Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

My scattered brain

Lately, I have been working on uncluttering my inbox. Sure, in the spirit of Getting Things Done, I "get In to empty" every day, but I realized I've been processing waaay too many messages that have little or no relevance to me, and handling too many pieces of paper. I want to share some of the things I've done, and hear from you about additional steps you may have taken to trim down your inbox.

Spam filtering

I've experimented with a number of add-on spam filters for Outlook (most of them have free trials) and have settled on Cloudmark Desktop, and am quite happy with it. It's very easy to use, and is based on a 'neighborhood watch' kind of model - all users are able to report things they believe are spam, and messages flagged by enough people are reviewed and added to the spam list, if appropriate. Likewise, if you find a message that you think was mis-identified as spam, you can unblock it which unblocks it for you (this sometimes happens when people who are too lazy to unsubscribe to messages just hit the Block button on the toolbar instead). At right is a snapshot of my stats since I started using it in January, for perspective.
Unsubscribe more aggressively
I've been paying more attention to newsletters, Google alerts, and other recurring email traffic and unsubscribing from them if I notice that I always (or almost always) delete them without reading. Same goes for offers from vendors I've purchased from, particularly if I'm no longer using their product.
I've also been unsubscribing to physical mail, as well. Letting magazine subscriptions end, returning unsolicited or unwanted mail (in their own postpaid envelopes with a note asking them to remove me from their mailing lists), and so forth.
Deleting, rather than responding to more email
I'm getting better at not jumping into the fray on email threads that don't directly pertain to me or my primary goals. I'm seeing a gradual, but persisten, decline in mail volume from this. Once I realize I no longer want to follow an email thread, I use ClearContext's "Unsubscribe" button to make it disappear from my view (don't fret - it puts these things in a special Unsubscribed folder where you can go re-subscribe if you make a mistake).
Automate recurring bills
Last year, I wrote about "outsourcing the drudgery" in my life. I've now gone a bit further and set up every service I can as an "autopay" account, and converting to electronic statements if they offer them (this allows me to easily use NitroPDF to mark them up and forward them for expense reporting, and makes it easy for me to file the statements electronically so I can retrieve them if I need to.
Back off on the email "whack a mole"
When I first discovered the joy of an empty email inbox, I constantly watched it and tried to keep it empty. Now, I only "work" my email inbox about 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the afternoon, and sometimes a quick check in the evening. And I still get to empty every day.
This helps partially because it prevents "rathole emailing" since many problems have resolved themselves by the time I see them. It also helps because the limited time windows help me do a better job of sticking to the 2-minute rule, etc.
I shared my tips for getting a very large email inbox down to a very empty one a while back - if your inbox is overloaded, this may help.
And I'm still looking for more ways. What about you? Any tricks you've discovered that you'd like to share?

Are you wired for clutter?

Gretchen Rubin at the Happiness Project has a great quiz/commentary on the subject of clutter, packrat tendencies, etc. I definitely learned a lot from her article - both about myself and about ways to declutter my house. Click over and take the quiz.

In addition to her comments and topic areas, I find that lack of good storage space is often a big factor in whether my "stuff" becomes clutter or not. If I don't have a place to put something, or if that place is inconvenient to get to, then that increases the likelihood that I'll create more clutter.

One of the "project candidates" I'm considering for this summer is to pick some key problem areas in my house and figure out how to resolve the "inadequate storage" problems they present. Of course, there is also an element of procrastination here, as well. I've bought a couple of storage racks to hang from my garage ceiling, but have been putting off installing them, and I have a couple of cabinets I still need to assemble for additional storage. The Projects portion of my list is something I've skipped in my last 3 weekly reviews - time to get back on the wagon, I suppose.

What about you - any major epiphanies for dealing with clutter?

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Want to share my personal assistant?

OK, this is so cool. I want to tell you about a very specific type of personal assistant: its name is Yapta, which stands for "Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant."

I've been using this as part of the company's private Beta for the past couple of months, and they have now moved into a public Beta, and I can talk about it. As you know, there are lots of good services out there to help you shop for good prices on airfare. Yapta is the first system I've ever seen that track prices even AFTER tickets have been purchased and alerts you when you are eligible for a travel voucher or cash rebate from the airline!

You see, most airlines have policies that allow you to get money back if the price of airfare drops after you purchase a ticket. Yapta will watch the fares, let you know if the price drops, and helps you get a travel voucher to get obtain travel vouchers - and in some cases, cash refunds - when the price decreases on tickets that have already been purchased. They make it very simple to start watching a trip you've already purchased - you simply enter the airline, the confirmation code, the price you paid, and your last name and it fetches all the details and starts tracking. In the past 3 months of private Beta testing, Yapta alerted its 275 test users to approximately $30,000 in eligible savings and refunds, for an average net benefit of $109 per traveler.

The other thing that is cool is their browser add-on that lets you tag trips you are watching and let you know if the price goes down. For example, from the Expedia site, I tagged a few different routes (clicking on the "Tag it with yapta" button) on a few different airlines for a trip I want to take next Christmas. Now I am watching them to see if any bargains crop up. Today, they track a respectable list of airlines, and I imagine the list will grow as time goes by.

This is a game changer, folks. Be sure and check it out - and sign up for your own account. It is free, by the way!

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[Updated] Calling for backup

I'm very good about backing up my laptop (I regularly use Norton Ghost to do full and incremental image backups to removable hard drives). At home, I tried a similar routine to back up my wife's computer using a SimpleTech NAS drive attached to my wireless router. The drive is awesome, and I still use it to store data, but I just couldn't seem to keep a consistent backup routine going.

My wife takes a lot of pictures, and also stores a lot of important data on her computer relating to her very active involvement in Girl Scouts. She would wring my neck if her computer crashed and her data was lost.

Mozy to the rescue

For the last couple of months, I can tell you without hesitation that her computer is backed up every day no matter where I am.

You see, I discovered an online backup solution called Mozy that automatically backs up her entire computer to a remote backup facility every day. Mozy is very simple - you install it on your computer, select the files you want to backup (there are some presets, or you can select them yourself). Mozy then begins to back up the fill set of files you've selected.

One thing you need to know up front: Mozy is designed for users with broadband connections - moving large amounts of data over anything less than broadband is not practical. There are clients for Windows Vista, XP, 2000, and Mac OS X 10.4.

Mozy is efficient and secure

Mozy has built-in bandwidth throttling and uses secure transport and storage (128-bit SSL for data transfers, and your data is encrypted with 448-bit Blowfish encryption before it's sent over the wire).

As efficient as Mozy is, the first backup can still take a while - our first backup of around 13 Gigabytes of data took 4 days to complete over our broadband connection. However, once the first complete backup is done, Mozy performs an incremental backup each day (incremental backups back up everything that is new or changed since the last backup). My incremental backups only take a few minutes each day.

Mozy also handles file versioning (it can store multiple iterations of frequently-changing files), and can back up open files.

Restoring is easy, too

A backup is only as good as your ability to get your files back if you really need to. Mozy shines in this department. You have quite a few options - here are some of them:

  • You can right-click a file and select "Restore Previous Version" and Mozy will show you a list of the previous versions available so you can pick the one you want to restore.
  • You can right-click anywhere in a folder and select "Restore Files in Folder" and you'll get a list of the files in the folder that are available for restore and you can select any combination of them for restore.
  • You can log into the Mozy site and restore from there using their web UI (this allows you to restore to the original location or another location).
  • You can use the Mozy web site to create a ZIP file of selected files so you can download the file and unzip them wherever you want.

Free or fee, depending on your needs

For personal use, Mozy offers a free subscription option, as well as a fee one - here are the differences:

  • Mozy's free option is limited to 2 gigabytes of data storage, but is otherwise fully functional.
  • Mozy's fee option runs $4.95 per month for unlimited data storage - this is the option I chose, and I recommend it for most people. It doesn't take much for your data to grow larger than 2 gigabytes. Incidentally, you can go month-to-month, but a 1- or 2-year subscription is a better deal since you get 1 or 2 months free.
    • Note: I bought my copy at my local CompUSA in a box and it only cost $50 for the product with an activation key for unlimited backup for one year. That's a sweet deal since that comes in at $4.16 per month since Oregon has no sales tax.

For business, there is a "MozyPro" option with different pricing plans (along with additional features and broader platform support).

Outsourcing your backups

In summary, if you're one of those procrastinators that doesn't ever seem to get around to backing up your computer, why not outsource the task to Mozy?

I, for one, am quite pleased with this service.

Updates: Some additional thoughts

Since I posted this yesterday, a few questions have come up in comments - I'll address them here, as well as in the comments.

  • I had a typo in the monthly price - I've corrected it above.
  • Restore speed - will it be too slow?
    • My broadband ISP (and most others from my informal research) provides me with much faster speeds for downloads than uploads. This means that the restores will be several times faster than the backups.
  • Can I trust an online backup service?
    • There is, of course, always the possibility of a problem. However, I have used online backup services in the past (Connected Online Backup - I used it for business) and never had a problem.
    • For many reasons (don't put all your eggs in one basket, etc.), I suggest you have a mix of backup methods - a periodic local backup (I use Norton Ghost for this - I got a copy as part of Norton Systemworks), along with the online backup for more frequent data backups.
    • Mozy has gotten some good reviews from some people I trust (like Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal, and a lot of leading computer tech publications)

Related items:

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Jott a note to yourself

In my last post, I talked about using "notes to yourself" as a means to build fodder for status reports, track completed activities, etc.

Another tool in the arsenal for this is "Jott" - a free service I found out about a couple of months ago through Big Wes when he commented about it in response to one of my posts.

Jott is a service that allows you to call a phone number and leave a voice message to yourself or any number of predefined recipients (or groups of recipients via a Jottcast). After you leave your "Jott," the service converts it to text and sends it to you or your chosen recipient via email. Very cool. They even provide a link to listen to the original audio recording in case you suspect something's gone awry in the translation.

As with the method of sending an email to yourself, this just becomes a part of your inbox processing workflow (a la GTD) and you can act on or file the email as appropriate.

I have a speed dial key on my Blackberry to make it easier to use this - I just hold down J, and it connects me to Jott. Simple as can be, and easy to incorporate into my habits.

By the way - Jott continues to improve the service and make it even more user-friendly. They've already done a "version 2" upgrade since I've been using it.

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