In the past, I’ve made numerous attempts to pull in the reigns on my email “situation”, but nothing worked. Three months ago, I had literally thousands of emails in my inbox – today I have zero. I haven’t been getting less email, in fact I’ve probably been getting more, but I’ve been handling it differently.
I’m no expert, but I’ve had a few people ask me how I’ve been keeping my inbox empty, so here’s the strategy that has worked for me:
- I check email every 20-30 minutes, and I process it immediately
- processing means reading, determining if an action is necessary, then deleting or archiving
- sorting email sucks, so I use one archive folder and search
- if a follow-up action is required, I a) do it right away if I can do it in less than 5 minutes, or b) star the email for a reply, or move the task to a to-do list (I use Things)
- I don’t go back to my inbox until the email has been archived or deleted
- I set aside time before lunch and at the end of the day to write longer replies
- I write filters/rules for assigning labels to newsletters, digests, cron reports, etc. so they can be mass selected deleted
That’s it in a nutshell. It’s nothing revolutionary, it just takes some discipline, but I promise it gets easy, and makes staying organized much easier.
For the canonical source on email productivity, check out this guy.
I’d like to preface this post by saying that I believe there is enough pretension in the design world, and I’m not trying to add to it. This is a frivolous exploration into the classification of design disciplines.
That said, focusing on my design responsibilities, and ignoring the fact that application development is also a large part of what I do, I have struggled to describe what it is I do for quite some time. This is a particularly troublesome task when speaking to those who are not familiar with industry terminology. On a fairly regular basis, I see people who have similar responsibilities using a mishmash of acronyms as a title — UX, IA, IxD. The terms these acronyms represent are all completely valid, and represent distinct skill sets. I have nothing against these terms, and yet, aside from being a mouthful, they do little to help people (who are not in our industry) understand what we do. On the other side of the equation, we have people who are commonly referred to as graphic designers.
I propose that there are really only two types of design when it comes to software/web application development — Analytical & Emotional. Now, I realize the term “Analytical Design” would present itself as an oxymoron to some, but let’s come back to that in a moment. In design, how something functions, and how something makes you feel can be considered separate, but very tightly coupled aspects. Continue Reading
DataTO.org is a community website, built as a venue for the users of Toronto’s open data to request and discuss open datasets. On top of enabling conversation, the site also helps users garner support for their request so as to establish a democratic prioritization of requests.
I first became interested in the open data dialogue back in early 2009 at ChangeCamp in Toronto, which was an event aimed at re-imagining government and citizenship in the age of participation. ChangeCamp spawned ChangeEngine, a project where a group of citizens (including myself), imagined a geo-aware issue tracking system, aimed at bringing communities together to solve problems and to provoke systemic change.
As the launch of Toronto’s open data site approached, some of my colleagues at Architech Solutions and I, met with Mark Kuznicki (organizer of ChangeCamp) to discuss the possibility of building a community companion site to the city’s site. We all felt there was a need, and so DataTO was born. Continue Reading
Today is a very special day for me. It marks the end of a very significant period of my life. At the tender age of 16, I started working as a contract web developer, a career, which has now supported me for nearly 12 years.
There have been good times and bad, and many, many lessons learned. Ultimately, I’m proud of the path I took. Through pure stubbornness, I managed to bypass post-secondary education, by working my ass off to learn what I needed to know to get the job done (often after I had already sold it). In many ways, I attribute my success in this business to this fly or fall approach because it kept me on my toes, always learning, always hungry to improve my skills, and always ready to take on new challenges.
Looking back, I know that I went about things the hard way. A wiser, less obstinate person would have gone about things differently, but then I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
For the last year and a half, I have been working with The Blog Studio. My time with them has been very important to me for a lot of reasons. It freed me of my solitary home office, and got me out into the world, working face-to-face with people again. The life of a freelancer, especially in this industry, can be a hermetic one, and working with Peter, Lucia and Mike was a very welcome and necessary change.
Next week, I start a new era of my life as I leave the world of contract work and venture down a new, exciting path. A remarkable opportunity landed on my lap a couple weeks ago, and enticed me to make some life altering decisions.
On Monday, I will be starting work, as an employee (for the first time since directing cars in the parking lot at the Stratford Festival as an early teen), with Toronto-based Architech. Architech builds kick ass software. They are a team of people who are extremely passionate about building amazing applications for business and I could never make the jump into a full-time position like this without sharing core beliefs and passions like I do with Architech. I’m confident we will have a bright future together.
Needless to say, I’m extremely excited, and can’t wait to see where this new direction takes me.
For those of you who may be familiar with Jörn Zaefferer’s jQuery Validation plugin, I’ve written a method for validating zip/postal code fields, which was not included in the plugin.
To start validating zip/postal code fields, include this code somewhere after you’ve included the plugin:
jQuery.validator.addMethod("postalcode", function(postalcode, element) {
return this.optional(element) || postalcode.match(/(^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$)|(^[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXYabceghjklmnpstvxy]{1}\d{1}[A-Za-z]{1} ?\d{1}[A-Za-z]{1}\d{1})$/);
}, "Please specify a valid postal/zip code");
Now you can add postalcode to your validation rules like so:
$("#myform").validate({
rules: {
postalcode: {
postalcode: true
}
}
});
Note: this will accept both Canadian postal codes (with or without a space) and U.S. zip codes. Enjoy!
