Email emancipation

Depending on which surveys you read, the average business person spends a minimum of 90 minutes a day reading email. In my experience, I think it's longer. And it's certainly become more pervasive now that smartphones, tablets, iPads and other mobile devices keep us attached to our email 24X7.

Whether it's a ding, a trill or a subtle vibration, you are never fully able to escape from the onslaught of communication.

Despite the fact that we've had email for a couple of decades now and many tools and methods have evolved to get it under control, most of us are still being controlled by our tools.

There are some very basic methods you can use to get control of email and some tools - some embedded in your mail readers like Outlook and others that can be purchased like Mail Tags and Mail Act-On for the Mac - that can help automate your methods.Here are three tips:

Develop an email methodology. Email is a task generator - not a library. People send you email because they want you to READ, SCHEDULE, MEET, REVIEW, CONSIDER, VOTE, ATTEND, COMPLETE .. something. So set up a folder system based on actions. For example:

•  Read Later (email that's interesting and requires no action from you) 
• Waiting (email that will require an action once something else has been completed or email where you have assigned tasks and need to make sure they are completed by someone). 
• Action (things I have to do/respond to today) 
• Follow up (emails I need to follow up on in the next day or two) 

Discipline yourself. Schedule specific times each day when you are going to read and act on email. Don't open your email every time a new message comes in.

Automate standard tasks. Every time you click on "Yes, I'd like to receive more information", that's another email that's coming into your mailbox on a regular basis. All of us get ads, newsletters, curated listings of topics you may find of interest, daily digests from FaceBook, LinkedIN, newspapers and magazines. Even if it's material you want, it is not demanding immediate action. Learn to set up rules that will automatically move these messages to your "Read Later" folder. Or, if it's something you no longer want, directly to your trash.

Rules in Outlook and Apple Mail can automatically categorize mail so it can be easily pulled up when you need it. In Outlook, an even more powerful feature is the ability to turn messages into tasks or appointments right through the inbox.

These steps can help you "triage" your mail based on what you need to "DO." Or often who needs to do it (think of all the emails you get copied on that really don't involve you).

The important thing is at the end of each day there should be something less than 15-20 emails in your inbox.

Remember: email is a tool to help you do your job, it is not your job. A construction worker isn't "hammering", he's building a house.

Working the iPad: Best inking/handwriting applications

By Laura Haight

Since my iPad and I embarked on our journey together, I've tried - really, really tried - to be totally paperless. It's a goal I have championed for years and, in various career incarnations, tried to move toward.

But there are those times and certain situations where my brain and hand just talk to each other and - unbidden and unstoppable - I reach for a pen and a notebook.

My paper notes are usually brief - jot down a phone number or email address, a few keywords or mind joggers, a quick task list.

So, I thought, maybe there's an app for that - an iPad tool to let me handwrite quick notes and export them to other tools. Many of the note-taking applications that I experimented with (see Working the iPad: Best Note-Taking Applications) had a component that allowed inking/handwriting, so I started there.

Here are the guidelines:

First, if you are a woman and you have any kind of fingernails at all, you will need a stylus. With any kind of protuberance at the end of your finger that blocks your fingerTIP from making full contact with the iPad surface, your writing results will be unacceptable. The screen shot at right of my inking without a stylus gives you a good idea of what the problem is.

Second, a note is meaningless if you can't get it out of the iPad and into some actionable form. This is the challenge with note-taking

applications as a whole and why - Steve Jobs would kick me out of the orchard for

saying this - Microsoft's One Note remains the best note-taking app I've ever used and the standard by which all the others are judged.

Finally, it would be great if a good note-taking application also offered good inking features.

Most inking apps make a big deal out of offering different pen styles, different colors and line weights. That's important if you are drawing, but if you are note taking - that's not the higher priority. So if that's all they had to offer, I didn't consider them. Some of the many apps out there with inking capabilities are designed to let you express yourself more personally by handwriting your emails, or sticky notes. And I didn't consider those for this purpose either.

This narrowed my field down to four: Inkiness, Notify, SmartNote and Penultimate.

I had great hopes for Inkiness ($3.99) which I found through the Evernote Trunk - a collection of add-ons or affiliate apps that extend the functionality of Evernote. I don't think of Evernote as a note taking tool, but it is by-far the best tool for organizing information and keeping it tagged and accessible. The Inkiness app is lean - no vast selection of the design of the paper I am writing or drawing on, limited ink color choices and only three line weights are offered - fine, medium and broad - common fountain pen nib options. One nice feature is being able to select the way the way your fingertip or stylus will position on the surface both in terms of proximity to the virtual nib and also angle. So if you are right or left handed you can make adjustments to improve the accuracy and appearance of your notes.

Still you are forced to write HUGE. It seems that the stylus makes this unavoidable, no matter what line weight or nib selection you make. Inkiness does seemlessly transfer to Evernote, as well as Twitter (although why you would want to I haven't figured out yet), to email, your photo gallery or to the clipboard.

There are several real problems - or maybe it's more fair to call them limitations - with Inkiness. First, no wrist-safe zone. You really need this with the iPad or you have a lot of unwanted marks and distractions. Second, each note is one page. There is no note

book or file structure within the app itself. So if you are taking notes during a meeting and they spill over to a second or third page, those are all lose pages with no way to append them. If you use Evernote, there is a merge function, but if not you are on your own.

Bottom Line: Evernote users may put up with the shortfalls to the get the integrations, but anyone else will likely find this app is quite ready for prime time yet. I will, however, watch for updates.

Notify ($.99) is another Evernote Trunk find. This is a more full-feature

d program and it's big selling point is that you can import web pages, documents, pdfs and annotate them with your own handwriting and drawings and then export them back out - including to Evernote, Google Docs, Dropbox and Box.net. This is a useful program for annotating pdfs and web pages. It's got a wrist-safe area and a full array of pen styles, widths and even different colored highlighters. You can change your paper style (lined, legal, white, yellow) if that's a big driver for you.

One- and two-fingered operations let you draw boxes and circles. There are fairly thorough object manipulations available. Type handling also has some neat features like the ability to calculate simple formulas and to translate text into dozens of different languages.

You do have the ability to create tags for your notes within Notify and to perform a full text search if your notebook gets sizable.

Bottom Line: A lot of features, a good tool for annotating. Navigation confused me a little and I am still trying to figure out how to close a note.

SmartNote ($2.99). In my previous look at Note-taking apps, I found SmartNote to be the all around best product for note taking. This remains true and it will allow you to integrate inking with typing. SmartNote lets you create as many notebooks as you want so you can keep notes organized by topic (this would be a big plus for students). You can bookmark pages and notes to make them easy to find later, add audio recordings and use an array of pre-built widgets to add drawings, graphs, musical notations and more to your notes.

For students - especially those studying music, science or math - SmartNote is a must-have app. For business, there are a few challenges. The handwriting appearance is jaggy - even with a stylus - but gets better with experience. You only have two things to do with your notes/notebooks when you need to integrate them with other applications - Export a PDF or Email a page - which comes over as a .png file. Exporting a PDF gives you several good options: export the entire notebook or just specific pages or page range, include the notebook background or not, change the image quality to make the file smaller if you need it to be and email it or save it in a documents folder.

Your recordings can be emailed separately, but if you email the note any associated recordings do not come along with it.

Bottom Line: smartNote does a lot, but I started out looking for a quick way to take notes on the go. This is not smartNote's forte. Still if you're looking for a good note-taking program that you can work in 75% of the time, this may be it.

Penultimate ($3.99). This app advertises itself as the best handwriting note app in the App Store. Although it seems like you are paying more for the app that does the least, it's more that you are paying more for the app that focuses on doing one thing. The interface is simplicity - choose one of three line widths and six colors and start writing (or doodling, if the artistic spirit moves you). There are no boxes to get in the way, no questions of whether to type (you can't) or write. The fewer moving parts, the less to get in the way of the single purpose - taking some quick notes.

Bottom Line: It's odd as I look at my evaluation, but this is my favorite app for this purpose. Don't get me wrong: This is not an app for writing. You won't want to take copious notes in long meetings or lectures. And the export options are limited to email, which fails on one of the two things I was looking for - something to integrate with Evernote. So it seems unlikely that this should be my favorite. But its simplicity and ability to do the one thing well won me over. It looks and feels like exactly what I was looking for - a pen and a notebook.

Any of these four programs will fill the handwriting and note-taking role - some with more features, some with less. What those who like to write know is that ultimately it comes down to intangibles - the weight of a fine pen in your hand, the feel of the nib on quality paper. And so it does with these apps. If it feels right, go with it.

--------

Portfolio provides services to small businesses in communication, technology and training. Want to integrate iPads and iPhones into your business but worried about communication with your enterprise and legacy servers and software? Contact us for a free consultation about how to help your workforce be more mobile and more productive.

We believe in sharing information that assists small businesses to be more efficient, productive, and profitable. So we pass on information for free through our blog, Facebook Page, Twitter account and email newsletter. Don't miss a beat and subscribe to the newsletter. You'll get some great information and special offers!

Get more out of your inbox

If you use a computer, you probably have dozens of software programs you don't even remember installing. But for most of us, our computing life is defined by three to four programs. I don't know what your third and fourth programs are, but I know the first two: email and your browser.

Regardless of age, station, profession or computing facility, email is the application almost all of us are familiar with and yet it is one of the most misused.

Email is a call to action. In business, email is used to make assignments, share and collaborate on documents, schedule meetings and garner consensus. And yet most of us treat it more like a giant junk drawer that we rummage through when trying to find that eyeglass screwdriver we threw in there last Thanksgiving.

Even though there are many better applications for many of these functions, most people are comfortable with email. So here are some tips on how to be a better email user and get more out of your inbox.

1. Make sure your email messages contain actionable subject lines. Cultivate this among the people you most often exchange email with. For example, if an email requires a response use a prefix in the subject line of RESPONSE REQUIRED followed by a specific subject. If email is only informational put an INFORMATION ONLY prefix on your subject. Whatever language you choose, make sure you are consistent and honest. If you overstate the urgency of email, your recipients will come not to trust your tagging. And truly urgent mail may be ignored.

2. Get the clutter out of your life. I confess that I have probably 3-5 services that I signed up at one point or another that send me emails every day. And every day I delete them without reading. Rather than clutter your inbox with emails you will never read - get to know rules. Rules are relatively easy to write and most email applications from Outlook to Apple Mail support them to some degree. Outlook gives you the most flexibility in customizing your rules.

3. Most mail apps also let you set up organizational attributes - like categories and color coding. Organize your categories/colors to suit your particular business or preferred way to work: set up categories for specific clients so you can easily find email that relates to a critical account; set different categories for different levels of urgency or response; or different categories for different business areas.

4. Use follow up flags on your email. These are great tools and, in Outlook, let you set up a custom reminder on an email that will pop up a message to remind you to do something related with that email. If you receive an email spelling out something you have to do by a deadline that is three weeks away, chances are you either assigned it to someone or you jotted down some note and then immediately forgot it. Set a flag to pop up four days before the task is due to remind you and pull up the email from the depths of your inbox where it has fallen.

5. Delete things once you've acted on them. Our inboxes are full of completed items, read email, things we looked at and no longer need. Delete them immediately to keep your inbox clear of those items that no longer require anything from you.

6. Email is really not intended to be a storage platform and many businesses establish quotas on mail to prevent that from occurring. Nonetheless, some email should be saved and others should be deleted. Have the wisdom to know the difference. Set up folders based on a file structure you understand - by client, by task, by sender, by subject - and whether you do it automatically with rules or do it manually, file the mail you need to keep. If you are a sales person, you may want to save emails from clients authorizing specific purchases. But you may not need the actual sales order if that has already been created in your main business system.

7. Turn mail into the action items they really are. In Outlook, by clicking on an email message you can drop it on top of tasks or the calendar icon to turn it into an assignment or a meeting. If you're a Mac user and you're using Apple Mail, if a message contains information that is identified as an appointment, you can click alongside of it and a drop down menu will appear that lets you add it to your iCal. If you use a GTD (getting things done) program - like Things or Evernote - you may be able to drag the email

message over top of the icon to create a new to-do item.

8. Don't spend your life in your email - it is far to easy to get distracted. Schedule times when each day when you'll devote yourself to working through email - assigning tasks, scheduling meetings, making assignments and filing important information.

9. When you shut it down for the day, your inbox should have 10-20 items at most.

10. I can hear you telling me that's impossible. So I ask you: Have you ever lost all your email? Mistakenly deleted things, your IT department did an upgrade and you lost your inbox, your mail file was corrupted? Initially, you panicked, but it didn't take long to just move on. The world did not come to an end.

It is possible to clear the clutter out of your work life and make your mail work for you - not the other way around.

-----

Want to learn more about how to save time for you and your employees with the tools you already have? Contact Portfolio to discuss custom training options.