January 28, 2011
Like a lot of inside-the-White-House information, definitive data on which president first used e-mail is hard to come by. Working backwards, the Obama, George W. Bush, and Clinton administrations most certainly used e-mail as a daily part of their workdays. For select White House staff, e-mail, in fact, goes back as far as 1982 when National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and his deputy, Admiral John M. Poindexter were hooked in to an early IBM office e-mail system. The rest of the Reagan White House came online in 1986.
There’s not much evidence, though, that presidents themselves used e-mail on a regular basis before President Obama, who lobbied to keep his Blackberry despite recommendations from advisors. According to a BBC report on the Obama Blackberry, “neither George W. Bush nor Bill Clinton used e-mail during their presidencies.”
According the the Clinton Presidential Library, however, Clinton was the first president to send an e-mail – two in fact. The first was a test e-mail to see if the president could work the system. He could. The second was an actual e-mail message sent to 77-year-old Senator John Glenn aboard the space shuttle Discovery during Glenn’s 1998 return to space. Glenn replied, making him the first senator to e-mail a president from space. As if being a war hero, astronaut, senator, the first man to orbit the Earth, and the oldest man in space wasn’t enough.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 26, 2011
Here’s something you’ve been told 100 times. But it’s worth reading again. Because if you haven’t tried it yet, you’re starting your day all wrong. You may be the type who likes to hit the ground running, go straight from the commute to the first phone call, meeting or e-mail without missing a beat. But as efficient as that may seem, starting your work day without a few minutes of planning is a recipe for a meandering workday.
Ten minutes with a to-do list and a little prioritizing will not just help pace and structure your day, it will give you a benchmark to fall back on when the day distracts you with brushfires, impromptu meetings and unexpected emergencies. This may be the most hackneyed productivity tip of all time (well, after “don’t check your e-mail every five minutes”). Nevertheless, it’s repeated so often because it works so well. Try it for a week and see if it leads you a calmer, more productive workday. Oh, and stop checking you e-mail so often.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 25, 2011
E-mail is a flawed communication medium – just like all the rest. Like a cell-phone call or an exchange of morse code, an e-mail conversation has its own unique set of shortcomings and potential pitfalls. The problem with e-mail is that it’s only part of the story. Unlike a phone conversation or an in-person meeting, the reader’s only clues about your feelings come in the words you type. This leaves a lot of room for interpretation. We’ve all been part of e-mail exchanges that start with a misunderstanding and spiral down from there. There’s hope for the medium though. It starts with writing to minimize misinterpretation.
1. Short is good. Too short is dangerous.
Sure, you’re overworked. You’re answering a lot of e-mails. Why not keep your replies as minimal as possible? Mainly because they’re going to be read by a human. And very often, we humans interpret minimally worded answers as an indicator of dissatisfaction. It’s OK to be concise but only if you can do it without coming off terse.
2. Season With Greetings
It’s tempting, especially with e-mail replies, to launch right into your message without an introductory greeting. While it saves typing, omitting the “Hi Dave:” or the “Thanks for your e-mail” also makes the reply less personal. Depending on what you have to say next, this may not make too much of a difference in the perceived tone of the message. But especially if what follows is bad news, the opening greeting can help soften the blow and make you seem like a partner, even if you’re saying something the recipient doesn’t want to hear.
3. Beware of Subjectivity
There’s a reason e-mail marketers spend years fine tuning their subject lines. The subject is the first impression that will shape the emotions and expectations the reader brings to your e-mail. Don’t blow it with your first words. Messages whose subjects sound like demands will be read as such, even if you’re carful with your prose in the body of the message.
4. Easy on the Opinion
To minimize negative interpretation, minimize the negatives. Assume that everything you write will be read as a glass half-empty. Dissatisfaction, negative opinions, and above, all indignation, should be kept to a minimum and worded as gingerly as possible. You can’t control how your e-mail will be interpreted but you can minimize the triggers likely to fire off negative assumptions from the reader.
5. Re-read. Re-read Again.
We all type fast. Or try to. Sometimes that means what’s in our heads doesn’t make it to the screen. Omitting a word, letting spell-check replace a misspelling, or funking up your phrasing can all happen without warning. The only way to catch these mistakes is to re-read your message. It’s time consuming. But one unfortunate typo can change the tone, or the meaning of your message. So, re-read. And if it’s really important, have somebody else read it too.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 23, 2011
Postbox is now available in the Mac App Store! This exciting new option will enable an even greater number of people to discover, purchase, use, and manage Postbox within their iTunes accounts.
There are some important things to know about Postbox in the Mac App Store, so we’ve compiled a full list of FAQs. Here’s a quick run down of the most common questions:
Can I install Postbox on more than one Mac?
Yes, you can install Postbox purchased from the Mac App Store on any and every Mac that you personally own and use.
What languages does Postbox from the Mac App Store support?
Postbox from the Mac App Store is currently available in English.
A version of Postbox that contains support for German, French, Spanish (Spain), English (British), Italian, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, and Swedish has been submitted for review by Apple, and we expect that this version will be available in a couple of weeks.
Are the versions from the Mac App Store and the Postbox Store the same?
Not at this time. There will sometimes be a slight lag between the versions available from the Postbox website and the Mac App Store due to the extra time required for Apple’s review process. Additionally, there may be slight differences in functionality in order to comply with Apple’s application guidelines.
Why are Add-ons, and iCal and iPhoto integrations not supported for versions of Postbox purchased through the Mac App Store?
Apple requires that applications be self-contained, single application installation bundles that do not install code or resources in other locations. As such, we cannot support add-ons, iCal or iPhoto integrations for versions of Postbox sold and updated through the Mac App Store.
We’re currently working with Apple to determine if there are any possible work-arounds to these restrictions. If we do find a work-around, or if Apple revises their guidelines, we’ll be sure to submit a new version with this functionality enabled.
If I purchase through the Mac App Store, can I download a version from Postbox that supports Add-ons, iCal and iPhoto?
Yes, and you can do so free of charge!
However, once you copy the version of Postbox from our website into the Applications folder, updates from this point forward will be managed by Postbox’s update system as opposed to the Mac App Store.
Can I convert a purchase from the Postbox Store to a copy managed by the Mac App Store?
There’s no way to convert a Postbox Store purchase to a Mac App Store purchase without repurchasing Postbox on the Mac App Store.
If you wish to purchase Postbox from the Mac App Store, just drag Postbox from your Applications Folder to the Trash, empty your Trash, restart your computer, and the Purchase button will then be re-enabled. Your mail settings and mail databases will not be affected.
Is the Postbox Family Pack available in the Mac App Store?
Not at this time. If Apple provides this functionality in the Mac App Store, we’ll be sure to pursue it!
Are there student discounts in the Mac App Store?
We do not have special discounts for students in the Mac App Store. However, students can purchase from the Postbox Store for $19.95. Please visit our Student Discount page for details.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 21, 2011
We all know our employers have control over workplace e-mail. The standard legal thinking is that they own the system and therefore the messages. But as of last week, employers gained even more control with a ruling from a California court of appeals.
The Sacramento court ruled that e-mails between lawyers and their clients are no longer protected by attorney client privilege if they’re written at work. So, if you’re planning on suing your employer, pick up the phone.
More on the story at Wired News.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 20, 2011
Before you click the next not-safe-for-work e-mail attachment, look over your shoulder. In the NSFW e-mail story of 2010, an Australian banker temporarily lost his job for opening nude photos e-mailed to him at work. How did he get busted? Uh, he opened the e-mails on TV.
During an evening news live segment from an investment firm, one unfortunate Dave Kiely can be seen in the background clicking through a number of fleshy e-mail attachments. While the video went viral, his employers sent him home and decided what to do with him.
In Dave’s favor:
The photos were less-than-nude shots from an issue of GQ.
The model, Miranda Kerr, made a public statement that he should keep his job.
Working against him:
Opening nude photos on the evening news.
Dave kept his job. This is a good place to mention that Postbox makes it easy to archive, find and view e-mail attachments. If, however, you’d rather view Dave in the act, we’ve got that too.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 19, 2011
The too-long e-mail generally induces the following behavior in recipients:
- A sigh
- Closing the e-mail and marking it as “unread”
- Getting around to it later
- Skimming
- Reading partway through and saying “yeah, yeah, I get it”
Nobody wants to write the too-long e-mail but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Some things simply take a lot of prose to explain. Fortunately, there are some tricks to make a too-long e-mail less burdensome to the recipient.
1. Write an outline.
Despite her speech impediment and the faint smell of mothballs, your 9th grade English teacher was right. If you don’t know exactly what you want to say, you will dither around and waste words.
2. Write short paragraphs, even if it takes a lot of them.
Look at a newspaper. Long stories get broken up into lots of short, few-sentence paragraphs. Those little pauses make the page (or the message window) look less intimidating to the reader.
3. Use bullets and numbered lists.
Sites like eHow and Instructables break complicated explanations down into a few discrete steps. This kind of slicing and dicing makes for easier skimming.
4. Employ the sub-head.
Magazines and newspapers use short (often bold) lines of type to introduce sections of a longer article. You should to. In addition to breaking up a long grey page, they let readers know what’s coming so they can adjust their attention level.
5. Get abstract.
Every academic paper starts with an abstract, a few-sentence overview of what the paper will be about. Business and government reports use something similar: the executive summary. Whatever you call it, it’s a great way to let the reader evaluate the importance of the e-mail. If they can understand at a glance what it’s about, they may just choose to give the rest of the e-mail the time it deserves to be digested thoroughly.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 18, 2011
There’s a famous line in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina about families: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. If Leo were writing on a PC in 2011, he might have said the same about e-mail. I can think of at least 50 kinds of unpleasant e-mails, everything from forty flavors of spam to the unsettling “I’d like to see you in my office.”
One kind of unpleasant e-mail is a particular drain on workplace happiness and productivity. It’s the one that requires a very carefully worded reply. These e-mails happen all the time. Sometimes it’s a complaint from a disgruntled customer. Sometimes it’s a co-worker trying to pull you into a meeting you’d rather not attend. In themselves, the e-mails aren’t so bad. The problem is the dread associated with the reply, a dread so insidious that it can sap time and energy from your day.
The trick, like so many workplace solutions, is avoidance. Just avoid dealing with the e-mail. Not forever, but long enough to get on with the rest of your day. Try this avoidance system: the Later Box.
Create a folder (or a Topic tag in Postbox) specifically for those e-mails requiring careful replies. When you read an e-mail that makes that little voice in your head say “man, I don’t want to deal with this,” stick it in the folder and get on with your day. You’ll need a block of time to revisit your Later Box when you have the stomach crank through your replies.
When and how you “process” these depends on your temperament. Some people can dispatch them first thing in the morning and begin the day with the satisfaction of knowing they’ve already tackled the toughest task of the day. For others, commute time on a train, bus or ferry is the perfect no-man’s land to spend half-an-hour in reply mode. But any way you do it, getting these e-mails out of your head for a few hours is one of the few productive kinds of procrastination.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 14, 2011
Nobody likes meetings. But nobody seems to know how to make them go away. We don’t have the answer either but we do have are a few tips to help shorten your next business epic.
1. Arm Yourself with the Agenda
Most meetings have agendas. But few of them get used properly. The agenda isn’t just a list of what to talk about, it’s a meter for measuring the progress of the meeting and a lever to move it along when it’s bogged down. Be the “agenda guy,” reminding people that you need to get to the next item before you all run out of time. It’s a great excuse to suggest that unresolved issues get tabled, worked on offline or postponed to the next inevitable meeting.
2. The Secret Ballot
Everybody knows that meetings without goals are a waste of time. A few of us even take the time to spell out those goals at the start of a meeting. What almost nobody does, however is to look at whether those goals were met at the end of the meeting. One way to implement this meeting post-mortem is to use a grading system. After each meeting, attendees slip a letter grade into a shoebox by the conference room door. Each grade should reflect one attendee’s opinion of how close the meeting came to meeting its goals. Consistently bad grades may be the lever you need to shake up how (and how often) meetings are run. You can even try to connect meeting grades to the bottom line with a Meeting ROI.
3. Threaten Longer Meetings
One reason meetings don’t work is that attendees don’t come prepared. They haven’t read the pre-meeting packet or taken the time for some other bit of homework intended to make the meeting go faster. One way around this is to offer attendees the option of even longer meetings. When planning a meeting, give attendees the choice of doing their pre-meeting homework in the first half-hour of the meeting. Most will get the idea.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 11, 2011
It’s hard enough to concentrate at the office without our own bodies working against us. But that’s exactly what happens to most office workers in the early afternoon. Endocrinologists call it the postprandial dip and it stems from a drop in blood glucose as your body concentrates more on digesting lunch than on helping you concentrate.
Until the beginning of the last decade, your only (legal) option for a workday energy boost was a cup of coffee and a glazed donut. Then came the tidal wave of energy drinks. From Rockstar to 5-Hour Energy, there are now dozens of drinks. Despite claims of the benefits of amino acids and B vitamins, most nutritionists attribute any energy boost to their high levels of sugar and caffeine.
A less sugar-laden way to boost concentration may be available in herbal supplements. Leading the list are ginseng and gingko biloba. The first is credited by advocates with curing everything from impotence to diabetes. Despite the hype though, there is some evidence that it can improve abstract thinking and mental reaction times. Ginseng, taken in combination with gingko biloba, it might even be a memory booster, according to the National Institute of Health’s MedLine Plus database.
So far, most of the research into ginkgo biloba has been to gauge its effectiveness as a defense against Alzheimer’s and dementia. While less research has been done on how good it is at improving concentration in healthy adults, there may be something to it. One British study showed improved cognitive reaction times peaking about 2.5 hours after taking just one dose of the extract. Not exactly a quick fix but potentially healthier than a caffeine and sugar bomb. Or you may be better of with a clandestine afternoon nap.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 10, 2011
When was the last time you offered an idea at a workplace meeting that didn’t raise some sort of objection or qualification from a co-worker? From “that won’t work” to “let me play devil’s advocate here,” there are a million roadblocks to getting a group to go along with your good idea. Sometimes the criticisms are valid. (After all, not all your ideas are good). But more often than not, someone is objecting to your point just to raise their profile in the group.
While there’s no silver bullet to outsmarting the devil’s advocate, there are a few techniques for sidestepping objections and engaging the rest of the group with your idea. Tom Kelly, one of the founders of the product design firm IDEO, offers a number of strategies in his book “The Ten Faces of Innovation.” Here are a few of his his role-centric ways of disarming your attacker:
- Be the Cross-Pollinator - find an analogy from outside your company, your market and your world. New ideas always sound fishy. If you can show that what’s new in your world is a proven strategy in other environments, you can paint your opponent as unwilling to think outside the box.
- Be the Experimenter - concede that you don’t know for sure your idea will work but that the path to the best solution seldom comes without trial and error. If you can explain why a negative outcome is manageable, you can focus on the rewards that come from planned trial and error.
- Be the Caregiver - few people want to admit that they’re advocating against their customers’ best interests. If your explanation as to why your idea is good for your company isn’t getting traction, flip it. Explain why your idea’s good for the company AND good for your customers. You’ve just doubled the upside.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 7, 2011
Yesterday, we covered ways to stay focused by using Account Groups to separate work messages from personal messages. The trouble is, it’s often work-related e-mail that gets in the way of work. Most of us juggle multiple projects on any given day. And it’s often the distractions of one project that prevent you from making progress on another.
Postbox’s Focus Pane is designed to let you focus on one project or topic at a time. The Focus Pane let’s you view just those messages in your inbox that you’ve assigned to a particular topic. The topic tagging is easier than it sounds: Postbox lets you tag messages with topics of your choice and then automatically labels any later messages in that thread with the same topic.
Let’s say you’re working on Project A. With the Focus Pane tuned to Project A, you’ll see only Project A-related messages in your inbox. If a colleague you’re working with on Project B sends you an e-mail, it won’t appear in your inbox until you switch off the Focus Pane.
Used together, Account Groups and the Focus Pane really let you concentrate on one thing at a time. Learn more about the Focus Pane here.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 6, 2011
Smart? Driven? In the prime of life? Multi-tasking should be no problem, right? Maybe not. It’s increasingly looking like no one is particularly good at bouncing back and forth between tasks.
In the 2010 Frontline documentary “Digital Nation,” a Stanford University professor describes the effects of constant multitasking on his students’ work: good paragraphs, lousy papers. “What we’re seeing is less of a notion of a big idea carried through and much more little bursts and snippets,” he said.
Nothing poses a bigger threat to workday concentration than e-mail. Just when you’re getting up to speed on one message, another pops into your inbox, pulling you away and breaking your concentration. Ignoring incoming e-mail is easier said than done. But it’s not impossible, especially if you have the right tools.
Postbox includes a number of features designed to let users focus on one task at a time. We start with a very smart inbox.
We found that while users love a unified inbox (where mail from different accounts flows into a single inbox), mixing work-related and personal messages in the same box often creates an irresistible distraction. Postbox gives you the option of customizing your unified inbox into Account Groups.
With Account Groups, you can organize your accounts into groups to create custom unified views. For example, you can create groups for personal accounts and work accounts and then unify your message views by those account groups. That lets you focus on work (or play) without unrelated messages appearing. Learn more about Account Groups.
If your life’s really complicated, you can break your inbox down even further, either with additional Account Groups or with another filter function: the Focus Pane. More on that one tomorrow.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
January 5, 2011
First there was Slow Food, a worldwide movement against wolfing down mass-produced food. Then there was Slow Travel, an effort to get tourists to interact more deeply with the places they visit. From there, the trend has spawned everything from Slow Sex to Slow Art, Slow Gardening, and Slow Software Design.
Recently, the trend has started to creep into the business world with consultants, agencies and bloggers promoting Slow Marketing, Slow Branding and Slow Work.
What the slow movements have in common is a distaste for the ever-increasing pace of modern life and a healthy suspicion for products quickly conceived and poorly created. If you think you’re working faster and getting less done, it might be worth a look at the International Institute of Not Doing Much website. Tips include: “yawn often” and “spend more time in the bathtub.”
Posted by Sherman Dickman
December 31, 2010
Like Coke vs. Pepsi or Lady Gaga’s outfits, e-mail signatures are a matter of taste. Unfortunately, it’s not just your taste that matters. Your e-mail recipients are the ultimate judge. A new year is a good excuse to take a good hard look at your signature and what it says about you. After all, it’s the final word in every e-mail you send.
There’s too much that can go wrong in a signature to cover in a short post. So we’ll stick to a single topic: signature images. E-mail purists and design-nerds think they’re hokey. Those who use them think they’re great.
Regardless of where you come down on the image issue, remember one thing - it shouldn’t replace text. If your contact information appears only in an image, it won’t display by default in most mail clients. Even if it does, the reader won’t be able to copy the text out, which is a least part of the reason you’ve got a signature in there in the first place.
If you think an image is appropriate, that it gives your readers a better sense of who you are and how you do business, we recommend keeping it small and simple. The more elaborate your image, the more likely it will get noticed. And that may not be a good thing.
A poorly designed signature image, like a lame logo or clunky website says something about your business. If you’re not 100% sure you’re sending the right message, stick to text. And keep the ASCII art portraits to a minimum.
Posted by Sherman Dickman
