How can I take control of e-mail, to-do’s, and the media diet?
Although this presentation was a little off topic, it was quite informative. In fact, Mark provided a tool I’d been trying to find for months – what he calls BitLevers. Here is what Mark had to say, much of which is contained in his new book Bit Literacy.
All employees should have some basic skills mastered in order for them to be productive. These skills include:
- Managing E-mail
- T0-Do Lists
- Media Diet (consuming less content)
- Managing Photos
- Creating Content
- Naming Files
- Storing Files
In fact, Mark has applicants do a typing test to ensure they can touch type fast enough to remain productive in his company. Mark showed us how to master our in-boxes. Here are five types of email that we receive – and what you should do with them.
- Spam [Delete It]
- Personal [Read and File or Delete]
- FYI’s [Read and File or Delete]
- Small To-Do’s [Take care of them right away – anything that takes less then five minutes]
- Big To-Do’s [Defer to later by creating a to do in your e-mail application, or scheduling time in your calendar]
He says the biggest issue most of us have with our inboxes is not deferring most email to a To-Do or calendar entry, and we should get in the habit of clearing out our in-boxes on a daily basis. Once it’s clear it’s time to tackle your To-Do list for the day. You’ll sleep better when you’re done.
The final bit of advice he gave was to use BitLevers. I call them speed codes. These applications run PC and Mac and allows you to configure speed codes of text so for example – TYVM would automatically conver to Thank You Very Much automatically. I’ve installed a similar tool on our WordPress blog called Templatedia which you can use to configure speed-codes for any amount of HTML. Example {{ckphoto}} when published will automatically insert all of the HTML associated with adding my photo to the beginning of a blog post and the hyper-link that takes you to my profile page. Brilliant!
Unfortunately I can’t find one for the PC. TypeIt4Me and Typinator are both for the Mac. Anyone know of a PC based version?
Hopefully this information will help you too!
