Productivity: Two Amazing Ideas (or Duh..)
- Turn off the email notification alert in Outlook. I used to think it was really cool. Turn it off and watch your productivity soar while doing stuff on your PC. I got this tip from another VC out there (Brad? Fred? Paul?) so, thank you, brilliant.
- Set your mobile device - Blackberry in my case- to only buzz you from a seriously select few people, like family. With the 8800 (and Pearl I would guess), you can set very granular ring tones/alerts for virtually everybody's inbound email/phone. Essentially be ruthless in defining what's really immediate/important.
Of course, taking out the entire Blackberry network helps as well, but that seems excessive.
Hi Rick - I had the same experience with the notification alert, much better turned off. Another idea, which I'm not sure you know but which I find useful as well is this: create a subfolder in your inbox (cc folder) and set a rule so that all email where you're cc'd on goes there immediately. It sure filters out my inbox a lot.
Posted by: Kris Hoet | April 18, 2007 at 15:10
This is true for any information source. You have to filter the signal from the noise, being always interrupted guarantees a loss of productivity.
Posted by: engtech | April 18, 2007 at 17:37
The notification alert is EXTREMELY distracting, and now I have it off, and have filtered all emails where I'm not in the TO: line to the garbage.
My boss thinks it's great that everyone in our group gets every message, thousands a day, when only a handful are relevant to each person. Some of the messages are "The job ran successfully." Why do I need to be alerted every hour when things are OK?!?
Since I work at a bank, I assume they are backing up and storing all these emails forever for compliance purposes. Perhaps that is the strategy... if anyone lawyer ever has to do discovery on our emails, they will never be able to find the juicy important emails in the deluge of crap.
Posted by: Joe | April 19, 2007 at 11:37
I found that I had to create 2 hotmail accounts for IM. One for work contacts and one for family. That way I'm not be bothered by personal issues when I'm busy. Sometime they can be just as distracting as email alerts. :)
Posted by: Keith Glover | April 21, 2007 at 05:28
These are great tips - the trick is always to control the technology rahter than the technology controlling you. It's an easy trap to fall into.
Posted by: AJ Cann | May 03, 2007 at 06:37