Manage your email more easily with Shift

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Not long ago, I told you that I made the switch from Gmail to Google Inbox. I may or may not switch back to Gmail at some point, but whatever I decide to do I’ll probably do inside of Shift.

Shift is a desktop application (for Windows, Mac and Linux) that puts your Gmail or Google Inbox (or Outlook) inside of their container. This frees up some tabs on your desktop, and also adds a few other nice features that I’ll share below.

Here is a quick animation showing some of what it does:

Google Inbox is great because of the “snooze” feature, but also has a few shortcomings. One them is the lack of badges to let you know how many unread emails you have. Gmail has a cool feature that shows your unread count in the favicon in your browser, like this:

Google Inbox has no such feature, but Shift does. In fact, Shift gives you a few different badges — the icon running at the bottom of your screen shows your total unread count:

Then each individual tab inside of Shift shows the unread count for that specific email account:

Keep it simple

What I like most about Shift is that it doesn’t try to do too much. I can still use the normal Inbox/Gmail app on my phone, and still use the normal web interfaces when I’m on a Chromebook. This gives me a slightly improved experience on desktop, and I love it.

The basic version is free, and the Pro version (which I use) is just $19.99/year. Give it a shot for yourself at TryShift.com. It’s based on the open-source software Wmail, which is a bit less powerful but is totally free. I’ve been playing with that a bit as well, but either one should work well for you.

Brand loyalty is a bad thing

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Over the years I’ve worked hard to keep my digital life in a place where I can freely move from device to device without worrying about being too locked in to one system. Lifehacker wrote an article that summed it up perfectly: Brand loyalty is for suckers.

You tend to hear this most often with Apple. Here’s an image from the Lifehacker article:

There is certainly nothing wrong with using Apple products. They make excellent phones, and certainly the best (and most expensive) laptops on the planet. It’s when you get locked into their ecosystem to the point of not being able to leave that things get tricky.

Here are some examples:

Phones

When the iPhone first came out, I was enamoured. I wanted one. It took about a year, but I finally got one. The next year I waited in line for hours to get a new iPhone 3GS for myself and my wife.

However, Android came out before the first iPhone was even announced, and it seemed likely that it would be a better fit for me eventually. A few years later, it was. I switched. I had already moved my contacts over to Google, so the transition wasn’t too bad.

While I’m a huge fan of the new Google Pixel, it’s entirely possible that I’ll move back to iPhone one day. I think Android is better right now, but if I someday think Apple is better I’ll happily move back over.

Cell Networks

The same is true with cell networks. In 2016 I actually used three different providers.

I started the year at Verizon, who I still think have the best network. The pricing was just getting out of control, so I moved over to T-Mobile. I saved over 50% with that move, though the network is a bit lacking. Their network is quite impressive around Atlanta (even better than Verizon, I think), but it simply disappears outside of town. Driving to Florida last year, we had zero signal for about 1/3 of the trip.

After the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, I switched over to Project Fi (explained here) and it’s worked very well.

Computers

Computers are another area where I like to keep my options open. I’m writing this from a Windows 10 desktop (which I love), but I can write from pretty much any web browser.

I’m really becoming drawn to some of the Google Chromebooks, as I can do about 95% of my work on them. As I mentioned above, I still completely believe that Macbooks are the best laptops you can buy. However, when looking at my Chromebook R13 post, the price is hard to ignore. That is a very nice Chromebook, and at $350 it’s roughly 1/10 the cost of a high-end Macbook. The Chromebooks we bought for our kids last year were $108 each and are still going strong.

Chromebooks wouldn’t work well for the designers on our team, as having access to the Adobe Creative Cloud software (Photoshop, InDesign, etc) is essential. For most of us, though, they can do anything you need.

My point again is to keep your options open. Drop me in front of a Windows computer, a Mac, or a Chromebook, and I’ll be able to do most of what I need to do.

Photos

Google Photos is an amazing product. You can store all of your photos in there for free, and it syncs automatically with your phone. It alone helps keep your options open (can work with iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever), but it also keeps its own options open with Google Takeout.

Google Takeout is one of the big reasons I tend to prefer Google products. You can argue about the amount of data that they collect, but they make it very easy to get all of that data back out. Microsoft is bad about that, and Apple is awful, but Google gives you one-click access to grab all of your info and move it elsewhere.

This is the power of Google Photos. It’s a phenomenal product that I’ll likely use for a long time, but if that changes I can grab all of my photos out of there in a single file and put them wherever I want.

Notes

I used Evernote for a long time and I was a huge fan of theirs, but have recently moved away from it. I’m now using Google Keep and it’s a great solution for me. As with Google Photos, though, all of my Google Keep notes can be quickly exported via Google Takeout, so I’ll only use it for as long as I think it’s the best.

I love Android. I like Windows. You might love Apple. All are great. Just keep your options open and don’t be a sucker.

Getting all of those contacts organized

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Contact management can be a pain. Most people will add some contacts from their phone, add some from their email, end up with duplicates and some missing info, and just have a big mess on their hands. We’ve all been there.

I spent much of 2016 trying to find ways to get things organized. I had switched to Google Contacts years ago (back when I still used an iPhone), largely so I’d be free to use whatever phone I want. iPhone and Android both work great with Google Contacts, so that was step one.

Even with that, though, I had kind of a mess. I had my personal Gmail contacts (which synced to my phone), my GreenMellen contacts (through Google’s “G Suite”) and then we also use ProsperWorks as our GreenMellen CRM, which had a separate set of contacts.

FullContact

The first piece I added was FullContact. It’s an online contact manager that happens to sync with Google. I had it pull in my Gmail and GreenMellen contacts so I could sort them out. It detected most of the duplicates, and fairly quickly I had things cleaned up.

They have a lot of great features and it helps keep things cleaned up. They also have a mobile app, but I don’t use that. Since it syncs nicely to both of my Google accounts, I simply use the native contacts app on my phone and it works great. Anyone I add to Gmail or FullContact are automatically synced to both.

ProsperWorks

I mentioned above that we also use ProsperWorks. It’s a great application for keeping track of website leads, clients, etc. However, it doesn’t talk to FullContact so things needed to be entered in there separately.

Here’s a quick video that shows some of their features:

PieSync

Fortunately, PieSync comes to the rescue. It works behind the scenes and keeps things synced. It doesn’t talk directly to FullContact, but it can connect ProsperWorks and Google Contacts, which does the job for me.

Contactually

We also use a product called Contactually. It’s another business CRM, and a bit redundant when used alongside of ProsperWorks, but it has some other features we like. The main one are reminders — it’ll automatically remind me to reach back out to people if I haven’t contacted them in a while, and it does a nice job of that.

Putting all of that together leads to this. It looks messy (and it is), but it works wonderfully. I typically add new contacts directly to FullContact, and within minutes they’re in every system.

Add Everyone

Because I have this system humming now, I use FullContact a lot. When I get new contact information, whether it’s a business card from a meeting, an email from a prospect, or even just some new info from a friend, it goes in there. That means I always have everything I need on my phone, and if I get a call from an unknown number I can be 99% sure that it’s a telemarketer.

Pricing

The downside is that all of this isn’t free. Google Contacts are (which is why you should be using them now), but the rest each have some small monthly fees:

  • FullContact: (pricing) Their basic version is free, but only holds up to 1000 contacts. The premium is $8.33/mo and works great.
  • ProsperWorks: (pricing) They start at $19/mo/user and that will do most of what you need.
  • PieSync: (pricing) They start at $5/mo, but I’m on the $19/mo plan so it can handle multiple connections and more contacts.
  • Contactually: (pricing) They start at $39/mo, which is the plan we use.

It’s rare that you’d need both ProsperWorks and Contactually, and many of you likely need neither. Get your stuff into Google Contacts, use FullContact to help organize and sync it, and things should work well for you.

What do you currently use to manage your contacts?

Gmail vs Google Inbox vs ActiveInbox

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A few years ago, Google released Inbox

, a new way to help manage your Gmail. It’s aimed at folks with busy inboxes, and refinements over the years have made it quite impressive. I’ve used it a few times, but always ended up going back to good old Gmail. Gmail has some great power tools (such as Send & Archive) that are hard to give up.

However, a few weeks ago I discovered ActiveInbox, which is a Chrome extension that makes your Gmail better. There are a lot of tools out there like this, but one thing in particular jumped out at me. Watch the video and see what happens at the 2:15 mark:

ActiveInbox has more tools than I really need (I have no desire to replace Asana and Google Keep as my to-do tools), but the ability to automatically remind me if someone hasn’t replied is awesome. Other tools (such as Boomerang) have similar features, but I love the implementation on ActiveInbox.

My previous solution was to send a reply to someone, and then hopefully remember to add a task in Asana to check back in with them if I hadn’t heard back in x days. This solution is much easier, and it will automatically go away if the person indeed replies.

Back to Inbox

All of that said, I’ve gone back to Google Inbox. ActiveInbox was great, but really too bloated for my needs. Being able to keep track of open-ended emails was great, but it took too many clicks to get there. I can do roughly the same in Inbox by simply “snoozing” an email for a date in the future. If they reply, the email comes back up anyhow (thus killing the snooze) and if they don’t reply then the snooze has me covered. It should work quite well.

You can read more about snoozing here or watch the video below for an overview of Inbox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlahqFNwC-g

If you want to dig deeper, this video digs deeper into Inbox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDslvjONN7E

If you tend to keep a lot of emails in your inbox or have a need to keep up with reminders like that, Google Inbox might be the best solution for you. However, if you keep a clean inbox and have no need for snoozing, good old Gmail is probably your best bet.

What do you use to manage your email?

Google Keep is the best solution for quick notes

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It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Asana for task management. For keeping up with projects, assignees, timelines and notes, Asana is tough to beat. That said, all of us at GreenMellen keep a small to-do list on the side for quick thoughts and notes. I’ve bounced around to a few different solutions over the years, but always come back to Google Keep.

When Google Keep was first released, it was only available on the web and Android. A few years ago they added iPhone support and their Chrome extension continues to improve, so it’s an easy way to keep up with quick notes wherever you are. They even have Android Wear support; it seems kind of cheesy, but it’s very handy to have your shopping list on your wrist and not have to fumble around with your phone.

While I love Google Keep, I certainly try out other solutions as they come along such as…

Simplenote

One that really intrigues me is Simplenote. As the name suggests, it’s simple. Very simple. It’s owned by Automattic, the folks behind WordPress, so that was of interest to me. It’s a very fast app and has solutions for most platforms.

There are some drawbacks, though:

  • Too simple. Being simple, there are no colors, no automatic links, no image embedding, no checklists, etc. I appreciate the philosophy behind that, but often wished for “just this one feature…”.
  • Hidden notes. It collapses your notes and makes you click each one to view it, similar to email. This is indeed “simple”, but I like that Keep just shows me the contents of my notes without having to open each one.
  • Bugs. It had some bugs where sometimes notes wouldn’t save, extra characters would get inserted, things like that.

I’ll certainly keep an eye on it, and may switch it to someday, but not yet.

Google Drive

Google Drive isn’t ideal for quick notes, but I thought I’d mention it here because it’s a big part of our note taking usage. Google Keep is awesome for quick notes, but Google Drive is where things live long-term. Some reasons why it is great for long-term note keeping:

  • One home. It’s where we store all of our client information (logos, photos, etc), so it makes sense that our other notes would be in there with them. This is a big reason we’ve moved away from Dropbox. Dropbox is great for files, but with Drive we can put our files and our online “docs” in the same folder. Keeping everything in one place is essential.
  • Collaboration. It has shared real-time sync. Even though it’s years old, this feature still amazes me — you can watch letter-by-letter as your colleagues type into a document! When we’re in meetings, we always share a Google Doc so that we are taking a single, comprehensive set of notes, rather than separate notes that need to be combined later.

Evernote

The big competitor that everyone talks about is Evernote. I’ve been a huge fan of theirs for the better part of the last decade, but I’ve pretty much removed all of my notes from them and moved on. Why?

  • It’s slow to sync. They’ve worked on speeding it up, but the infrastructure behind it requires it to literally sync every x minutes rather than just keep up in real time like Keep, Simplenote, Google Drive, etc.
  • I simply have no place for it. Because it’s not fast enough to sync real-time, I need to use a solution like Google Keep for those notes. However, it’s also not as robust as Google Drive. As a result, it’s kind of in no-man’s land where nothing feels like it belongs there anymore.
  • There is essentially no free version. I was a premium user of Evernote for a long time, but had eased back into the free tier. Now they’ve stripped the free version to the point where it is no longer useful for me. My choices are to pay for a product that I don’t really use much, or stop using it. I’ve stopped using it.

I keep a very open mind about apps like this, but for now Google Keep is the clear winner. It does a great job, is available on all major platforms, and is free to use.

What do you use for quick notes?

Some things are worth remembering

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Last week I told you that you should try to keep “stuff” out of your brain so you can free it up to work harder on important things. Today I’m going to flip that around and show you how to cram more into your head.

This isn’t to go against what I said in the previous blog. All of your “stuff to do” should be tucked away on lists, your events should be on a calendar, and you shouldn’t constantly be worrying about remembering the next four things you need to do.

On the other hand, it can be good to be constantly improving your knowledge. One way I do that is by keeping up with hundreds of RSS feeds, which I explained a few years ago in this post. I still follow over 500 blogs in there and I’m pleased with how well it helps to keep me informed regarding WordPress, Google and other topics that are relevant for what I do.

However, in the past year I’ve added a new tool to my daily arsenal that has been life-changing: Anki. I had stumbled upon this amazing article and then began to research the best system to make it happen. My searching led to Anki, and subsequent dives into similar software has only served to reinforce that decision.

Anki

So what is Anki?

In short, it’s a spaced repetition flashcard system. You load it up with things that you want to remember, and it will quiz you on them each day. The magic is that it only shows you a card when the algorithm thinks you’re just about to forget it. As a result, once you’ve learned something you’ll only see that card pop up once every few months to help strengthen that memory. This means that in 10 minutes a day (around 150 cards) you can eventually memorize a deck of over 13,000 items!

My first (and still most important) use of Anki was on remembering people’s names. I always considered myself bad at remembering names, but it was really that I was just lazy about it. If you ever attend Kathy Drewien’s Meetup, you’ll be amazed at how she knows everyone’s name — I certainly am! However, if you watch closely, she works hard to learn each person’s name, repeat it a few times, practice, and make sure she has them down. It’s not magic, but it works wonders.

I started by adding a few people whose names I wanted to be sure to remember, but I’ve slowly expanded it to include pretty much everyone other than my family and coworkers — 841 cards as of today! A good example can be seen below. When reviewing my “people” deck, this card might come up:

It’s a guy I absolutely should know, but I only see him maybe once or twice a year; those are the names that tend to slip away pretty easily. I think about it for a few seconds, then click the “Show answer” button below the photo. Did I get it right? Once I reveal the answer I get to choose “again” (got it wrong, put it back in the active stack), “good” (it’ll push it out a bit further for next time) or “easy” (it’ll push it out even further).

In the case of Micah above (a brilliant WordPress developer, btw), his card only shows up every few months because I’ve gotten it right a few times in a row. Whenever I meet someone new (client, colleague, Meetup attendee, neighbor, etc), I try to put them in there. While I’m still quite imperfect with names, I’m far better than I used to be.

Do you know your countries?

Since then, I’ve taken it further by adding other decks. You can create your own, or choose from hundreds of shared decks made by others. One that I’ve been working through is the location, capital and flag for every country in the world. I’ve always felt a bit weak on geography, so this is helping me improve. Do you know this flag?

Let’s click “show answer” and find out!

Did you get it right? Now you can either click “again”, “good”, or “easy” and it will adjust accordingly. You can choose how many new cards to add each day, so I simply have one new geography card pop into the deck each day, with usually 20-30 older cards that I need to review.

Other decks

I’ve also created decks for numbers to memorize (my kid’s social security numbers, driver’s license number, etc), Spanish words I’m currently reviewing in Duolingo (there is an export feature) and the order of the books of the Bible. The Spanish and people decks are constantly growing in size, and the geography deck will be showing me one new card every day for the next few years, so I doubt I’ll add any other decks soon.

I encourage you to read the Wired article I mentioned above and give Anki a try for yourself. You can learn more about it at ankisrs.net. The Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and web versions are all completely free to use. The iOS version is $24.99 to help support the developers that ported it over.

If you use a system like Anki (or might start trying), what are your favorite kinds of decks?

Only think about cat food once

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I’ve told many people over the years that GreenMellen Media simply wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done“. In the early days of the company, going back to when I was a freelancer, I was juggling a lot of things — a full time job, two young children at home, this new freelance thing, etc. It was a mess.

I applied the concepts in the book and was able to get all of my inboxes and systems under control. At a basic level, the book and system are intended to help you get the “stuff” out of your head and out of your inboxes and into trusted systems. As it says on David’s site right now:

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

It’s a simple concept, but can be hard to implement. David Allen was on a 45-minute podcast last year that introduced one simple idea that really helps people grasp the concept: “only think about cat food once”. In David’s words:

The whole idea of GTD about being present is that you can’t really focus your reflective brain fully on being present if you’re distracted. If you need cat food and that thought “Gee I need cat food” pops in more than once, you are inappropriately engaged with your cat and “you need cat food” could pop in and take up brain bandwidth when you’re trying to focus.

The first time you think “oh, I need to buy more cat food”, that should go on a list. This could be a paper list, or you could tell Siri to remind you, or put it in Google Keep, or whatever you want to use. The key is that it needs to be a fully trusted

system. If your brain isn’t completely trusting that the system will remind you about the cat food when it’s time, your brain won’t let it go. Seven years ago I posted about trusted systems and the analogies still hold true.

Finding and developing the right system can take some time. At GreenMellen we use Asana for task management and I use Google Keep for quick notes on the side. Both applications work on Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, etc, and I’ve grown to trust both of them over the years. If I put something in there, my mind is free to let it go.

Stop wasting your time worrying about cat food, and free your mind to be able to focus on bigger issues.

What is your favorite system for keeping track of things like cat food?

How to easily keep up with 538 blogs

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Imagine for a minute that you had to personally request each email that you wanted to receive.  Each morning you’d get up and go through your list of people that might have email for you:

  • “Kelly, do you have any email for me today?”  Nope.
  • “Ali, do you have any email for me today?”  Yes, here are two.
  • “Chantelle, do you have any email for me today?” Yes, here is one.
  • “Steve, do you have any email for me today?” Nope.
  • And on and on and on…

It’d be awful!  Fortunately email doesn’t work that way, but people often treat websites the same way.  They’ll go through a list of sites to see which ones have new content and which ones don’t, then determine which stories are worth reading.  There’s an easier way.

Google Reader

(note: in the time since I published this post, Google Reader has been discontinued and I’ve moved over to Feedly. The concepts listed below work almost exactly the same, just on a different system.)

rss-iconYou’ve likely heard of “RSS Feeds” (or you’ve seen the orange icon on the right) but perhaps don’t know what they are.  Without getting technical, they’re simply a list of recent posts from a website that you can plug into a system like Google Reader.  Google Reader will remember which ones you’ve seen and only show you the new posts.  For example, right now Google Reader is telling me there are 18 new items for me to read out of the 538 sites that I follow.  Rather than going to each site to see what’s going on, I can just pull up Google Reader and read through those 18 items.  Here’s a bit more about how it works:

Starred Items

One nice feature of Google Reader is that it allows you to “star” items that are of interest to you.  I tend to flip through my list of unread items very quickly (you can use the “j” key to “jump” from item to item), star items that look interesting, then go back to them when I have time to dig in.

Those items then might be shared by me on Twitter, or perhaps become part of a blog post, or may be simply discarded because the content wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped it would be.  If it’s a long post that I’d like to read later, I’ll often it add it to Pocket for easy reading on my phone or tablet.

Mobile

Speaking of mobile devices, I also do a good bit of skimming from my phone.  I don’t read many in-depth posts while mobile, but I’ll often flip through the items and star those that look good so that I don’t have dozens of unread items waiting for me when I get back home.  If you use Android the native Google Reader app is pretty solid, and on iOS I’ve had good luck with Reeder.  There are many other great apps for both platforms, so just choose that one that you’re most comfortable with.

What do I add?

Virtually every blog that you can find will have an RSS feed, even if the author doesn’t know it.  You probably keep up with a handful of blogs already, so just start adding them to Reader. You can add sports feeds, tech news, general news, all kinds of stuff.  I follow blogs from my children’s teachers, other web companies and many others.  Once you learn to look out for the orange RSS icon you’ll start seeing it everywhere!

For example, if you do a search on Craigslist and scroll to the bottom you’ll find a feed for that exact search term.  This can be great if you’re looking for a specific kind of item — just add that feed to Reader and let the new items come to you rather than having to visit Craigslist every day to see what’s been listed.

How do you keep up with your favorite sites?

Gtdagenda launches their Android app

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I’m becoming more and more confident that my next phone will be an Android device.  The ties to Google are excellent for me, and the apps are finally reaching the point of being pretty good.  The Apple app store still rules, but Android is catching up quickly.

Today saw the release of a very nice Android app — Gtdagenda. I don’t have an Android device yet, so I’m not able to test it out, but it looks to be a pretty solid program.

Below is a collection of screenshots from the app, and you can learn more about it on the Gtdagenda for Android page.  If you have an Android phone and can try the app, give it a shot and leave us a comment to tell everyone what you think of it.

Trying to find the perfect GTD system

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As most of you know, I’ve been using Nozbe for a while now and I’m fairly satisfied with it.  However, it has a growing list of issues that are starting to bother me — horrible waste of space on the page, a very buggy iPhone app, and tasks that occasionally move from one project to another without warning.  It’s the last one that bothers me the most, as it’s causing me to lose a bit of trust in the system.

At this point, I’m sticking with them.  Their support staff has assured me it’s an isolated incident and that a new iPhone app is coming “soon”.  We’ll see.

In the meantime, I figured it was time to re-investigate my options.  I have a short but specific list of things I need in a GTD system for myself: web based, iphone accessible, project based, overview screen, recurring events and sharing.

On my personal blog, I’ve reviewed 32 different systems and I’ve come up empty.  None can do what I want, other than Nozbe.  A few are close, but they’re not there yet.

Is it a lost cause?  Check out the list of applications and let me know if I’m missing any.  I’m hoping “the one” is still out there and I just haven’t seen it yet…