gmail

Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts

Merlin — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:46:17 -0400

Like thousands of people yesterday, I was annoyed and inconvenienced by Gmail's unexpected 2-hour dirtnap. But, wow. Apparently, it just irrevocably hijacked the whole day for some folks. And even sent a few into a Dark Afternoon of the Soul that most 19th-century Romantic poets would have found a bit histrionic.

Now, as a user, polemicist, and nemesis of Apple's MobileMe problems, I'm not here to criticize the frustration about a broken cloud service; I know that feeling all too well and have the dents in my wall to prove it. But, I do want to talk about some strategies you can choose to employ whenever a change in access to anything unexpectedly rearranges your day. Because things do break, and there's no reason you have to break with them.

One of the things that's most helpful about a system like GTD is the way you learn to think of your work as something that can and should be viewed from multiple angles.

A 90-second GTD primer:

Project. Any desirable outcome that requires more than one physical action in order to be considered complete.
- "Present a persuasive pitch to Henderson's group on 2008-10-03" is a Project.
Next Action. The next physical activity I could perform that moves a Project nearer to the outcome I want.
- "Call Henderson to schedule time and location for 10/3 presentation" is the next action for my Project.
Context. Any limitation, opportunity, tool, or resource that lets me do one of the physical actions in my Project.
- "@calls" is the Context for my Next Action
- in this case, "@calls" serves as a list of all items I could do on any Project, so long as I have access to a phone.
- (See? Different angle.)
The Four Criteria Model. The notion that Priority is only one of four criteria in deciding what to do at a given moment.
- The other three are "Time Available," "Energy Available," and (you guessed it) "Context."

Got it? Contexts are a way to horizontally slice across all of your Projects in a way that lets you do what you can do at a given moment -- even if it's not the thing you want to do or most need to do. Because that's life. And, sometimes, life is a huge dick.

Like a famous religion and a handy bit of Psychology, Getting Things Done acknowledges that, while you have little or no control over the interruptions and unexpected change in your life, you DO have the power to decide what you want to do about it right now. So, while you can't run your life by Priority alone, you always have plenty to do. If you've learned to think in terms of Contexts. Get it?

So if you forgot your phone, skip "@calls," and move to anything else. Boss out to lunch? Skip "@Boss," and move to anything else. Internet went down? Skip "@web, "and move to anything else. Gmail is down? Yes! You've already guessed it! Skip "@email" and move to anything else. Anything else. Anything. Else.

Sure it's insanely frustrating and annoying to not have access to something you depend on. And, yes, it's natural to whine about it and even burn a few cycles on a fast, cathartic tantrum. But, friends, if you're so mad about an uncontrollable change in your life that it takes you off all your work for half a day, then you're still playing in the minor leagues of GTD. And you're not doing yourselves and the people you produce work for any favor in the bargain.

Plan in Projects, work in Contexts, and strive to not let anything stick to you more than you'd like it to.

And, seriously. Guys. When one door closes, just open a freaking window. An hour without email is a great time to dive into sixty guilt-free minutes of writing, reading, or even pencil-sharpening. Work the time.

Because it ends up being a lot more fun and useful to ride the wave than to yell obscenities at it for four hours.

”Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 12, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Gmail IMAP Settings, Straight from the Google's Mouth

wood.tang — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:55:27 -0500

This may not count as a real find since it's on the Google's own support site, but this list of recommended IMAP client settings is interesting in that it differs from many of the Gmail IMAP how-to's I've seen so far.

Regarding Sent mail:

Do NOT save sent messages on the server. If your client is sending mail through Gmail's SMTP server, your sent messages will be automatically copied to the [Gmail]/Sent Mail folder.

...and Junk folders:

Do NOT enable your client's junk mail filters. Gmail's spam filters also work in your IMAP client, and we recommend turning off any additional anti-spam or junk mail filters within your client. Your client's filter will attempt to download and classify all of your existing messages, which may slow down your client until the process is complete.

I adjusted my Mail.app settings and noticed some marginal improvements. A big difference is that their advice for Trash results in archiving every single message in All Mail, whether you delete it from your client or not.

”Gmail IMAP Settings, Straight from the Google's Mouth” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 19, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Why don't you just shut up?

Internet Rockstar — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:08:57 -0400

I subscribe to a lot of email discussion lists for the various secret yet high profile projects to which I contribute. Most of these lists are active, with five to ten new threads every day, each consisting of several messages. Even when the lists stay on topic, most of the time, my contribution to (and interested in) the conversation only lasts a few messages.

This creates a problem for me, as I am a neurotic email checker. Constantly seeing a stream of new messages that I am not reading makes me feel stressed out. I do not feel like I have to read them, but I do feel like SOMETHING must be done. But I cannot silence the threads by reading the messages, or by deleting them -- as soon as a new message comes in, the thread will be back, bolding up my inbox again.

I want to reiterate that I am not just talking about off topic threads. There are plenty of on-topic threads that I don't want to see. The same way I don't want to attend your in-person meeting (even if you managed to get the good bagels this time), I don't need your stinky coffee breath filling up my inbox with nonsense about some sub-project that has nothing to do with me.

Like you haven't heard this one on 43Folders before.

I fully and totally believe that eventually, Google will be everywhere and know everything. I don't know how it will work, specifically, but my best guess is that everyone will (be forced to) have a robotic Google spider nanomachine implanted in their brain so that everything they do and everything they see is constantly and instantly indexed, and all of our experiences will be filtered through context aware smart filters into the appropriate sub-folder of our consciousness.

It is for this reason that I was super excited to discover that in addition to the delete, archive, report as spam, report as phishing and "report as annoying ex girlfriend trying to wheedle her way back into your life through innocent seeming emails" buttons, Gmail also has a MUTE button. It is located between the N button and the , button on your keyboard, and when pressed, it will do something unbelievably great. You will never believe what it does! It will MUTE the conversation! That means, even if the conversation goes on for three years and spans fifty thousand distinct email messages, not one of them will ever embolden your inbox. They will still be there, filling up Google's giant hard drive in the sky, but they won't be demanding my attention.

The mute button gives me hope, dear readers. For it is not just my inbox that is cluttered with the constant and meaningless chattering of morons -- it is everything and everywhere. So, I look forward to the day when Google will enable me to mute the entire world around me, and finally find out just how blissful ignorance can be.

”Why don't you just shut up?” was written by Ben Brown for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"