Yesterday I spoke about the success I had with Inbox Zero at work. That should make starting the day today much easier.

However, I was not as successful cleaning through my inbox at home as I hoped. This is what happened - I have become successful at removing junk and clutter from my home inbox, so none of that was present. Instead, the 30 or so emails I have there all require either Defer or Do (to relate to the 5 options for handling email).

This is the bottleneck; they all require work.

The items that have been deferred are the ones I am handling first. I am taking the main point and scheduling time to handle each of them. Alternatively, I am starting to do them as well. This is the gap - each of them requires a chunk of time to accomplish what is in the email or what it is reminding me to do.

My strategy? I see it as two-fold:

1. Handle all new email as they arrive, selecting to Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer, or Do it so they do not increase my work later on. Begin to keep up from now on.
2. Handle 2-3 emails already in my inbox each day until I am caught up.

This seems realistic for me, and I have found that having the greatest plans in the world will amount to nothing if I cannot implement them.  I will report back . . .

I have heard some colleagues speak about Inbox Zero, and this is exactly what I accomplished before I left the office on Friday.

What is it? Inbox Zero is a strategy to end the day with nothing in my inbox. Not a single email. Nothing read (those should be either deleted or filed) and nothing unread. Empty. Clean. Ready for Monday. A new start. No longer overwhelmed. Not lost in data. Caught up. Free.

Got the picture?

When Monday morning at the office comes, I will start up Outlook and know that anything that arrives from Friday night to Monday morning will be new and need attending. As this was a major accomplishment for me, I will struggle to remain caught up.

There is a great slideshow that demonstrates this, and I liked the five immediate options for handling email (delete, delegate, respond, defer, do) that Merlin Mann developed, all of which get it out of the Inbox. Hopefully having those references here will better help others process the sheer quantity of stuff we get bombarded with every day.

One thing I learned along the way is that while some email has information in it I need for upcoming tasks, I still file those in folders using keywords and then put tasks on my calendar to complete the items later. I don’t forget them, and have things organized for future reference. I then know where to find the filed information without having it taking up space and needing to be constantly re-read in the Inbox.

Next step is to bring this to my home Inbox, which is pretty clean already, but another hour or so, and it should also be Inbox Zero.

I have been struggling to keep track of and organize all the websites I need to save, review, re-visit, and frequent. This would be easy if I used one computer with one browser, but I travel between my computer / browser combination at work and the three browsers I use on my computer at home. How can I maintain all the websites–academic, professional, personal, private, and needed for future research–between all these machines and locations?

I think I finally found a way to do it using a feature that I rarely used before in the simplest social bookmark application, del.icio.us.

I have had an account on del.icio.us for some time, but have never figured out how to use it to organize my online life. I do not use it much for the social bookmarking as it was intended, but some of the features to allow this to happen work really well meeting my organizational needs.

After reading Gene Smith’s wonderful book on Tagging and attending his tagging presentation while at Northern Voice 2008, I have been thinking about more creative uses of using tags for personal use, rather than just thinking about them for social purposes. I have started to use the tags on the right of my del.icio.us page in the same way I would use folders, as concept organizers.

For example, I need to get to the log-on page for an online class I am taking at CIIS, so I saved it as a bookmark on del.icio.us and tagged it “ciis.” As I have currently have 170 web pages / sites bookmarked, it can be a challenge to locate that particular one in the del.icio.us list.

To get to this page, I click the del.icio.us shortcut on my browser and then I can see the first 100 of my bookmarked pages / websites.

It is here that I use the tags on the right side of the page as organizational “folders” or conceptual groupings. I look for my own tag that I created and associated with that web page when I saved it to del.icio.us, and click on it. For CIIS, there are two separate web pages I need to access, and clicking the CIIS tag brings both of them together on one page, ready for me to select and go there. Voila, I now have the direct bookmark to the site I need, accessible from any computer I use.

Now that I have created this system and it seems that it works for me, I will go through my del.icio.us bookmarks to clean-up and better standardize the tags to associate them with how I think. If it helps others in a social bookmarking folksonomy manner, then that is wonderful! However, with the amount of information and data I need to sort and crunch, I will not be able to contribute much if I cannot even find my own saved items!

It is official, I came down with bronchitis yesterday, and I am taking lots of medications for it right now. I do not think this is the Northern Voice Plague which affected so many people after last year’s Northern Voice, as I have felt fine this week. I just think I juggled too much this week, with work and academic deadlines that all seemed to come simultaneously.

One of the communication items I stress with my students is that PowerPoint slides require Message Titles, not Topic Titles. The difference? A message title tells the audience what to think, believe, do, or say as a result of your slide or presentation. Don’t just tell them the topic and allow them to draw their own conclusions, whatever they may be. If you have gone through all the work of gathering your message and are preparing to deliver it to an audience, you must have some point you want them to take away, something you want to persuade them to do or think, of even inform them that your vision of a situation is the most accurate one. To help them with this process, tell them by embedding your message or point in the slide title. When presenting, leave as little to chance as possible.

I started thinking about this with Garr Reynold’s post today about Bill Gates, where he compared a slide presentation from Bill Gates to one by Steve Jobs.

Bill Gates’ slides are overwhelming in content, the colors look dark and dreary, and as I scan the slides, I have no idea what main message (point? take-away? idea? belief? action?) he wants his audience to leave with. Granted, I am a huge fan of the business prowess of Bill Gates, and he undoubtedly said some interesting and challenging things while presenting, but I was not at the conference. I only have the slides, and reviewing them now does not help me at all. If anything, it has the opposite effect–what is he talking about? When they get printed and/or electronically distributed (as is happening here and at countless desks around organizations), they lose their meaning. That is not what a communicator wants.

Steve Jobs’ are clean, straight-forward, and more compelling. They follow what Seth Godin suggests with minimal text on slides so they help to reinforce the speaker’s message. Great for the audience that is there, perhaps, as long as they are primarily auditory learners. However, I have another reservation here–I was not in the audience at the time, and while the slides may indeed reinforce the presenter, that doesn’t do anything for me. Is Steve suggesting Apple is aiming at all-in-one? They have already achieved it? They want to ultimately sell only one all-in-one product? I am not sure. Once again, without message titles, I am clueless and left to my own thoughts.

Yes, presentations still have that “had to ‘been there” quality. BUT, as social media changes the way we work, it is also having an effect on how we communicate and consider the primary and secondary audiences we face. Message titles, even if they are just scattered through a presentation with the other slides filled with images and other engaging devices, will definitely help the various audiences far into our digital futures.

If only Amazon will hurry up with the delivery of Garr’s book Presentation Zen!

Today, my department had our annual white elephant gift exchange at work, and I won a S’Mores Maker. I sense a sweet weekend ahead!!!

Thanks to Beth Kanter, I was able to perform a Blog Readability Test on my blog, with the following results: I suppose this is good, as my work in adult literacy demonstrates that the lower the reading level, the larger a potential audience there is. I have heard critics state that having a low readability level “dumbs down” the text, but literacy experts have pointed out that nobody ever asks people to write with bigger and more complicated words. For this blogging service, I just wish there would be some explanation as to what literacy indication test was used (e.g., Fry or SMOG),  who is behind the site (for credibility), and why there was a cash advance link at teh bottom of this image (which I removed, as well as the link to it).  Perhaps this is just a link-baiting scam? I like to think of this as an invitation for a programmer to develop a readability test according to more accurate and evidence-based research. This will then help offer real assistance to making the Web more accessible.

Technorati Tags: Beth Kanter, Readability

Leave it to Beth Kantor, the innovative web guru of nonprofit social media and low-cost technological wizardry to raise enough money online to send not one, but now almost two students in Cambodia to college. Beth has long been involved with working with the needy in Cambodia, and with her large network of admirers and colleagues and associates, she has raised thousands of dollars in a day or so, all through small donations and via word of mouth (with some Twitter and Facebook support). Keep up the good work, Beth, and glad I could pitch in at least a little bit!

Technorati Tags: Beth Kantor, Cambodia

I read this story on CNN and it really made me pause and think about how vast the world of possible terrorist targets really is. In a nutshell:

Researchers who launched an experimental cyber attack caused a generator to self-destruct, alarming the federal government and electrical industry about what might happen if such an attack were carried out on a larger scale, CNN has learned.

I suppose it is better to learn this in a test so we know what our vulnerabilities are. Suffice it to say, that I wonder the value of knowing the vulnerabilities if there are neither plans nor funding to fix them?