Category Archives: Writing

Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-Off #1: Warning: Email Alerts Are Costing Your Company Money

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Welcome to the first Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-off, this week, the distraction of just one aspect of email.

Disable Your Email Alerts

A huge time sink. We all love email. Some days it just seems I live in the Inbox of Microsoft Outlook where I have to respond to a few dozen business emails and be in constant contact with a geographically dispersed group of people. Email can be an insidious productivity killer as it leads us to believe we are making industrious use of our time when we answer 20, 30, 50 or even 100 emails in a day. Much has been written about being more productive with your email or stopping it from becoming a huge time sink. I do not want to belabour the valid points that others have raise but there are some things you can do which might not be so obvious to prevent email from becoming a complete distraction.

Turn off your email received alert right now, by default Microsoft Outloook, the email package I use and the package of choice for most businesses, will announce you have new mail as soon as it arrives. Microsoft killed off the Office Assistant Clippy and all the other little avatars in Microsoft Office because they presented a huge distraction to users and were not particularly helpful to boot. The new mail alert needs to go the way of those dodos too.

If you spend your days hovering over every missive that is dispatched to you and feel the need to read or answer it the moment that it arrives, you should seek serious help in your time management skills. Until the day arrives that Microsoft disables this feature by default, I strongly suggest you turn off your email received alert in Outlook or any other email application you utilise. You do not need widgets on your desktop or cell phone either that alert you to new email. Unless you work in a rapid response, customer service department that depends on email as one of the communications channels you just do not need to be that distracted. Oh, and if you are responsible for monitoring the World of Warcraft servers and rebooting them when they need it and receive email alerts to that fact, you should ignore this advice. Just saying…

Email alerts are the near ultimate Pavlov experience topped only by an eBay outbid signal or Amazon Goldbox notice for their potential to distract. Alerts of just about any kind are a ridiculously flawed user interface practice and the final word in disruptive software[1]. One moment you are having a deep thought, utterly subsumed in your task, and then along comes your email client to announce you have new messages that demand an answer right now. Even worse, those little pieces of badly written communication are often not even relevant to your current task.

If you are a knowledge worker, such as an artist or programmer, and you work for someone who insists that you continuously monitor your email for their latest, deeply fascinating communiqué and respond within minutes, your best option is to talk to them.

Sit down for a one-on-one chat with the person about how your job requires large uninterrupted blocks of time for concentrating on your assigned tasks. Inform the person politely but firmly that checking email too often absolutely kills your productivity, preventing you from focusing on the work that you need to do.

Many jobs we do throughout the day require large blocks of time to concentrate and not everyone needs to be at the beck and call of someone every minute of the day. Should the person you are confronting about the email issue insist that you be constantly available whilst trying to do your most creative work requiring concentration, I suggest you start contemplating a new job. The person making demands of you to check your email frequently respects neither your time nor the work you produce, no matter how much they may protest to the contrary. Do you really want to work for someone like that?

I check my email at most twice a day, and that is still once more than necessary for my job. It has to be a very rare day when I am checking more often than that. I check my email as the first thing I do when I get in to the office, and I check it again towards the end of my waking day, just in case there is a communication that requires a response be sent before the next morning. Only checking two times a day allows me to get large blocks of concentrated time to work on projects for my company. My day is already filled with distraction and disruption so minimising and streamlining where I can, in this case, my email handling procedure, can really add up over the course of a month to save me hours I can use working on other projects.

By informing and educating people I work with that I only check my email twice a day it sets an expectation that they will not receive an immediate response from me. I find that generally one of two things happen, either the person refrains from contacting me for completely trivial issues or they personally interrupt me in a face-to-face communication. This latter problem is a topic for a different article.

Turn off email alerts, educate the people around you, check your email only twice a day, recover time to focus on what is important.

[1] And not disruptive in a good way either.

Blogging Tools Update

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In an earlier article I lamented how difficult it is to find a decent tool to make the act of posting a moderately complex article to a blog an easily achievable act.

It appears that the current version of Microsoft Windows Live Writer, which I started using a few days after I wrote the original lamentation, is actually becoming a blogging application to be reckoned with. The version I am currently making use of is 14.0850 released in early 2009 and so far it has proven to be a useful, albeit still somewhat lacking, blogging application.

I still write my articles in Microsoft Word, copy & paste the text directly in to Windows Live Writer, verify the HTML source code was not tampered with, correct the HTML source code in Adobe Dreamweaver if it needs it, fix up any hyperlinks, copy and paste the HTML source code back to Windows Live Writer, and finally publish to my blog.

Windows Live Writer to date has so far not seen any need to alter, change or otherwise screw around with my source code in any way, shape or fashion and the application handles both pages and posts reasonably proficiently which I am glad to see. This was always one of my main complaints with it and other blogging applications.

Live Writer also handles a few extra features of WordPress that it never used to, such as handling publishing dates in the future.

I am also pleased to see that Windows Live Writer can properly handle a moderately complex WordPress theme, a task that earlier versions would easily choke on. Live Writer can actually display the theme as a preview whilst you are editing your text and not do enough weird shit to make you give up and not use the feature.

The application is not quite smart enough to use appropriate CSS style class tags from the WordPress theme – yet – but I would not expect it to without a little bit of configuration.

I even get mostly real-time word count from Live Writer now. I say “mostly” as it takes a second or two to catch up with my typing before updating the total words. It unfortunately only gives me a total word count for the entire article, not a word count of a selected region of text. I can live with that for now as Live Writer is not my main editing application anyway.

The feature I like about Windows Live Writer that I have not seen any other blogging applications handle correctly is support for footnotes in Microsoft Word documents. I often add a lot of asides and footnotes that are tricky to make work in a blog post if the editing application does not support them.

A new feature I would dearly love to see is the ability to import a Microsoft Word document directly, instead of performing a copy and paste. For that matter, just let people import any other kind of Microsoft Office application document. Being able to bring in and convert a Microsoft Project or Microsoft Publisher – or an Adobe PDF file – without any kind of intermediate conversion would be a welcome addition.

I am now using Live Writer to directly turn out short little posts like this without bothering with Microsoft Word. The editor lags behind a little bit more than Microsoft Word, but it is tolerable.

Who knows, maybe in the future the text editing facilities of the application will rival those of Microsoft Word and I can do 90% of my daily blog writing directly in Windows Live Writer.