The word gravity has two different meanings that both suit the needs of my proposed meme “Inbox Gravity Zero“. Both are bad, and both need to be reduced. Yeah, even if the phrase isn’t that catchy.

 photo credit: Hammonton Photography

Grave-ity

First there’s the meaning “grave”-ity, as in “How bad is it? Grave consequences!” This means, that an email that you get could cause stress because it might mean that you’re required to act upon it. When such an email arrives and your email client goes ‘ping!’, it might cause stress, because you feel you need to look for it.

To reduce this sort of gravity, you absolutely must use multiple e-mail adresses. In my opinion, you’ll need one work e-mail, and that’s the most grave-ity laden one. One trusted private personal e-mail is needed, where you just have a bit of grave-ity, as you give it only to friends and family and your most trusted webservices like your own blog and as you actually might want to see the mail. At last, one spammy e-mail that you can use for everything else is needed, which you can use as your open ID and to register and login in all the webservices that you use. This email has no grave-ity, as it will mostly be something spammy like or facebook notifications and the like.

 photo credit: mugley

Generally, you shouldn’t catch work-emails on your smartphone unless you get paid for reacting anytime. You should also not set your smartphone to collect the spammy email adress, as otherwise you become someone whose phone pings all the time and who can’t put that thing away.

Your home computer should get all of your email in my opinion, but I would set the catch rate to once an hour or deactivate the sound when an email arrives, so that you don’t go nuts.

Physical Gravity

Secondly, there’s the physical meaning of gravity, which means that an object draws in other objects. The higher the gravity of your inbox, the more mails will be drawn into it, causing work, stress and a sawtooth effect that effectively hinders your productivity. Reducing this sort of gravity can be done with the following ways:

- The separation of emails as just described will help, because the email clients on your systems usually only attract emails you want to see when you’re around the systems. What could help here too is using IMAP in all the systems, as this marks mails as read that you have read on another device so you won’t get pinged multiple times.

 photo credit: underminingme

- Secure your spammy email adress. Be sure that there’s some kind of spamfilter that sorts out spam, as when you’re putting that email adress everywhere on the web, it’s only a matter of time until the spambots find it and add it to their catalog of adresses to send spam to. My spammy adress is at http://www.gmx.net, who are not very good per sé, but who have a very good spam filter built in.

When you have reduced your inbox gravity the best way possible, you won’t scream “INBOX ZERO” at Twitter anymore, but that’s because of the fact that it won’t be such a pain to do email anymore. Comments?

Related Posts:

• ToDo for Mac – Review
• Merlin Mann Talking
• Complexity and Dealing with it in Software Development
• Do not use the WordPress iPhone Apps
• New year’s resolutions

ToDo is not perfect. But I’ll begin with the nice little tidbits that make me keep on using this app, which is the best feature a ToDo app can have: continued usage.

• There’s a keyboard shortcut to quick add tasks, that can be defined in the settings. After the shortcut, just type the task name and hit return or tab, which adds the task and lets you go on typing the next tasks name unless you hit return or tab again. Great feature for quickly adding tasks.

• Clicking on the blue linked day in the calendar filters everything by tasks due today

• CMD + N is the shortcut for a new task, or, if you’ve selected a project or a tasklist-task adds a new subtask. With the arrow keys you can navigate in the list, hitting right or left arrow folds or unfolds projects and tasklist-tasks.

• If you’ve selected a context or tag, you don’t only get the whole list filtered by that tag / context, but also have new tasks get the context and tags automatically selected for the active values. Very nice thing if you’re seperating contexts as work and private and projects as tags.

• I should mention that I only use “lists” for the default one “inbox” and “ideas”. I’m throwing everything into ideas that shouldn’t be deleted, but that I usually won’t want to clutter my list. And you can completely filter out lists from your views, what I did with “ideas”. Additionally, context and tags are kept, so I can scan for ideas very targeted, if I need to.

• Via drag-and-drop you can drag your single or multiple selected tasks to tags, contexts, lists or on a due date (in the calender) to set those on the task(s). Very nice way to easily set stuff on tasks.

CRITICISM:

As I like this app, I want to make some point that could be improved, and if anyone reading this develops this app or knows someone who develops this app, please forward this.

• automatic recognition of context by WIFI-SSID (or place on iPhone)
• keywords for the quick-entry dialog (for example #tagname or @contextname), autocompleted if possible
• more folding levels for tree-like tasks
• tree-like contexts
• more performance after CMD-N: sometimes half the typed name is missing because I didn’t wait for the new task to pop up in the tree

OVERALL:

The app fits my workflow most and keeps me using it – what no other ToDo-list-tool has ever achieved as I’m to much of a GTD freak. Have fun with this app.

photo credit: @superamit

Related Posts:

• Marketshare and Winning and Religion
• New year’s resolutions
• Be more productive with Phrase Express
• Inbox Gravity Zero
• Firefox on Mac – Tabs Closed after Restart

They seem to generate permalinks for the converted audiofiles. So if you listen to podcasts from time to time … here are the links. If the links don’t work anymore, give the site some time to come back up (or drop a comment).

Merlin Mann – Who moved my brain? (28.49MB .mp3)

Merlin Mann – Toward Patterns for Creativity – Macworld (25MB .mp3)

Webvisions 2010 Keynote – Merlin Mann: “Bold Ideas and Insane Possibilities” (25MB .mp3)

Inbox Zero (Merlin Mann)  (GoogleTechTalks) (26,84MB .mp3)

Merlin Mann on Time and Attention (Getting Things Done) (GoogleTechTalks) (32.37MB .mp3)

Oh by the way, if you need a nice Windows tool for downloading music or videos for Windows, try our Youtube Song Downloader (from Abelssoft, where I’m working at). It’s really a very nice piece of software.

Related Posts:

• Life is The Ultimate Game
• A Waste of Time – How (Not) to Reach Your Goals
• Timeframes of Life
• Programs you should have a look at
• Time Management doesn’t mean rushing

And using those better ways is like wearing a watch when you never did so before. It feels strange first, often you don’t realize it could help you, but then, you find enough situations where the quick glance on the watch is really much more convenient than getting out your phone buiried in your pocket, klicking a button and waiting the screen to apprear, only to have to lock the screen after that and putting the phone in its safe position.

photo credit: KatieKrueger

Related Posts:

• New year’s resolutions
• Get over your media collecting habits
• A Waste of Time – How (Not) to Reach Your Goals
• Great Software Engineers Fail
• What should a good ToDo Tool do?

• how a HTTP-Request works
• what GET and POST means
• that HTTP is stateless and what that means to your application
• what JavaScript is and where & how it is interpreted
• what AJAX is besides a nice word you heard often
• how a server works
• what request and response are
• what a servlet is
• …

Connect all the information

After you have understood the basics, you can go on and understand the higher level stuff. This is what most of us learns while attending a university, but you never have understood everything and you’ll never stop hitting new fancy acronyms and technologies if you’re into programming. But for every acronym you see and that you don’t understand, try to make sure you at least read the Wikipedia page before you try to do some fancy coding by copypasting things you found via Google – because if you don’t understand what you’re using just now, you implemented a black box that might or might not work and that you didn’t learn anything about.

When you approach new concepts, frameworks and technology in that way, you can build up a solid foundation of knowledge that get even more solid every time you learn another new technology that bases on stuff you already know, assuring to yourself that what you learned before is correct. Fast and dirty is slower in the long run. And as such, you shouldn’t be concerned that something takes some time to understand – because when you don’t really understand it, then you won’t be able to fix the issues that will occur anyways. And it’s a long way from zeroes and ones to AJAX.

photo credit: Patrick Hoesly

Related Posts:

• New year’s resolutions
• Life is The Ultimate Game
• Increasing Speed: Evolution of Lifetime
• Inbox Gravity Zero
• ToDo for Mac – Review

photo credit: bloody marty mix

Related Posts:

• Scheduling One Post per Day & Reading Blogs
• Using GTD for more Blogposts
• Making Money with Blogs – How To Believe the Lie
• Auto-Enrich blogposts with Zemanta and Web 3.0
• Inbox Gravity Zero

So, just use the following plugins, and you’ll be fine:

• Efficient Related Posts (doesn’t steal your time like some other related posts plugins do)
• jQuery lazy load plugin (important if you use pictures, you’ll not want to load all images the user won’t scroll to anyways)
• TweetMeme Retweet Button (this is the fastest retweet button I found, usually those things make your site dog slow – if someone knows a faster one, please give me a hint, as this still drags me down)
• WP-Optimize (optimize your database very easily, so the dataconnection is faster)
• WP HTTP Compression (just use it)
• WP Minify (big time speedup – just use it)
• WP Super Cache (you don’t want processors calculate what HTML to output everytime someone enters your site, caching lets you store that)

photo credit: Éole

Related Posts:

• Superb WordPress Plugins – Speed, Easy!
• Bloggers, Stackoverflow, Favstar, Quora – Let’s extend Flattr!
• Do not use the WordPress iPhone Apps
• Scheduling One Post per Day & Reading Blogs
• Need more WordPress Plugins!