Has your inbox got you locked up?

With the onslaught of new and emerging social networking tools such as Google+, we now we have bigger social circles and more friends, connections, followers and so on. This means we are communicating with newer tools other than email. Our  frustration with email has therefore increased significantly. When was the last time you checked your inbox, 1 minute ago? Luckily there are tools available that may help to ease the time you spend on your messages, or at least alert people about your current message “load”. Cue: Courteous.ly.

What is COURTEOUS.LY?

Courteous.ly is a new idea in the pipeline to help users share information about their email load. It is an academic research project conducted at the University of Georgia. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of sharing information regarding email load and to see how users respond under such circumstances. The hypothesis is that people once exposed to your message (over)load will better understand and therefore delay either sending their message or expect a delayed response from you.

How Does it Work?

Courteous.ly provides you with a personal link which you can add to your email signature. Once clicked it informs contacts about your current message load by grading it as either “Light”, “Normal” or “High”, so they can better understand the delay in your response. You can sign up at Courteous.ly using your Gmail account and as soon as you get your link, you’re good to go. You can also show contacts how they can reach you faster by adding a personalised message in your settings. Also, by using simple tags for example [whenever] in the subject line of their email will ensure that the message only reaches you when your email load has dropped back to normal. Courteous.ly currently only works with your Google account, including Google Apps. Although it is a research project your personal information is kept private.

Benefits to Working Professionals and Business

Being a working professional, one has to deal with loads of e-mails on daily basis. Whether it be important business appointments, meeting schedules, client feedbacks, information sharing; today all happens electronically. E-mail is your personal postman and it is all up to your email account to keep you posted. It has provided us with a simpler and more effective ways of contacting people, however sometimes a mesage stampede may work counter clockwise. Every morning there will be junk mails, regular mails and important mails in your account and you have to deal with all of them in some fashion. People do not know what is keeping you from replying but Courteous.ly does exactly that for you. Letting people know about your email loads can help reduce your frustration as well as theirs.

When was the last time you stayed on top of your inbox? Did you go offline, or perhaps you have decided not to check your emails first thing in the morning and instead focus on becoming more productive in the way you use email? Whatever system or techniques you make use of, Courteous.ly could become one of them.

Thinking about being productive and how to increase productivity

I recently went on a course on developments in digital marketing. My main reason for being there was to network with local businesses and speak to the course leader whom I knew. During the course we had to work in pairs to solve a problem that the course leader had set online, we were given a deadline and off we went. I had the fortune to work with a very experienced woman and we used her new laptop (MacBook Pro…great choice) to do the activity. Things went well for the first 3 minutes until her TweetDeck began pinging her with new messages. Each time a new message popped-up she would lose her focus and look to the right-hand corner of her screen to see the message. The pinging occurred every 2 minutes and we never completed the task properly. How many hours a week will be wasted and how many assignments will be delayed as a consequence of these seemingly minor distractions? Employee productivity is clearly important.

“Don’t bother him, he’s wired in”

- The Social network

This quote crystalizes the state of being productive, well at least the state where we stand a chance of getting there. This line was taken from the film The Social Network, you know the Facebook film, and shows how programmers in this environment put their headphones on to get time to focus. This is what we need to do. Let’s look at the reasons we sometimes get distracted:

The Un-Productivity Check List

Try to answer these questions as truthfully as you can.

1. When I work on [Add Important Task Here] I always close my browser window.

2. I limit time on [Favorite Social Networking site] to x minutes in the morning, a touch after lunch and a brief stint in the afternoon.

3. I switch off my mobil phone (or keep it on silent with phone facing down – If you’re a parent and switch your mobile off but leave the screen facing up you’re OK too)

4. I set my email software (Mail, Outlook etc) to ‘Offline’.

If you can say YES to 3/4 you’re almost ‘Wired In’ – well done. If not consider the amount of time you are wasting in a day\week\year? How is that impacting on your work(load)? If you don’t notice any impact on your work and you said YES to 1-2 that’s even worse…

The only distraction we need in front of us should be our: Goals, USPs or Purpose. Put these clearly somewhere, post it notes on your wall, on your desktop or do like me and print them on my coffee mug (though that is a tiny bit sad…). So next time you need to write that all important blog post, get wired in and focus.

The dedicated website owner, blogger or Social Media enthusiast used to be confined to their office or at the very least laptop and broadband dongle. Nowadays however, these creative individuals can run their online empires from the comfort of, well, anywhere. Cue devices like iPhone and iPod Touch.

Below follows my top 11 Apps that I use to keep track of trends in education, communicate with colleagues and other creative professionals and update my websites and blogs with text as well as files and graphics. This list is by no means exhaustive and only contains apps I personally find effective, some of which are free whilst others come with a modest price tag.

If you use other ones which would be worth mentioning please add a comment.

1. WordPress 2 (free)

This is a simple, fast and effective application that enables you to update your WordPress blogs at the press of a button. It focuses on adding and editing posts, pages as well as handling comments but has left out other WordPress features like changing themes, plug-ins and major administrative settings.

2. EverNote (Free)

I started using EverNote way later than most it seems and it’s got to be said that it really does improve your workflow as well as your organisation. This app lets you save ‘snippets’ from your online as well offline experience including photographs, text (whatever you copy like hyperlinks and standard text) and you can record audio and save it on the EverNote app. After you press save it will automatically sync with your online (free or premium) account that you set up via the app. Similarly, it’s a good idea to install the software on all the machines you use as it will sync with all. There’s also a handy web widget to install for most browsers so that saving to EverNote becomes a breeze. Many productivity apps now allow you to save directly to EverNote (like Qipit below). Superb.

3. Documents ToGo Premium (£8.99)

A very handy app to have as it allows you to open, edit and create Word, PowerPoint and Excel files straight on your device. I have found it invaluable particularly when I really need to do last-minute amendments to a presentation or handout. A tad pricey for what it is but hey it’s still under a tenner so won’t break the bank and coupled with DropBox and FTPOntheGo you’re invincible!

4. Drop Box (Free)

To put it simply, DropBox is outstanding. It syncs all files saved on its server to all computers (PC and Mac) where you have the software installed. It’s as if you saved the document to all of your computers in one go. There are also other powerful features which makes DropBox superb:

• File Sharing: share an entire folder or specific files on DropBox with friends and colleagues. A great way of using DropBox is to open a ‘Public’ folder which you can use to link to files from websites and emails.
• Back-up: use DropBox as your online back up. The free account allows you to upload 2G of data which is a pretty good start. If you need to backup all your music and video files then upgrading is very cost effective.

The app does not allow you to access all of these features from the handheld device, but you can still:

• Access media, photos and documents you can’t fit on your iPhone
• Sync photos and videos from your iPhone to their secure online storage
• Download files from your dropbox to your iPhone for offline use (just select your favourites and they will be downloaded straight to your device)

5. FTPOntheGo (£3.99)

I love this tool! Upload your files straight to your server without any hassle. It will also allow you to upload using secure FTPS. Perhaps the best feature is the ability to edit files within the App and upload on save ( (Word/PowerPoint and any text file such as PHP/HTML) as well as take a photograph or video with your phone, resize it and upload, all witin the App – clever.

6. Mocha VNC (£3.99 or Free)

I started using this app initially when my daughter was a newborn as it was difficult to access my Mac when she was sleeping (generally on me). I just launched Mocha VNC and controlled the Mac from the iPhone. Hmm a bit fanatic I know. However it will also allow you to use your machine from anywhere – very clever and immensely useful particularly if you need to send larger files and you haven’t got access to a fast connection or PC/Mac.

7. Qipit (£1.19)

QiPit turns your iPhone or iPod Touch into a scanner! This handy little gem will turn any photographs of written and printed materials into scan quality digital documents so if you are in a lecture theatre or workshop and want to save time, then take a snap of the Interactive Whiteboard, Flip-chart or handouts and QiPit will digitize the photo and tweak it until it’s readable. Then just send it to EverNote or email, all within the app. Genius.

8. ColorSplash (£1.19)

Originally I wasn’t going to add any design or graphics apps but the following two apps are too good to miss out.

ColorSplash is a stunning application for what you pay. You start by taking a photo with your device or import a photo from your Photo Album. ColorSplash will then convert the photo to black-and-white and it is your job to ‘add a color-splash’ which really does draw people’s attention to the image. You can zoom in and out of the image which means that you can create very detailed and sophisticated images. Fantastic for your blog posts or department website.

9. Sketches 2 (£1.19)

Sketches 2 is the web designer, blogger, artist or doodler’s dream. You can use it to just draw images using the various painting and drawing tools (very similar to PhotoShop), sketch ideas for webpages, prototypes, layout of your own iPhone app or whatever else you’d use the various backgrounds, shapes and icons for. You can also add your own images as backgrounds. Perhaps the most clever feature is the ability to add a background map (satellite, map or hybrid) based on your location! It also offers extensive export features of your amazing canvas to the Photo Album, Twitter, email, PDF as well as JPG/PNG.

10. EchoFon Pro for Twitter (£2.99)

I tried eight different Twitter clients before realising that EchoFon is the most efficient and easy-to-use of them all. The most significant features I use are:

* Multiple accounts (Pro version)
* Searching for people you follow auto-list their usernames for quick selection
* Creating lists
* RT your own Tweet menu
* Who has RT you menu
* and a lot more!

11. Skype (free)

I always question how this can be a free service everytime I speak to my friends and colleagues abroad. Even when there were 21 million users talking and VC:ing at the same time, the quality was still good. Skype is the ideal tool to stay in touch and signing up only takes a few seconds. All you have to do then us to search for your friends and colleagues and add them to your Skype list – if they haven’t got Skype tell them to download it ad it works on both PC and Mac as well as most mobile devices.

If you liked that, you'll like these:

• Improve Your Email Productivity Courteous.ly
• Why am I not more productive? Increase your productivity
• 7 Brilliant iPhone Apps for Teachers and Bloggers