标签: email

Just like many of us these days, I've grown used to multi-tasking. In my case this involves writing articles while answering telephone calls and handling email. Perhaps I'd be more efficient if I multi-tasked less and focused on individual tasks more. When I'm ensconced in my command chair I'm surrounded by a wall of screens. Two of these screens are predominantly devoted to displaying the status of my two main email accounts. I typically receive a couple of hundred emails a day, so there is a steady stream of bing! sounds indicating new arrivals. On the one hand I pride myself in answering incoming emails as quickly as possible, and also to responding to anyone who emails me, even if the answer is "No, I'm terribly sorry that I can't do your student project for you." (LOL!) On the other hand, every time I glance away from whatever writing project I'm working on to look at what just binged, it takes me a few seconds to regain my train of thought, even if I decide that particular email can wait until later. Things are worse if I decide to respond to an email, because it can take at least a minute to regain my stride with regard to my main project. Interestingly enough, my chum Jay just emailed me a link to "An Empirical Study of Work Without Email." The creators of this study cut off email usage on five workdays for 13 information workers in an organisation.   During the course of the study, the researchers observed and classified a total of 5,643 activities carried out by the 13 participants. They recorded millions of sensor readings, including things like window changes on computer screens and the heart rates of the subjects, during more than 700 hours of data collection. This data collection encompassed both the baseline condition (with email) and the no-email state. Perhaps not surprisingly, the study revealed that, when without email, the participants multi-tasked less, focused longer on the tasks at hand, and experienced lower stress. (It wasn't all good news, because some of the participants reported feeling a sense of being "cut off" from their colleagues.) Now that I think about it, I realise that having my email systems up all of the time is actually putting me under some amount of stress. There have been numerous bings while writing this column, for example. Many of these, upon inspection, I've subsequently realised lack importance (especially in the case of spam). Some have caused me to utter words of which my mother would certainly not approve. Thus, for the remainder of this week, I am going to perform an experiment on myself. (I'm a professional. Don't try this at home without medical supervision.) I'm going to power-up my email systems only three times a day—once when I first come in in the morning, once in the early afternoon, and once just before I head out of the door in the evening. The idea is to see if I feel as though I'm being more productive and under less stress. Actually, I just took a moment to close down both of my email systems. I have to say that I feel under less stress already. I shall report back further at the end of the week. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on this?

Some days are indeed stranger than others. For example, I've just been copied on a series of emails that have left my mind reeling. It all started with an email whose subject line was "Allergic to cats?" Inside this email was the following image, which certainly made my eyes water...     Someone responded with an email containing another unusual image as shown below accompanied by a message saying "This was seen at the CPhI show here in Madrid ... can anyone suggest an appropriate caption?"   Well, as you can imagine, this sparked a flurry of email activity, with suggestions ranging from "Getting to the bottom of skin grafts" to "Porker? I hardly even knew her!" to "PharmASSeutical," "PharmaSOWtical," and "PharMOUSEutical" (all of which are rather clever, I have to agree ... much better than anything I could come up with). However I have to admit that my personal favorite was "A pig, a mouse, and two asses walk into a bar..." But wait, there's more, because then someone responded with a stop-motion video of a Lego version of the Titanic sinking (quite moving with the haunting music). And this is the point when things started to get very silly indeed. I don't have the time for all of this. I really will have to ask my 83 year old mother and her friends from church to remove me from their email distribution list!

It's true that some days are stranger than others. For example, I've just been copied on a series of emails that have left my mind reeling. It all started with an email whose subject line was "Allergic to cats?" Inside this email was the following image, which certainly made my eyes water...     Someone responded with an email containing another unusual image as shown below accompanied by a message saying "This was seen at the CPhI show here in Madrid ... can anyone suggest an appropriate caption?"   Well, as you can imagine, this sparked a flurry of email activity, with suggestions ranging from "Getting to the bottom of skin grafts" to "Porker? I hardly even knew her!" to "PharmASSeutical," "PharmaSOWtical," and "PharMOUSEutical" (all of which are rather clever, I have to agree ... much better than anything I could come up with). However I have to admit that my personal favorite was "A pig, a mouse, and two asses walk into a bar..." But wait, there's more, because then someone responded with a stop-motion video of a Lego version of the Titanic sinking (quite moving with the haunting music). And this is the point when things started to get very silly indeed. I don't have the time for all of this. I really will have to ask my 83 year old mother and her friends from church to remove me from their email distribution list!  

My former neighbor Dave just sent me a link to YouTube -- the most AMAZING video on the site – this one literally had me saying "Wow!" As an aside, I just heard that the 2011 issue of the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook (which is scheduled to hit the streets on July 26, 2011), has finally decided that the abbreviated term for "electronic mail" is losing a hyphen. That is, instead of saying "e-mail", henceforth the officially sanctioned moniker is "email". Which means that once again I've been ahead of my time for several years now . ( Click Here to see an article on this). But we digress... Are you familiar with Wallace and Grommit ? These are stop motion clay animation figures created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. If you haven't seen their short films – especially The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave then you are missing a real treat ( Click Here to bounce over to Amazon to see the complete collection of four short films – these are WONDERFUL for kids of all ages). Eeeek... I'm wandering off into the weeds again. The point is that, in November 2010, the BBC in the UK premiered a new science show called Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention in which our two heroes take a light hearted and humorous look at the real-life inventors, contraptions, gadgets, and inventions (which, of course, reminds me of my recent Of bagpipes and inventors blog; don't you think it's amazing how all of these things seem to come together, almost as if there were a master plan ?) Anyway, episode one of this series featured Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen. This guy is amazing. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals that are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. As you will see, Theo's animated works are a fusion of art and engineering. Personally this just blew me away. I think his works are absolutely beautiful. I only wish I could see them in real life.

I am ecstatic. My data is not just backed up and secure, my email from different accounts is now so synchronized it brings tears of happiness to my eyes...   Let's first remind ourselves how we got to be where we are (and when I say "we" I really mean "me", because after all – at the end of the day – it's all about me, isn't it? :-)   Synchronizing data files A few months ago I almost lost my working data on my notepad computer (I'd been working from home for a couple of days and thus I hadn't performed my usual daily backup).   The solution I decided upon was to have two computers – my notepad at home and a tower system in my office – and to ensure that exactly the same working data files were present on both machines. This spurred me to write an article on Dropbox.   A very brief summary (in case you are new to all of this) is that you install the Dropbox software on all of your computers. When you create a new file or modify an existing file on one of your computers – say my tower at work – that change is immediately copied up into "The Cloud" (where it is securely stored using military-grade encryption). And when you power-up one of your other Dropbox-enabled computers, your data on that computer is automatically synchronized with your data in The Cloud.   Actually, if I happen to have both my notepad and tower computers powered up at the same time (on the odd occasion when I bring my notepad computer into work, for example), then as soon as I make a change to a data file on one computer I can immediately see that change appear on the other ... this really is amazingly cool.   Synchronizing emails (the way that DIDN'T work) In addition to my data files, I also wanted to synchronize my emails (and calendar and contacts) so that I saw exactly the same thing on both my computers. My first approach blog turned out to be a ghastly failure.   I don't quite know how this came about, but over the years I've accumulated a number of email accounts; different people send me messages on different accounts, so I have to keep them all going. The way I had this set up on my notepad computer was to use Outlook 2010 to automatically access each of these accounts every five minutes or so and to download any new emails from them. Also, when I replied to an email, Outlook was set up to send the reply via the appropriate account.   So far so good; the problem was that I wanted to do the same thing on my new tower computer. Also, I wanted to make sure that the current state of play was identical across both of my computers with regard to which emails I'd read, which I'd responded to, and which I had deleted.   My original plan (which was really rather "funky" now I come to look back on it) was based on the fact that Outlook stores all of your emails (and contacts and calendar and "stuff") in a database called a PST file. My idea was that – at the end of each working day – I would copy the PST file from my tower computer onto a memory stick. Then, when I subsequently powered-up my notebook at home, the first thing I would do would be to copy the PST file from the memory stick onto the notepad ... and then repeat the process in the other direction when returning back to work.   I tried doing it this way. It was a pain in the rear end! Also it didn't work. For some reason I couldn't get Outlook 2010 on the tower to read the PST file from Outlook 2010 on the notepad. Of course the PST file wasn't created with this usage model in mind, but still...   Actually, now that I come to think about it, I was incredibly lucky that this didn't work. If everything had gone as planned, I might have spent the rest of my life copying PST files around, and once you've done this one time you've pretty much exhausted any fun you can squeeze from it (grin).   Synchronizing emails (the way that DOES work) As fate would have it, I was chatting to my friend Mike Smith, who owns the IT consulting firm Serenity-Networks. Mike is based here in town, so I asked him if he could help me with my email synchronization problem.   When Mike came into my office and I explained what I was trying to do, I could see that it was taking all of his willpower not to burst out laughing (or maybe he was fighting himself to not slap me around the head for my stupidity).   Now I don't fully understand all of the ins-and-outs of what Mike did, but I will try to give you the gist of it. First of all he set me up with something called Google Apps for Business . This costs $50 a year, but as far as I'm concerned it's already paid for itself many times over in the last few days alone.   Next, Mike used my Google Apps account to assume control of my primary email account. Again, I'm a bit "fluffy" about the intricate details, but my understanding is that he did things like changing DNS entries such that any emails to max@CliveMaxfield.com no longer go to my old account that was part of my www.CliveMaxfield.com website – instead they now go directly to my new max@CliveMaxfield.com account that's controlled by Google Apps.   Once this was set up, Mike used my new Google Apps thingy to go out and link into all of my other accounts. So now the Google Apps account is doing everything that Outlook 2010 used to do. It automatically accesses each of my email accounts every few minutes and downloads any new emails from them. Also, when I reply to an email, the reply is automatically associated with the appropriate account. So now I can access my Google Apps email from any computer in the world using a web-based interface, which is rather handy. Of course I could do this with my old email accounts, but there was a separate (and different) interface for each account. Now everything is under one "umbrella".   But wait, there's more, because this is where things start to get REALLY clever...   On the one hand it's wonderful to have all of my accounts centralized as discussed above, but... I personally loath web-based email interfaces. I really prefer using Outlook 2010 as my main email. So the next thing Mike did was to download and install something called Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook onto both of my computers. Once he had done this, Mike went into the Outlook applications on both of my computers and connected them back into my main Google Apps email account. So what does this all mean in real terms? Well, just for the sake of argument, let's assume that I have both of my computers here in my office. When I power-up my tower computer and open Outlook, the first thing it does is to synchronize with my Google Apps email account, so any new emails appear in my "Inbox" as you would expect.   Now let's assume that I power-up my notepad computer and open Outlook on it. Not surprisingly, it also synchronizes itself with my Google Apps email account. The clever thing is that from this point on it doesn't matter which machine I'm working on. If I read an email on one machine, that email shows as having being read on the other. If I send an email on one machine, a copy of that email appears in the "Sent" folder on the other. If I delete an email on one machine, that email is immediately deleted from the other. (Of course if one machine is powered-down, it will resynchronize itself the nexttime it is powered-up again.)   And it gets better and better... if I add a new contact on one machine, that contact is added to the other. If someone sends me an invitation to a meeting and I accept and that meeting is added to my calendar ... it appears in the calendar on the other machine.   But wait, there's still more...   The way Mike has things configured is everything I ever dreamed of ... but just to add the last dollop of icing onto the top of the cake, the last thing he did when he set all of this up was to import my original Outlook 2010psT file into my new Google Apps account (you basically use the "Import" command in Google Apps and point it at your old PST file). This took a while, but in addition to all of my old emails, it also imported all of my existing calendar entries and contacts and suchlike.   Even better, it imported the old hierarchy of email folders I'd created over the years and then it stuck all of my old emails into the appropriate folders (this hierarchy of folders is – of course – replicated on my Google Apps account and both of my computers' Outlook accounts).   I cannot tell you how "tasty" this all is – it is everything I ever dreamt of and more – I have a great big silly smile plastered all over my face just thinking about it all – this has been a good week!