“Better organise your start menu” – This probably applies to XP more than Vista because with Vista you have the search function built into the start menu.
If your program menu is a huge tower of application folders and short-cuts, you may find yourself having a hard time finding the application you need.
Try categorising all your applications in to a small number of groups, then create folders for each of them. Then you can drag and drop each application into the category it belongs to. You can do this directly in the start menu, or you can actually go the location on your hard drive where all the shortcuts are stored. They’re likely split across two places:
C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Start Menu\Programs
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs
Unless there’s any short-cuts you need to keep to yourself, it will make things simpler if you move everything into the “All Users” folder (with the exception of the “Startup” sub-folder, you should keep that in your own area).
By going to those folder locations, you can create folders and drag and drop all the short cuts just as you do any other files in Explorer.
For example, I have the following top-level folders for all my application short cuts:
Okay this is due to a Google video I watched of a talk given by Merlin Mann, about “Inbox Zero (Google video)” (which I’ll show you at the end of this series), you can download the audio here (MP3 59Minutes 40MB). I’m not going to rehash the whole talk, but listening to this really changed the way I have looked at e-mail. (He talks a lot more about time management than I do).
In short, if your Inbox (work or home) is just a wall of messages that makes you weep as you roll the scroll wheel, then you are handling your e-mail in the wrong way. Also you can go the other way, and really spend way too much time organising and have a filing system that is way too heavy to live with. I have swung to both of these extremes in my time.
If you’re a lazy e-mail person, and you’ve got that wall of messages in your Inbox, then for the sake of liberating your time and energy you goal is to get that e-mail Inbox down to zero, yes that’s right, zero e-mail in your Inbox.
First off, there is so much e-mail you can just delete. Those mailing lists you’re on, those silly conversations you had that read more like text messages. You really don’t need to know what someone had for dinner last year, or what was the latest news on your favourite site last week. You just don’t need it.
What Merlin preaches is to learn to regularly process your e-mail rather then just checking it, and to then actually check your e-mail less.
“Don’t live in your e-mail.”
Give yourself little actions, “verbs”, for what needs to be done with an e-mail. You can watch/listen to the talk to see his actions, although here’s my current version. From my Inbox messages get the following treatment:
Immediate reply and file into my archive.
Delayed reply, gets put into my “Unreplied” folder.
Is required for reference in an ongoing task, gets filed in my “Projects” folder.
No action required, but information is needed for future, gets put into my archive.
Just delete.
Now the archive is a tricky one. Merlin Mann says that, to him, the archive is just one folder that everything goes into. When giving this talk to Google employees at their campus he said “C’mon you’re Google, you’ve got the frickin’ Gmail, just search”. My old way of archiving had an insane amount of folders and sub-folder levels. After initially listening to Merlin’s talk, I did reduce my folders, but I was still addicted to thinking in folders. Soon, I got down to only five folders and no sub-folders. Eventually, I realised that I was rarely wanting to pull anything from my archive. In which case, it became clear that using search was probably more worthwhile. Therefore, I finally gave up my folders and just dumped everything into one huge archive folder. If you are as addicted to using folders as I used to be, I hope this anecdote encourages you to change.
Conclusion
So boys and girls, this has been the story of how I became an e-mail ninja. I can now access my mail any place any where any time. I am not tied to (or at the mercy of) one specific e-mail service or computer Operating System, and I am not in dire straights if I am without an Internet connection for a while. Most importantly, I am no longer weighed down by year-old messages in my Inbox.
Picking up from where we left off last time. If you use POP mail and need to access old messages when you’re away from home, you can’t because it’s all stored inside your home computer!
So, if you need to access your e-mail when you’re not at home, the alternative of web mail would seem to be the solution. However, if you want to have a home copy of your e-mail for back up purposes and for off-line access too, then web mail is no help.
You can’t get web mail if you can’t get on-line.
Although, there is a way around this. You can get a mail account that uses a different protocol, something called “IMAP”, which stands for “Internet message access protocol”, (here’s a list of some free IMAP providers). With IMAP all your mail is on-line, even if you create folders to sort your e-mail into for storage/archiving they are all stored on-line for you to look up from anywhere. However, if you still want your own copy of your e-mail (either for back up or reference), then popular e-mail clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook Express, can download and synchronise your on-line IMAP mail with what you have on your hard drive at home. This is a really useful feature even if you don’t want back-up or off-line access, because you would need to download all of your mail if you ever switched providers. With IMAP, you truly do have the best of both worlds.
If you want to be able to download/upload to/from an IMAP server without messing about with a full e-mail application, then there’s a nice little Windows program called IMAPSize that will do the job of down/up-loading AND incremental backups with a minimum of fuss.
This has the added benefit that if you’re using a mobile device to get your mail on a limited speed (and bandwidth) account, then you can access all of your mail without having to download the whole message (yes I know, this is possible with POP mail, “download headers only”, but it’s more fiddling with settings, whereas in IMAP it’s the norm).
I signed up with Fastmail.fm, which has a free service for you to try out, but is mostly a paid-for service. I like that it is paid for because unlike Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, etc, you’re not wondering what they’re getting out of the deal, since you’re not paying them. It doesn’t cost a great deal at all, less than a night’s beer money for a year of service, bargain! (and no I didn’t get paid to say this).
With Fastmail: I can access my e-mail through my e-mail application of choice (Thunderbird), I can access it all on the web, and they even provide a WAP portal for mobile phones. Every e-mail I’ve ever stored is available to me via my mobile phone. That is really useful if you use your e-mail as a memory dump. Now remember, I have time to fiddle with this stuff, or I wouldn’t be writing this, you just don’t have this sort of time on your hands!
We all depend on e-mail these days, most of the world runs on it. It’s definitely something we all take for granted, although it’s a lot more complicated than most of us realise. This series of posts will cover the pro’s and cons of whether you should download it to your home computer or keep it in the cloud and also how to keep on top of your e-mail, and not let your e-mail get on top of you!
Part 1 discusses the good and bad points of getting your mail downloaded to your home computer. Part 2 goes into more sophisticated methods that allow you to have your e-mail stored at home, but still accessible from anywhere. Part 3 then talks about how you process your incoming e-mail and keep your inbox from overflowing!
Part 1
E-mail, accessing it and storing it, has always been a bit of a preoccupation with me.
Given that e-mail can be so important, and personal I’ve always felt strongly that I wanted to maintain ownership of it (let’s face it, e-mail is as much a part of our identity as handwritten letters once were). “Maintaining ownership” of your mail largely rules out using any form of web mail (Like Gmail or Hotmail) because if your web mail provider disappears, then so does all that important e-mail you were hanging onto. So instead, you can go with good old fashioned POP mail, which you probably get with your ISP.
POP (Post office Protocol) allows you to download mail to your computer, and usually the mail is deleted on the server as you get it. You certainly have ownership of your e-mail now. Although beware, because you are then responsible for keeping it safe. Now ask yourself, when did you last do a back-up?
Then the next problem is accessibility. How many times have you been away from your own computer and for some reason needed to see your e-mail? If you wanted to check for a new message, then it’s not so much of a problem. If you’re near a web connected computer then sites like mail2web.com will do the job for you, or maybe your mobile carrier provides some sort of WAP portal to external mail accounts.
Although, what if you want to remind yourself of something in a mail you had already read at home? Well, you’re probably out of luck because that mail is gone from your POP server and now only exists on your computer, where you left it, at home. The only way you can get around this is to start fiddling with your home e-mail program setting up all kinds of rules for when and how messages are deleted from server. Still though, at some point your messages are likely to be deleted your POP server, and when they do, you can’t put them back, so your your old mail is then confined to your hard drive.
Stay tuned for part 2 where I’ll tell you how you can have the best of both worlds.
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