  1. Events – For your calendar
  2. Useful sites – Bookmarks
  3. Things to read/watch – Bookmarks that you really want to get back to which go on your Consumption List
  4. Things to remember to do – Your Task List
  5. Things to just remember – Quotes, stats, names, etc, which go in your Flashcard / SRS tool
  6. Other stuff – Everything else

Let’s dig into each of those.

Events

Some of your inputs will be about an upcoming event; this could be a weekly status meeting, or it could be your dream vacation in Italy. Either way, get those on your calendar.

If your boss emails you and says “Let’s meet next Tuesday at 2:00 about the Acme project”, put that on your calendar, respond, and then archive the email.

Useful Sites

You may come across a useful website, either from something someone sent you or perhaps just in your daily browsing. When it comes to saving sites, there are two ways to save them.

Sites you need often

If you have a site that you need to reference frequently, I often find it best to use the native bookmark tool in your browser. Those tools don’t scale well for a ton of bookmarks, but make it pretty easy to quickly go to your top 20 sites.

In my case, this includes things like Google Photos, weather sites, and various agency tools (CRM, task list).

Sites you just want to save

More common are sites that you just want to save. This could be medical info, Google tips, products you like, information to help with parenting, etc. Those typically should not go in your browser bookmarks or you’ll have a huge mess. I use a different tool for those, which you can share in my tools list.

Things to read/watch

This is different from a normal bookmark. I consider bookmarks to be for reference, for things you may want to look at again. What we’re talking about here are specific items that you want to reach or watch, so these will go on your “consumption list”.

This is a list that you should revisit as frequently as is reasonable so it doesn’t get out of hand. If I come across an article that I really want to read, bookmarking means it’ll likely never get read. Instead, I put it on my consumption list and I know that it’ll resurface again when I have time to work through that list. This works for articles, videos, or anything else that you’d specifically like to dig into when you have some time.

Things to remember to do

Or, put another way, your task list. How you execute that list will be completely up to you and your job, and is really too broad for the scope of this. Just make sure you have a solid, reliable place to put your tasks. Some ideas for this can be found in my tools list.

Things just to remember

This is a system that many people don’t have in place, but I find it invaluable. If you see a great quote or a stat and think “I should remember that”, then do it. Nothing is worse than saying “I should try to remember that quote” and then literally doing nothing to actually try to remember it.

This will go into your “Flashcards / SRS” (Spaced Repetition System) tool. Spaced Repetition is a deep subject, but in short it’s a way to memorize information over time. As you learn each item a bit more deeply, the “repetition” gets further “spaced”, so items may only show up in your flashcards every few months. Once you get it going, you could have hundreds of cards in your system, but only a dozen to review each day. It can be wildly useful. We’ll discuss SRS a bit more as we move forward, and here is a deeper post about SRS if you’d like to learn more.

Other stuff

This is the tricky one, as you’re going to have other things come in that you just want to store somewhere.

Some examples might be:

  • Paint colors used in your house
  • Books you want to read
  • Gift ideas
  • License plate numbers
  • Blog post ideas
  • Contacts
  • Printer cartridge model numbers
  • Code snippets
  • Apps to try
  • Book notes

The list goes on and on. Having a specific place to store that info is huge. There are vastly different approaches that you can take, but having a place to put them is the main thing. As with others, see my tools list for some ideas of where you can store this kind of information.

Control your inputs, control your time

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 4 minutes

We all have things popping up to distract us all day long, many of them coming from our cell phone. This is a quick look at the “inputs” section of the digital efficiency framework, to help you get those under control. If you can keep your inputs manageable, everything else will tend to flow better.

Inputs are all of the ways that digital information gets to you. Some of them you can control precisely, some you can control a little, and some you have no control over. The more you can control the inputs feeding your digital life, the better. As things flow into your world, you can use various processing steps to deal with them.

Ultimately, the more you can control your inputs the easier it is to get them to zero. The key is that all inputs must process to zero. Yes, this includes your inbox. This doesn’t mean your work is done, but just that everything is in their proper places (events on the calendar, tasks on the task list, etc).

As David Allen says, it will help you have a “mind like water” and give you amazing clarity to attack the day. You might have a calendar full of meetings, a bunch of stuff you want to read, and 37 items on your task list, but everything is where it belongs and is waiting for you to tackle it when the time is right.

There are three main types of inputs: Controlled inputs, Variable inputs, and Uncontrolled inputs. Let’s look at each three.

Controlled Inputs

These are items that you have 100% control over, because you literally put everything into them. No one else feeds these inputs, and no algorithm has control of them. This is really two areas:

  1. Your flashcard / SRS system, which you should get to zero each day.
  2. Your “consumption list”, which can only hold so much. You may never catch up, but it’s not infinite.

Variable Inputs

This is where most of your stuff will show up, but other people can feed these systems and make them messy. The key here is that they can all be worked to zero. They include:

Email

The best thing you can do for your email is to consider everything in there an action, not a message. Everything needs something from you (even if it’s to just delete the message), so figure out that “something” and move on to the next.

If you leave things hanging around in here, you’re letting other people dictate your priorities.

With every message in your inbox, you can do one of five things:

  1. Delete. Just get rid of it. If you want to keep it around, then “archive” instead, but get it out of your inbox. Related, you should always be unsubscribing like crazy.
  2. Delegate. If someone else needs to handle it, then let them handle it. Forward and move on.
  3. Respond. Some emails need a response, so you’ll need to get back to them.
  4. Defer. Some emails you can just pause on for a bit to see what needs to happen, but these usually turn into “respond” (for details) or put them on your task list.
  5. Do. A lot of emails can just be dealt with immediately, so do it and move on. If someone needs their password reset, then go reset their password. I’m a big believer in to-do lists, but if you can avoid the meta work of adding to a list and just knock it out, do it.

You can also look to move some of your future emails to other systems. For example:

  • Internal emails are frequently being replaced by tools like Slack inside of organizations.
  • Urgent communications can happen via text.
  • Project updates should be in your project management software, not in your inbox.

RSS / News Feeds

I’m becoming a bigger fan of RSS as time goes on. If you’re not familiar with the term, RSS is simply a way for you to get updates from many sites in one place. Rather than you visiting 20 sites to see what’s new, those 20 sites all show up in your RSS reader.

This offers a few huge advantages:

  1. You control the news that comes to you, and you don’t let a never-ending algorithm decide for you.
  2. You don’t need to worry when sites go dormant. If they don’t post an update, it wastes none of your time.
  3. You can process to zero. You have a fixed list of sites you get news from, and they have a fixed list of items. You’ll never hit the bottom of Google News, Reddit, or Facebook, but you can (and should) get your RSS reader to zero fairly often.

You should block a little bit of time each day to clean up your RSS feeds. You don’t necessarily need to read the items in-depth, but just process it to zero. If you see a good idea in there, add it to your to-do list. More often, though, you’ll come across a great story that you want to read so you can add it to your consumption list and move on for now.

Quick Notes

These are notes to yourself that you take during every area of your life. It might be in a meeting, in the car, listening to a podcast, or anything else.

As David Allen has said, “only think about cat food once”. Constantly trying to remember something silly like “don’t forget to pick up cat food” is a huge waste of mental energy. Get thoughts out of your head and onto paper, and then process through them when you have time.

As you’re processing your notes, some can be done immediately (like “change the mouse batteries”), and others need to be processed elsewhere using the steps from before.

Uncontrolled Inputs

Uncontrolled inputs include social media sites, news sites, Reddit, things like that. I consider these to be entertainment, not proper inputs. They’re all neverending, and algorithms heavily dictate what you see.

I’m not saying to avoid them, but treat them how they deserve to be treated — as toys. Get your proper news and ideas via RSS so you can get to zero and move on with your day.

That said, I certainly spend some time in these areas most days, but I don’t rely on any of them for information. Enjoy your time there, chat with friends, but treat them as the entertainment venues that they are.

Certainly there are exceptions, such as if you’re a social media manager, but social sites are explicitly designed to suck you in for as long as possible, so use other methods for your inputs when you can.

How I plan out my future posts

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Blogging daily is tough. I just passed six months and I’m going strong, but it’ll end at some point. For now, though, here is how I make it happen.

Lots of ideas

The biggest challenge for me is coming up with ideas. Following the idea of “long periods of thinking, short periods of writing“, actually creating each post only takes me around 15-20 minutes — it’s the work to get to that point that takes more time.

I have two older posts that talk about finding ideas, and these are still my best sources:

Whatever you do, though, be sure to capture every idea you have. I put mine under a #blogideas tag in Roam Research, but you can store yours anywhere. They key is to get them out of your head and saved somewhere so you don’t forget about them.

I’ll take those short #blogideas in Roam and add other small notes or links as they come up, but most of the work happens directly in the WordPress editor as I start building out the post.

Batches of time

The key to my recent streak is really the concept of batching. I write a handful of posts in one sitting, and then drip them out over the subsequent days.

This is partially only possible because of the types of posts that I write. If I was covering breaking tech news or something, I couldn’t hold posts for days at a time. By mostly writing more evergreen content, it allows me to stack some up. I generally like to have 6-8 in the tank ready to go, but as of this writing I only have two in there so it’s time to catch up!

In terms of specific timing for writing, I have two main windows for this:

  • Weekday evenings. After I drop my daughter off at dance and dinner dishes have been put up, I have about 90 minutes to myself. This is a big time for reading and writing. Ideas come all during the day, but it’s generally this time when I’ll pull them back out and start working through them.
  • Weekend afternoons. This varies a lot more, based on yard work, family trips, etc, but I often find a few open hours in the afternoons on weekends and can put a bit of time in there.

Every day?

I’ve mentioned before that I kind of cheat at the “blogging every day”, because while I publish every day I don’t technically write every day. That may change with time, but right now it’d be very difficult to do. Kudos to those that can make it work.

I’ll leave you with a link to see Marc’s writing process, which inspired me to create this post. While I don’t follow the same format as him, we have a few similarities and perhaps something in his writing will inspire you.

If you publish frequently, what does your process look like?