Cleaning Up The Mailroom

April 28, 2012 Leave a comment

Over the last decade or so – since we started Punch back in 2003 – the volume of mail coming into my inbox has steadily continued to grow in size year on year, from what now seemed to be very lightweight, to become the ever-demanding, resource-sapping monster that it is today.

Like many people, I have a love/hate relationship with email – I tend to get anywhere from a couple of hundred to up to five hundred or more mails per day on a heavy day. However, for me it remains a terrific tool for being able to delegate quickly, cutting out the need for superfluous meetings and providing a mechanism for tracking back to see the evolution of a conversation. Clearly CRM systems can handle that aspect of use, but then it’s the ease of access, whether by phone, webmail or desktop on many devices that makes email remain so attractive.

I’ve tried various routes to keeping it in check – having had my work and personal lives completely entangled for the last nine years, I made what was a fairly big step for me recently, to set up my first personal email account that I actually intended to use with family and friends. This enables me to keep a little space between work and home, particularly whilst on holidays. Whilst that’s great on holiday, enabling me to turn off work more fully than I could previously, the rest of the time, it just adds to the management burden of coping with email.

When someone leaves Punch, I tend to redirect their email to me, so not only do I get the benefit of my junk, I also get theirs. And over the course of time, that’s now quite a few email addresses. So, over Easter I snapped, and took the time to unsubscribe from every incoming mailer, newsletter and list-based mail that I was getting. It took a good deal of effort – and, one month later, I’m probably still only 80%/90% done – but I’ve managed to cut down the amount of incoming junk each night from upwards of 50+ junk mails to 5 or less. I also get less during each day of course. In short, I think I’ve cut down my incoming mail volume by at least a third – and perhaps by as much as a half.

The reason I’m bothering to share this is to convey how much better email is after a good clean up. Whilst it only takes a few seconds to register and delete each spam item, the effect that the clutter has in terms of preventing clear thought and concentration is massive. And that’s even with a decent spam filter in place.

In short, it’s no longer so necessary for me to cut out the superfluous to be able to identify the important – which means the whole process is less taxing. So, next time you’re having a physical desk clear out to clear up your physical workspace, I urge you to think about spending a bit of time doing the same to your email. A few days of effort can make a massive difference.

(NB – On this subject – here’s a post about TechCrunch’s MG Siegler and his attempts to give up email for a month).

Filed under Health, Tech, Travel

A Tiny Change

November 19, 2011 1 Comment

I’ve been going through an interesting internal debate over the last few weeks about the extent to which my inbox governs my life, both inside and outside of work.

Inside work is one thing – although it’s certainly debatable as to whether being super reactive and responsive, which is a trait that I value greatly and I’m told has been something that those that work with us also view as a significant benefit, is sometimes at the expense of greater mental clarity. That’s a balance which is hard to strike and something that I continue to work on. However, I’ve now come the the conclusion, which I’m sure is obvious to the rest of the world, that the battle with the inbox can never be entirely won. OK “battle” might not be the right term, as it implies divisiveness and clearly many of us, myself very much included, would now be lost without email (although this was an interesting experiment by MG Siegler). I’m really referring to the fact that part of my training was that the working day is never done until there is at least white space in the inbox – and preferably that everything needing attention has been actioned.

I’ve written about this subject before. I think that there are two types of users and there is just a few years between them. Those on the slightly older side of the divide have had the above ethos beaten into them through years of doing so. Those a little younger, that have grown up with first Hotmail and then Gmail offering seemingly endless supply of storage, don’t ‘action and delete or archive’, they ‘action and leave it there’ in case they need it later. Clearly this is a broad generalisation but I find it to be true again and again. Those that ‘action and delete’ really only delete from the inbox as they tend to keep important info in some type of folder structure, whereas the second group are more comfortable keeping everything in an amorphous, ever growing, inbox. This tends to govern how people feel about email – with the former group (myself included) needing to ‘be on top of email’ and the latter group being more accepting of the fact that they are merely swimming within the flow.

The realisation that the demands of my current role are such that I can never have a clear inbox at the end of the day have meant that I do feel like I’m continually wrestling with it. The more I do so, the more it eats into my life, both inside and outside work.

So, just prior to going on holiday a few weeks back, I made what will seem like a tiny change to most people but which was certainly a big one for me. Whilst I have several gmail and hotmail addresses, they are not used as personal mail – instead for purposes such as back up of other mail and to sync contacts with my android phone.

However, when moving this blog across to it’s new home at www.petegoold.com, I thought I’d take the opportunity to set up a personal email which I then gave to just immediate family and close friends. Not work.

Effectively this allowed me to turn off my work email to go on holiday yet still have email and the internet to hand, without fear of getting smashed with 500 work emails per day which would doubtless have resulted in me feeling the compulsion to action the important ones.

In short, this small change has meant a major separation between my personal and professional lives.

To be honest it has been a long time coming and it has been essential. The business has been developing whilst my kids have been growing up. I like to think that no one has suffered – quite the contrary, I think the decision to do what we have done was exactly the right one – but being able to choose when and whether to work, rather than it being a reflex action from the moment of waking to the last thing I do before turning the lights off at night and all points in-between, is where I want to be.

Inside work, nothing changes. A number of things have happened this year which have allowed me to reflect on what I love about what I do – and as a result I’ve realised that it’s the freedom and flexibility that is most important to me. If something major were to change in my professional life tomorrow, I’d still work as I do, simply because it’s the way I’m hard wired, so I have no problem with that. But it’s nice to finally feel that I have some power over it and I no longer need to go on holiday to switch off and recharge.

Filed under Parenting, PR, Tech

Talking Nonsense Since …

October 10, 2011 Leave a comment

Another month, another WordPress theme. This time however I’ve spent some time going through all of this blog’s content – this is post number 94, apparently – creating a range of new categories, tagging each post according to subject matter and integrating the categories as a means of navigation, both to the right in the category cloud and above, as a site-wide, horizontal navigation bar. I’ve also taken a bunch of the HTML snippets that were on the right and integrated them along the top as points of contact and refreshed some of the copy in various places.

So, I’ve had a bit of a play and am quite happy with the end result – I hope you agree (and if not, please tell me below). I’ve also finally managed to get around to moving the site across to petegoold.com, admittedly with a little help from a friend (thank you).

Whilst I’m under no illusion about the modest readership figures of this blog, it is a great playground to get to fiddle with WordPress in a meaningful way. I have had a fiddle with Tumblr recently too, out of both professional and personal curiosity, and whilst I love some of the more contemporary themes, I’m not wild about the interface and the servers keep dropping out. So, I’l stick with what I know.

On the subject of facelifts, I saw that Delicious – a service that I still use daily – has just relaunched, with some aesthetic tweaks and a little new functionality (Stacks, which seems like a cross between G+’s sparks and the categories that are used here). The new page design tells me that I set up my delicious feed on 27th March 2006 (when I recall, I also set up my Digg profile at the same time – a service that I no longer use and never really fell in love with, hence no link here).

So, I thought I’d do some investigation, to see exactly when I joined a couple of services – and was surprised by quite a few of the findings:

Twitter – 5th March, 2008 (found via this service)

WordPress – 22nd August, 2008

Facebook – 11th June, 2007 (found via Facebook’s new timeline functionality)

Delicious (& Digg) – 27th March 2006

LinkedIn – 14th May, 2004 and…

Punchcomms.com – 21st July, 2003

So, there you have it. At some point I might investigate Friends Reunited, Bibsonomy, Magnolia, Bibsonomy, Posterous, Xing, Plaxo and the many others that have come and gone, in terms of my usage – but as a broad chronology, those services above, along with Instapaper, my current favourite for reading on the go, are a pretty good representation of my personal affair with social media to date.

It’s unsettling that I’m starting to think I looked quite young in the first Facebook photos that were posted – which says it all really.

Filed under Nonsense, Social Media, Tech

Laptop Battery Woes

September 17, 2010 Leave a comment

I’ve bought a new laptop this week, which frankly was a fairly expensive exercise that was primarily to address one issue – battery life.

I bought a spare battery for my current machine for just over £100 a few months ago but it seems to have made minimal difference so obviously the old one wasn’t quite as far gone as I’d thought.

On a few occasions recently I have realised quite what a pain it is to have a two hour battery life. On one occasion in particular I was on the move for eight or so hours as a result of flight delays etc – and, as a result, simply lost about six hours of productivity. Whilst I’m happy to seize the rare opportunities for calm as and when they arise, I really could have done without it on the day in question as it simply meant that when I did arrive at my destination at 1:30am, the first thing i had to do was to plug in and get online, to make good on a promise that I’d made several hours earlier before I realised that I was, literally, powerless to action it.

So, the appeal of the promised 8 hours+ charge on the new machine far outweighs the other benefits (although 35% more on-screen info is not bad either – but not enough to justify an upgrade on its own).

I’ve managed to see out the week without having opened it from it’s shiny wrapper, so Monday morning I’m handing both it and my current machine over to someone that is far less likely to fiddle and break things than I. Sad really, I used to have more time to muck about…

Filed under Tech, Travel

Was The Times’ App Really Ready?

August 27, 2010 Leave a comment

Whilst I’ve been playing with The Times’ ipad app since its launch, I think I’ve now reached the conclusion that it’s simply not the best way to read the paper.

On the one hand there’s the lack of choice and personal flexibility. Clearly from News International’s perspective, that’s the point -
indeed I’m currently subscribing to the website and the ipad app – but on a daily basis, whilst I would certainly read the Times some days, I wouldn’t ever do so at the permanent expense of the other papers. To be honest, I see this as a fatal flaw in the ‘one fee per month’ model – as it relies entirely upon reader loyalty, which fundamentally cuts down on the potential target audience. Moreover, given the demographic of web and ipad users, surely they are the most likely candidates to be ‘floating’ readers?

Conceptually, the app makes sense – it’s just that I’ve now come to the conclusion that it’s not the best implementation of the idea.

I’m delighted that they took the decision to offer a couple of months of additional free subscription for the first adopters – but this was clearly admitted to be in return for effectively being beta testers for a product that really wasn’t even ready to be in beta, never mind widely available. I realised that I haven’t even fired it up for a few weeks now, which is probably based on my frustration at the experience up to that point.

Ultimately, I think there’s a lesson here – which is that the ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach is not necessarily always better than ‘ready, aim, fire’. Whilst this has no reflection on the publication’s output, despite being a fan of the technology, it simply doesn’t stack up again other projects which have, quite simply, been better implemented.

And given the Times has so much to lose in terms of brand equity, I’m not sure what has been gained in terms of being perceived as innovative was worth what is potentially lost through treating customers as guinea pigs.

Filed under PR, Social Media, Tech

The Times’ iPad App

May 29, 2010 Leave a comment

OK, so I thought it was strange at the time. The Guardian giving away ‘free content for life’ on the basis of a £2.39 download (iphone) app seemed too good to be true. The only way it could possibly make sense commercially is if it the app continually attracts new users and doesn’t take revenue away from the traditional model.

Following yesterday’s launch of the Times app (for the recently launched iPad) at £9.99 per month for a daily download, surely it’s now just a matter of time before the Guardian changes the model for charging on its app? Or kills it off altogether? Admittedly even as a one off, £10 for an app seems pretty steep when users such as myself are used to paying £0.59 – £2.99 for apps, but then the iPad app store is interesting for its differences to the iPhone app store. Whilst the latter clearly caters for a mass market, youth-oriented audience and the iPad is aimed at a different consumer, the difference is pretty stark, not only in terms of price – with the average price being far higher – but also the types of apps that proliferate targeting productivity use and children (presumably the children of the same people who use it for productivity the rest of the time – ie me).

So, I’ve spent more on apps in the last 48 hours, much, much more, than I have on the 100+ apps that I’ve downloaded for my iPhone over the last year – and can thoroughly recommend The Times, The Guardian Eyewitness, Wired and the Kindle e-reader app. Oh an the Toy Story app which offers an interactive book, colouring pad, karaoke etc – and the first one is free.

Typing currently presents something of a challenge. Even though the screen is far larger, I find it less easy to type on than it’s smaller counterpart – but perhaps that’s practice.

The one really notable aspect is that the speed of download is astonishing using the micro-Sim/3G. As someone that uses usb cards to connect to the web via laptop regularly (along with my phone, obviously), I’d assumed it would be similar connection speeds – but it’s really surprised me. On coming back to it last night, it downloaded the 49 remaining mails that I’d left in my inbox and not deleted from that day, in a matter of a few seconds.

So far, the battery’s holding up well too – it’s just lost about 50% since being charged the day before last.

Now, if only i could make all those fingerprints that currently cover the screen go away…

Filed under Tech

Moving Into The Cloud

May 14, 2010 Leave a comment

This week, the rate of change has quickened significantly at Punch. We’ve had a couple more people join in the last two weeks, several major projects confirm go-ahead (divided relatively across the PR, Search and Social areas, which is ideal) and the recruitment process had shifted up through several gears, not least to accommodate our growth into a second office, in London.

The latter has given me pause for thought in terms of how we share data effectively – not only in terms of cost but also with an eye towards making best use of existing resources and limitations. Clearly there’s the traditional server route – but I wanted to see if there was something more interesting that we could do. And, it turns out, there is.

We looked at a number of virtual file sharing options. Moreover, as this is a subject not well known to me, I’m still learning apace.

Given my obvious interest in communications, I found it notable that I was treated very differently as a potential customer by the various companies that we looked at. I spoke to Box.net in the US and briefly trialled its software, which is an excellent file sharing solution but which lags behind the likes of Dropbox given the lack of automated synchronisation (which, I’m told, is imminent). A client has also recommended Microsoft’s LiveSync which does sync – but whilst set up worked, it didn’t seem to want to share the files onto my macbook, at least on first attempt. In the space of a frantic 36 hour peirod that was devoted to crackng the issue as quickly as possible, I also fiddled with FilesAnywhere, Drop Send, Diino.com and Fasthosts.

The conclusion that I came to is that although Box.net is targeted at exactly our type of company – with numerous glowing testimonials eschewing its various virtues – Dropbox seemed to offer the best solution, despite being aimed at the consumer rather than the commercial user. To me, this is most interesting because it shows that businesses can target SMEs as consumers, without having to be too concerned about making the customer absolutely convinced that the product is robust, infinitely scalable, has been stress tested to the moon and back etc etc. In other words, by focusing on the required functionality (which, it has to be said is a step ahead of Box.net, for example) and appealing to me as an individual, I consider it to be highly appropriate for our commercial needs.

Still, it’s early days and I may yet live to eat my words but either way I love feeling like there’s a way to sidestep the traditional hassles – and cost – associated with going down the accepted route.

Filed under Tech

May 10th: Save The Date

April 17, 2010 Leave a comment

The launch of the iPad in international markets has been pushed back to late May – although apparently this means that both the wifi and the 3G+wifi versions will launch simultaneously (on Orange, Vodafone and O2 apparently).

This week I briefly considered seeing if it was possible to get hold of one from the US and couriering it across – but then read about the many early wifi problems that some users are experiencing. Whilst I’m undoubtedly curious and keen, I guess I may as well not add to any issues through a) breaking my neck to get hold of a US one and b) thereby getting one of the very earliest models whilst will undoubtedly be the most buggy ever sold.

Most interesting this week was the news that Israel has taken to ban any iPads coming into the country, on the basis that the wifi signal remains something of an unknown quantity in terms of signal strength and therefore they believe that it may cause havoc with other equipment. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out as it’s hard to believe that a country would have taken such a radical action if there wasn’t some truth in this.

Apple will begin taking UK pre-orders on May 10th apparently.

In other news, I have found the hard way that the price of import tax on a bunch of teeshirts from threadless probably outweighs the benefit. Hopefully the package’s eventual arrival on Monday will make it all worthwhile.

Filed under Tech

Hit Pause

March 26, 2010 Leave a comment

The last week or so before holiday is always berserk – and this week has been no different. With three new joiners in the last few weeks, a leaver today and a couple of major new projects onboarding right now, the adage that ‘it’s never a good time’ is perhaps more applicable than normal at present.

Still, for all the passion and effort that gets poured in the rest of the year, most people are really good about recognising that we all need to take a week or so at some point, even when timings aren’t ideal.

So, I’m leaving my laptop at home, turning off the wifi and roaming on my phone (although I suspect if I find wifi I may be looking at weather reports, as March is a little early to guarantee good weather on the Med) and bracing myself for the 4am arrival of the cab tomorrow morning.

If I get to wear flip-flops, play with my kids and just catch up on my sleep for a couple of weeks, that’ll be just fine…

Filed under Health, PR, SEO, Social Media, Tech, Travel

Discoveries To Report

January 22, 2010 Leave a comment

A couple of discoveries to report – firstly I’ve been playing with the new Guardian iPhone App this week.

In short, it’s excellent.

Whilst clearly it’s not going to replace the printed page, I can’t believe how much content you can get for a one off purchase of £2.39. There’s no doubt in my mind that this app will directly affect the frequency with which I buy the paper. So, now they’ve had the equivalent of a few days papers worth of revenue from me as a one off, you’ve got to wonder how it’s sustainable.

Still, as a consumer I love it and have read more articles over the last few days than I have in a while.

On this, I’ve been thinking about buying a kindle, as they have just become available in the UK. I doubt I will, frankly, as I enjoy books too much but tech-intrigue got the better of me this week so I downloaded the kindle app and a first chapter – and have to say that it’s a far better experience than anticipated.

So, I can see me regularly reading articles through both the browser and apps but novels look set to remain a strictly paper-based experience, for now at least.

Finally a couple of other spots. Firstly this crazy story that I picked up whilst browsing the Guardian app – http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/20/rise-of-the-sarcmark – about a company that’s invented a new punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm.

Secondly, a link to a new website that we’re promoting which sells CTEK battery chargers: www.batterychargerstore.co.uk.

Filed under Tech

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