Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• The Exaggerated Death of Voicemail

  Mike Arrington said “ voicemail is dead ”, and I used to agree. I hated voicemail forever but it was a reality we had to live with. (I’ve made my suggestions in the past on how to leave good voicemail ). The thing that changed that all for me was voice-to-text voicemail conversion. I couldn't live without SpinVox - it's invaluable for all of the reasons that Paul lays out . (E.g., Corey uses PhoneTag , formerly Simulscribe). Best yet, it's helped me achieve a single inbox with my voicemail and e-mails. Paul highlights an important piece at play here - for most of us, it's a lot faster to consume voicemail after being converted to text. It allows me to process messages quicker, it ties into my existing Outlook workflow, and it allows me to read messages when I couldn’t otherwise (e.g., in a meeting, a loud bar, etc). At the same time, it's often easier and quicker to generate that message. If you’re driving, don’t have a full QWERTY keyboard on your device, or whatever... Posted Jul 09 2008, 03:37 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Productivity, Business

• Time Management? It's the Attention, Stupid

  Those of you who follow Getting Things Done know that you don't manage time, you manage tasks. Scott says he "thought [time management] was all about being organized and careful planning", but "the number one thing you can do to . . . is be very selective about what you choose to do." As Tim Ferris said, "time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time". Steve Gillmor has long talked about attention data as an asset and recently discussed that the impact in Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo. Google is the king of this, putting things out for free and monetizing the time and attention of its users, and Newsgator recently started offering their software for free and are using this valuable attention data. And as Kevin Kelly said , we're in a world where inputs are increasing and time and attention are not. Thus, time and attention have become even more scarce and valuable than they were in the past. The same lessons are appropriate... Posted Feb 25 2008, 06:35 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Productivity

• The Problem with Multitasking

  A recent NYT article discusses multitasking and the impact of interruptions on the quality and speed of our work. In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites. "I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task," said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month. This should not be surprising - as any CS major knows, context switches are expensive. In this case, literally - as Matt suggests, someone is paying for those 18 minutes . And the cost of interruption doesn't discriminate by age. Conventional wisdom is that younger people are good at multitasking, but according... Posted Apr 30 2007, 03:28 PM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Productivity

• Major Blackberry Outage

  Starting last night, I'm stopped getting "capital EDGE" connectivity on my 8700. The last e-mail I received from my BES server was at 5:15 EST last night, and I've only been getting e-mails intermittently from my BIS servers. Turns out it's not just me - there's a widespread Blackberry outage in the US. But I'm not here to *** - these have been the most relaxing 14 hours I've had in awhile. If this keeps up for the rest of the day, I expect productivity to skyrocket - and meetings might actually be useful ! Posted Apr 18 2007, 07:59 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Gadgets, Productivity

• Email Tips

  Some tips on how to write better e-mail. Not only is it polite to follow these guidelines, it also makes it more likely that you'll get a response in a timely manner. Write better subjects . If you want your e-mail to get answered, you should write a subject that is meaningful to the recipient, not the sender . "A good subject line would include enough information about the question so that the recipient can decide whether to read further or whether it's something they can't help with. For example, Question about generics , or even better, Question about covariant types in generics ." Use TO: and CC: properly. The general rule of thumb is that anyone you expect to take action on the e-mail should be in the TO field. Everyone else should be in the CC field. Be judicious on who you send e-mail to. I've mentioned that e-mail is an exclusive means of communication. It's a nice idea to want to include everyone, but most people ignore broadcast e-mail. Worse yet, the more people you include,... Posted Mar 04 2007, 10:02 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Productivity, Outlook Tips

• Start++ brings WDS shortcuts to the Vista start menu

  Brandon recently released a tool for Vista that brings Windows Desktop Search-style shortcuts to the start menu (and command line). Users of WDS on XP may recall the “Deskbar Shortcuts” functionality that allows you to create little aliases between words or characters with commands and searches. For example, you could set up the Deskbar so that you could type “g Stuff” to search for the work “Stuff” on Google. You could also launch programs, run scripts with parameters, and more. Windows Vista replaced the Deskbar with Instant Search built-in to the Start menu, which is totally awesome. Unfortunately, it lacks all of that fun shortcut functionality that the Deskbar had. Unless you have my tool, which for the time being I’m calling Start++. The commands can be stored and shared as XML files called startlets . Download Start++ here . Posted Mar 01 2007, 04:59 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Productivity, Vista, Microsoft

• The Joys of Vista - New user folder structures

  In the past, we had C:\documents and settings\User\My Documents. Now we have C:\Users\User\Documents. Better yet, the Documents finally is just for documents. Instead of putting My Videos and My Music and My Pictures within the My Documents folder, they have been moved up a level and are now "even" with Documents. (I did something similar already to facilitate separate FolderShare libraries). Of course, there is still plenty of bad software out there that wants to clutter my Documents folder , but it's easier to manage with some of the stuff out of the way. Posted Jan 28 2007, 08:55 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Productivity, Vista, Microsoft

• The Joys of Vista - Search is Everywhere

  I already mentioned the updated Start Menu , which allows you to search. But there are Search Boxes literally everywhere in Vista that allow you to filter the results. This search box is in everything, including Windows Explorer. In Explorer, you can click the Save Search icon in the toolbar and save the current query as a search folder. Posted Jan 26 2007, 06:49 AM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Productivity, Vista, Microsoft

• The Joys of Vista - Quick Launch keyboard shortcuts

  You can launch programs in your Quick Launch toolbar using the Win+ position . So if you have Outlook as the second item in your Quick Launch toolbar, you can open it by pressing Win+2. ( via Lifehacker ) Posted Jan 25 2007, 06:28 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Productivity, Vista, Microsoft

• The Joys of Vista - The New Start Menu

  I absolutely love the new start menu. No more Start -> Run (Win+R). Instead, you can just press the Win key and start typing the name of the program you want to run. It even searches your favorites, history, documents and e-mail. In fact, I don't even really worry about organizing my Start menu anymore, because I never really see most of it. If you want Word, you hit Win and type Word and press enter. Between this and the Quick Launch shortcut keys, I don't have to touch the mouse. Posted Jan 24 2007, 06:21 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Productivity, Vista, Microsoft