Simplicity Is Bliss

Your own work first

Tue, 29 May 2012 21:04:56 +0200

At the beginning of the day, faced with an overflowing inbox, a list of messages on your voicemail, and the to-do list from your last meeting, it’s tempting to want to “clear the decks” before you start on your own most important work. When you’re up-to-date, you tell yourself, your mind will be clear and it will be easier to focus on the task at hand. The trouble with this approach is that you end up spending the best part of the day on other people’s priorities, running their errands, and giving them what they need. By the time you finally settle down to your own work, it could be mid-afternoon, when your energy has dipped and it’s hard to focus on anything properly.

A very common trap to fall into. With little surprise you look back at the day, the week, month or even year frustrated by the lack of progress against your goals - simply because you did not work on them.

I have adopted a similar approach to Mark McGuinness: No meetings or conference calls in the morning if avoidable and being offline the first 90 minutes of my working day. Not to catch-up on email or Twitter, but do my work. Not easy in an international corporation, but definitely possible.

A contrarian view of procrastination

Mon, 28 May 2012 16:52:17 +0200

A contrarian view of procrastination:

I have a contrarian view of procrastination: in most cases it’s a good thing. It’s your mind’s way of telling you it doesn’t see a smart plan. Either the goal doesn’t make sense or you don’t have a believable way of accomplishing it. Successful, productive people don’t blithely choose a goal and then charge after it. They take time to gather evidence; they study those whose have succeeded and failed. When they finally set out to take action, procrastination is rarely an issue. If you want to write a novel, don’t commit to National Novel Writing Month. Instead, take a novelist out for coffee and learn everything about her world. It’s the commitment that comes from deep understanding of a challenge, not willpower, that leads to success.”

-Calvin Newport

An inspiring view point I totally agree with. If the overall goal does not or no longer make sense to you and your mind is disengaging due to lack of a smart plan you can use as much willpower as you want. Picking the right goals and projects is key to productivity. Watching and learning the trades of those that have achieved what you are pursuing is also a great recommendation.

"Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never..."

Sun, 27 May 2012 16:54:01 +0200

“Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never have the sense of accomplishment of saying, “I’m done.” At the same time, to be finished, done, complete—this is a bit like being dead. The silence and the feeling that maybe that’s all.”

- Seth Godin on ‘Dancing on the edge of finished’

OmniFocus date manipulation with AppleScript

Sun, 27 May 2012 11:13:00 +0200

OmniFocus date manipulation with AppleScript:

The extensibility of OmniFocus is nearly unlimited and AppleScript is the way of leveraging it. Ryan Davis posted a nice overview of AppleScripts that help him manipulating task dates.

Defer takes the selected tasks and shifts their start and due dates by a user defined number.

Skip filters on the selected repeating tasks, marks them as done, and then deletes them.

Stagger Dates takes the selected tasks and redistributes them one weekday at a time

Stagger Times does the same thing as Stagger Dates, but for a single day

Followup takes the currently selected task, duplicates it, prefixes with “Followup: “, and then schedules it for a week out

Fix Start Dates takes the selected tasks and makes sure that the Start Date is filled in to the same day as the Due Date, if any.

Ryan provides some examples of how he uses these scripts and a very simple AppleScript code example that let’s you build your own task focussed scripts.

"Complexity is a chronic infection. Once you’ve got it you spend lots of time managing it. It..."

Thu, 24 May 2012 22:27:46 +0200

“Complexity is a chronic infection. Once you’ve got it you spend lots of time managing it. It almost never goes away.”

- Jason Fried (37signals)

nvALT tips

Sat, 19 May 2012 13:43:00 +0200

nvALT tips:

Just as the new SimpleNote client Justnotes is out and endorsed by people like John Gruber and Ben Brooks, Gabe from Macdrifter reminds us what great functionality there is to discover in nvALT.

JustNotes is a great client, but it is the equivalent of the iOS Twitter app where nvALT is more like Tweetbot. A number of Gabe’s tips were new to me and reassured me that I am using the right note taking application.

Very comprehsnsive TextExpander overview video by Wandering...

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:25:29 +0200

Very comprehsnsive TextExpander overview video by Wandering Minds offering 15 minutes of inspiration. Even after a couple of years with TextExpander, I always find new applications for it. Videos like this help me find them.

A Super-Efficient Email Process

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:01:04 +0200

A Super-Efficient Email Process:

Everyone has their way to deal with email. I have covered mine lately. Peter Bregman shares his approach on the HBR blog network.

Send: I start my timer and begin by writing emails I had planned to send. This often includes follow-ups to meetings, thank-you notes, questions, and scheduling and other requests. I do this first so that if someone gets back to me immediately I have time to respond while I’m still in my 30-minute email period.

Delete

Respond

File

Read and follow up

I like two things about this particular: He sets a timer for thirty minutes and sticks with it as well as that he writes those emails he needs to send right at the start of this time slot.

Purging OmniFocus backups automatically with Hazel

Sat, 12 May 2012 17:02:29 +0200

Purging OmniFocus backups automatically with Hazel:

Please have a look into OmniFocus backup folder now. It is typically at ‘~/Documents/OmniFocus Backups’ unless you configured differently it in OmniFocus’ preferences.

How big is it? 500MB? 2GB or even 16GB? Mine was 2GB yesterday since I didn’t clean up old backups since half a year.

There is of course a more efficient way that doesn’t even require you to remember this maintenance task. Using Hazel and the rule described by Christopher Mackay will do the job for you.

Clipping from nvALT into OmniFocus

Sat, 12 May 2012 07:08:38 +0200

I have started to use nvALT again to take my notes during meetings and calls. Yesterday was a rather epic call day with 8 out of the 10 hours I worked spent on the phone. Consequently many notes were taken and lots of actions had to be clipped from nvALT to OmniFocus for processing and tracking.

When I finished hitting my OmniFocus clipping hotkey (⌘⌥^-C) about twenty times, I was shocked looking at my OmniFocus inbox with each clipped actions looking like this:

The actions I wanted to be captured ended up in the note field and the task itself just reference nvALT. Now this is not a hugh problem if you have just one or two things clipped, but it is if you have twenty or more.

Reaching out to my fellow tweeps for an script-based solution brought Ben Waldie, AppleScript guru by profession, to rescue me.

His neat little script does nothing else than swapping task title and note around for all tasks currently selected.

tell application "OmniFocus"
    tell content of front window
        set theTasks to value of every selected tree
        repeat with aTask in theTasks
            tell aTask
                set theName to name
                set theNote to note
                set name to theNote
                set note to theName
            end tell
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell

Be aware that the script is rather minimal in nature and has no error handling. Make sure you use it with tasks selected that do feature a title and a note.

Clever trick by Jamie Phelps to leverage the 1Password bookmark...

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:40:34 +0200

Clever trick by Jamie Phelps to leverage the 1Password bookmark to allow you direct access to any key websites you need to complete OmniFocus tasks or routine. Get the detailed instructions.

Seems like 1Password bookmark integration becomes very popular lately as the lasted version of Alfred also offers a great integration with 1Password.

Spring Cleaning OmniFocus' Look & Feel

Tue, 08 May 2012 21:21:15 +0200

When I did the radical revamp of my OmniFocus setup last weekend, I also followed R-Miguel’s idea of refreshing the look & feel of the application I look at every day.

Until last week I was happily using the Light ‘Solarized’ theme by Ben Brooks, which is very good theme. But it was time for something fresh and hence I went out to OFThemes.com and checked out what was on display.

It was the ‘Reminder-ish’ theme that caught my attention aesthetically. Inspired by the iOS Apple Reminder App it provides quite a unique look.

However, the theme had a few things that didn’t work for me such as the dark sidebar. There where also some usability flaws, in particular the virtually unreadable font colour in OmniFocus’ quick entry box. So I went off and modified the theme to my practical and visual needs.

The end product is now a totally different theme, which I just called by the name of its creation date: May 4th (Star Wars Day).

The basic layout is pretty much the same as in “Reminder-ish”, but the colour-scheme is different, not only in the sidebar.

I also wanted to make better use of the different styles OmniFocus allows you to apply to different states like next action, blocked, due, …

Next actions are highlighted in purple and a soft underline setting themselves apart from single actions which miss the underlining
Blocked actions are smaller in font size and greyed out
Similar for completed actions incl. strike-through
Also actions groups are grey and smaller as they are typically not actionable themselves
Due Soon and Due actions catch your attention with slightly bigger font size and orange and red colour

Good old ‘Helvetica Neue’ is the font of choice for this theme to ensure it works the same for everyone (and just look classy).

If the OmniFocus ‘May 4th’ theme pleases your eye and supports your Spring Cleaning OmniFocus efforts go and grab it.

Spring Cleaning OmniFocus

Sun, 06 May 2012 10:05:00 +0200

Spring Cleaning OmniFocus:

I really went numb with my OmniFocus library recently. There was too much of everything: Tasks, projects, single action lists, folders, someday/maybe items and contexts. As a result OmniFocus became less trusted to me since I could not see the important stuff in all the clutter. Consequently I started procrastinating at my to-do list.

First thing to do when you fell of the bandwagon is to get back on. I had to do something radical to achieve this: I basically deleted 95% of everything in my OmniFocus library. Yep, I just threw it over board and started pretty much blank.

Rebuilding a new, simple structure (folders, contexts, single action lists) and doing a full mind-sweep felt really good. I now know again that everything that really has my attention is in OmniFocus and what has been there before - unfulfilled commitments with myself, ‘just said yes’-projects and issues that aren’t relevant (anymore) - is gone.

You don’t need to be as radical as this, but you want to Spring Clean using R-Miguel’s simple three-step process

Start by taking an inventory of your files, folders, projects, actions, perspectives and contexts.

Then, sort through everything, taking a very close look at each one.

Decide to drop or delete anything you honestly are not using, or, won’t for the rest of the year.

The key really is in the last point! Be determined, radical and do not cling on to old memories and commitments.

Refreshing the look & feel of OmniFocus as the last step of the Spring Cleaning, as suggested in R-Miguel’s post, helps immensely to give you that ‘fresh start’ feeling we all need from time to time. I switched to the Reminder-ish theme and modified it (severely) to fit my needs.

Finally: Really, really clean-up all these Someday/Maybe items. I moved most (wild) ideas, books and movie lists from OmniFocus into simple notes in nvALT to keep OmniFocus to it’s primary purpose.

"The key benefit [of Getting Things Done] is freedom – freedom from the sources of distraction and..."

Sat, 05 May 2012 07:16:19 +0200

“The key benefit [of Getting Things Done] is freedom – freedom from the sources of distraction and stress; and freedom to focus, engage, and create from a positive, clear space.”

- David Allen on the essence of GTD

My two most important inbox rules

Tue, 01 May 2012 15:47:00 +0200

The way I process my email is as simplified as it can be. It is really designed to help me focus on the message itself to understand what it means to me i.e., action, information or nothing.

However, I work for a huge American company and email is, as in most corporation of similar size, out of control. Consequently I cannot allow everything to enter my inbox, at least not if I want to have a chance to process emails diligently, keep my sanity, and do the other aspects of the job I am hired to do.

As email traffic grew and grew over the past years, the rules protecting my inbox became stronger and stronger. Today, I’d like to share the two strongest rules I have in my arsenal against the corporate email storm. These two rules alone route 65-70% of all emails around my actual inbox, mark them as read and get them out of my primary focus.

Mailing or Distribution Lists

While we have good collaboration platforms in our company, the wast majority of information is still spread by email. Technically you need to opt-in for most mailer lists yourself, but some people are far to kind and do it for you. Before you say ‘unsubscribe’ you are part of at least 40 internal distribution lists. Unfortunately a maximum of 10% of emails distributed via mailer lists are valuable and relevant.

With the exception of some selected distribution lists e.g., my staff distribution or the one of my manager, all emails which don’t have my email address specifically as a recipient get marked read and filed into a separate folder when they arrive. I look at the mailing list folder every other day and press the delete key very, very often.

You may have some mailing or distribution lists that are important to you e.g., virtual management or leadership distribution lists where critical information is shared and you want to make sure you see these emails right away. Simply include them in the rule as I have done in my example.

Carbon Copies (CC)

While the mailing/distribution list rule may not be too new for many of you, my ‘Carbon Copies’ rule may sound fairly radical for some.

I truly believe carbon copies is one of the worst aspects of email and leads to most of the traffic. People just add and add to the CC list: Their manager, their director, three colleagues… so on and so forth. Everyone adds more people and the resulting number of emails grows exponentially.

Very, very rarely there is any valuable information in these emails. Particular as a manager you get CC’ed for many different reasons, most of them not at all requiring you to read the email itself.

Basically this rule is executed after all mailing/distribution lists are already filtered out and looks at emails that have my email address in the ‘CC’ field, not in the ‘To’ field and are not from my primary customer. Particular the emails from my customer is something I definitely like to see in my inbox, even if I am just CC’ed.

If you have more than one customer just add all the domain names from your customers as an exception to the rule. Alternatively you can create (smart) groups in Address Book, which you then exclude from the rule.

The rule takes all the remaining CC-emails, marks them as read and moves them to a dedicated ‘CC’ folder. Shockingly enough I process — well, looked at — this folder even less frequent than my mailing lists folder.

The truth is that I basically stopped reading or even processing my CC emails for quite some time now and nothing ever happened. The world is still turning, my team is doing very well and nothing has fallen between the cracks. It’s actually liberating for me as well as my staff and peers as I stopped worrying about or disrupting activities that were well in hand.

Should the topic be something I am or have been actively involved in I still see the CC emails in my inbox as I tend to have ‘Organise by conversation’ turned on in Mail.app which also pulls related emails from other folders when displaying the contextual thread of a message.

40 emails in your inbox instead of 200

On busy days I can get 200 or more emails. The two rules described in this post filter out about 140 of them. A few others I have employed bring the load of my inbox down to 40-50 emails at max. And these emails are the really important ones, the ones that required focused reading and processing, which happens using my simple Inbox Zero workflow.

Meeting notes, date math and TextExpander

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 09:43:00 +0200

You really save time and increase productivity if you identify those things you keep doing over and over again in the exact same way. ALso all of us have better things to pursue during on our time on earth than do monkey work.

I am currently looking at the way I take notes or produce minutes from meetings and calls I attend or host. It turns out that there are a few elements I type over and over again.

Dates, dates, dates

One thing that of course reoccurs in meeting notes all the time is dates. When the next meeting is, when that task is due, when we expect a response from the customer and so forth.

Capturing relative date information is not easy, particular if you are not always 100% sure of the resulting absolute date. I, for example, rarely know a 100% which what today’s date is without looking at the little Fantastical icon in my menu bar, on to my iPhone or my wrist watch.

Consequently if someone on a call says “in two days” or “next week Friday”, I have a few seconds worth of effort to express this in an absolute date for my meeting notes. It typically involves punching the Fantastical keyboard shortcut (mine is ⌘ + ⌥ + ^ + K) or quickly switch over to iCal.

An itch to scratch with TextExpander

Setting dates in OmniFocus really spoiled me. The way it accepts things like ‘tom’, ‘+3d’, ‘next friday’ or ‘today 4.30p’ in the start and due date fields is just natural, easy and magical. Same for Fantastical, which basically reads your mind when creating an event.

When capturing casual meeting notes for my own reference in nvALT or producing formal meeting minutes in OmniOutliner, I simply wanted something similar but working in free text so I can safe myself some time, pay more attention to the meeting and be done faster.

TextExpander’s own date & time math

TextExpander itself allows you to do some date and time math yourself since version 2.5. When looking for some documentation and examples for it I came across the post from Smile that announced the feature. Unfortunately the description wasn’t too straight forward, but Jonathan from Smile proactively provided an improved guide within a few hours after I tweeted about the subject.

The math that TextExpander allows you to do is pretty simple and somewhat limited. You can basically add or subtract everything from seconds to years from/to today’s date and display it in all date format variations you are used to from TextExpander.

While there are quite a number of cases where this is not only sufficient, but also extremely useful, there are some obvious limitations to it:

It is just subtraction or addition based on raw numbers
You need a snippet for every operation you want to do, e.g. one for addition 3 days from today, one for adding 4 days from today, …
No concept of natural language processing possible whatsoever (‘next Friday’)

Date and time math is not TextExpander’s primary purpose and given it extensibility through scripts, they may or may not see a need to improve this functionality in the future.

Talking about scripts: For my meeting minutes and notes I decided I needed something more powerful to deal with the use cases I had in mind.

Enter: Brett Terpstra’s TextExpander Tools

In my continued quest for the right solution it did not took too long to come across Brett Terpstra’s work extending TextExpander. The developer of recently so popular Marked application and scripting pro had faced the same problem and solved it.

As part of his ‘Tools’ TextExpander group, Brett provides a ‘Make a date’ snippet which employs a PHP script to do some more sophisticated, natural language date math.

Using the Fill-in functionality of TextExpander it queries you for a natural language date string which it will process into an absolute date to insert right where you called the snippet from.

Brett’s script-based snippet supports simple date terminology like

Monday, next Fri, tomorrow 4pm
+3, 7, -2 - which, without any additional info are assumed days
You can also do ‘+30 minutes’ if you like to be very precise

It perfectly does the job for the use cases I have. There are also other useful gems in Brett’s Tools TextExpander group, such as creating Markdown links or shortening of URLs, and it is also worthwhile checking out the other TextExpander groups he made available for download.

Easier workflow, time saved

Taking notes and producing meeting minutes with my new TextExpander snippet now makes it quite simple to capture statements like

We need the quote by Friday noon (‘fri 12am’)
The customer is supposed to provide feedback in 10 days (‘+10’)
Can we rehearse next week Thursday? (‘next thu’)

and turn them into absolute dates. It’s true that it only saves me a few seconds every time, but it sums up and I am not forced to do dull work.

Tagging in OmniFocus

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:25:35 +0200

Tagging in OmniFocus:

Great hack by Jan-Yves Ruzicka to introduce the concept of ‘tagging’ to OmniFocus. He leverages the saved search functionality in Perspectives to do that.

There’s one more thing I can do to make this process easier, and that’s set up a perspective. Perspectives remember search terms, so I can take a snapshot of this view as it stands, and use it whenever I need to refer to my high-priority projects. And, of course, if I do want to remove a project from my high-priority list, all I need to do is edit the notes field and remove the “@30000ft”. If you want, you could collapse every project ever and make sure that your 30,000ft high-priority perspective saves expansion, to give you an ultra-brief run-down of what you consider high-priority right now.

OmniFocus and Basecamp

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:54:00 +0200

OmniFocus and Basecamp:

Amongst all online collaboration solutions Basecamp is the best one I ever came across. 37signals is putting a lot of thoughts and efforts into the platform to keep it simple, purpose driven and extremely user-friendly. Unfortunately I am required to use a different platform at work which has yet to adapt the design principles of Basecamp.

Those that manage their personal tasks in OmniFocus and leverage Basecamp for collaboration are always looking to integrate the two. At least to a certain extent.

Ryan Irelan has updated and reposted his AppleScript based solution that uses Mail.app rules to accomplish this. Check out his original description for instructions and more details.

The beauty of Ryan’s approach lies in its simplicity and the fact that you can use it with tools you have out of the box and consequently free of charge.

For a more professional grade integration between Basecamp and OmniFocus you should give Spootnik a go. It uses the WebDAV sync capabilities of OmniFocus not only to keep your data the same across your devices, but also between Basecamp and OmniFocus.

Spootnik also fulfils two very popular feature requests for OmniFocus by providing an web interface to your data and allowing you to email actions directly to your inbox.

While you can test drive it for 30 days, the subscription model starts at 3$ per month.

Managing Email with Smart Mailboxes and MailTags

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:57:37 +0200

Email is not your main job, at least for most of us. But likely it is an important part of your job. Email has become a substantial part of our communication and unfortunately also a primary source of distraction.

You don’t need to like email, I certainly don’t. But you need to deal with it and since you may not like it and it is only a tool to get your real job done, you should deal with it in the most efficient way.

Time-boxing email activities is one element to make sure email does not take centre stage in your daily work. Finding an easy way to file, archive, track and retrieve email is another.

The Magic of MailTags

Many like tagging in Gmail/Sparrow and ‘topics’ in Postbox as a way to organise email. MailTags by Indev - plug-in for Mac OS X native Mail.app - has been around for a very long time and goes way beyond what Gmail and Postbox provide. The Lion-compatible version 3.0 of MailTags has been released recently and allows me to share how I use (a very small part of) it to get my email done.

MailTags allows you to do lots of things with your email. Key features include:

Assigning tags
Associate your email with a project (MailTags can access your OmniFocus or Things project list, provided the application is running)
Assign a tickler date to remind you of the email in the future
Create a event or task in iCal related to an email
Add notes
Assign different colours and up to five different priority levels (now you procrastinators get really excited, right? Five! priority levels!) to your emails

While you can do all of this without taking your hands off the keyboard, the real magic is how deep MailTags integrates with Mail.app. You can leverage all the functionality in searches, Smart Mailboxes and mail rules. And the OmniFocus clipper also works nicely with MailTags-

There is only one downside with MailTags: It is so powerful and feature rich that it invites you to tinker.

Basic email folder setup

My setup is extremely simple and has been recommended often: One single archive folder. Whenever I process new emails in my inbox and decide to keep them they go into my ‘Archive’ folder. No sub-folder structure, no complex filing and no time-consuming browsing to find them back.

Many of the emails I get every day (between 80-150) get automatically processed by rules and go straight to archive, trash or two folders I have for carbon copies and emails to mailing lists I am subscribed to. How these rules reduce my email load by about 50% is something I’ll cover in a future post.

I have been using a single archive folder since years now and have never failed to find back an email using search/Spotlight. In fact I have been faster using search and tags than people with folder structures in 99% of all cases.

Key tags to keep email under control

Tagging is only effective if you use as few tags as necessary. Otherwise you’ll end up in a bigger mess than with any folder hierarchy. I have just a dozen tags defined in MailTags and only six of them are really important to my email management.

@Action — assigned to emails I need to follow-up, read or respond to as they require more than 2 minutes of my time; Nowadays I often use a flag in Mail.app to mark them; Some emails get automatically flagged for follow-up on arrival
@Waiting — Waiting for response(s)
@OmniFocus — for tracking the email follow-up in OmniFocus using this outbox mail rules and this AppleScript
Expenses — Automatically assigned to expense reports (mine or the ones of my staff) before marked read and filed
Travel — Automatically assigned to itineraries (mine or the ones of my staff) before marked read and filed
Staff — Marks emails related to any HR or people management topics

I am not going to discuss the actually processing, whether its manual or automatic by use of Mail.app rules, but I generally process my inbox 3 times a day pretty much following the Inbox Zero methodology.

Navigating your email archive with Smart Mailboxes

When I engage with my email beyond the pure processing I leverage the tags and the tickler date functionality of MailTags heavily through Smart Mailboxes.

The most important Smart Mailboxes live as links in my Mail.app Favourites Bar while I typically have the Mailbox List in the left panel hidden. In a typical scenario I engage with them one by one.

@Action

Looking for emails that have either the ‘@Action’ and/or are flagged, this smart mailbox shows me all the emails I need to read or respond to. Typically they require some more time, quick research or more focus than what I apply during processing.

Most of my email actions are tracked this way. Only emails that require substantial action outside of my email application get clipped to OmniFocus.

Waiting For and Tickler

It always amazes me how much you achieve if you only follow-up consistently. At least you appear on top of things which results in lots of recognition by your staff, peers and bosses.

My ‘Waiting For’ Smart Mailbox, which I look at once a day, gives me exactly that opportunity. It looks for all emails tagged with ‘@Waiting’ and sorts them by tickler date (if applied), allowing me to follow-up on the most urgent, outstanding responses first.

The Tickler Smart Mailbox only looks for emails with Tickler dates, but not tagged ‘Waiting For’. These are typically emails that require some incubation or action in the future. Again, if the resulting action or project is likely to require substantial action outside of my email client, I would clip the email to OmniFocus and tickle it there.

Handy Smart Mailboxes for recently sent or viewed

These two Smart Mailboxes go back to a 43 folders post from 2007 and come in extremely handy during your daily email war.

Recently Sent - Need to quickly forward the email you just sent to another colleague? Add something you forgot to mention to that email that just went out? This Smart Mailbox is the solution as it does not require to scan through your entire, typically huge sent folder. Remember that Smart Mailboxes in Mail.app also define the search scope once selected.

Recently Viewed - If you have a single archive folder and process your inbox with the right level of discipline, you may face the situation where you remember that you have looked at an email yesterday which you need right now.

Corporate mailbox server quota (still exists)

Yes, there are still companies out there that give you a (relative small) email quota on Exchange. Not everyone lives on the endless storage supply that Google provides (for the price of ‘reading’ all your email).

I am required to manage my server space actively to prevent annoying ‘warning’ emails and eventually suspension of my email service. Sounds dramatic, but can be addressed with two simple Smart Mailboxes.

This example also nicely illustrates how you can use one Smart Mailbox as the source for another one.

First I create an ‘Archives’ mailbox which spans multiple folders, most notably the actual archive folder and the sent folder.

My second Smart Mailbox looks at the above Smart Mailbox, but only displays message that have been received or sent more than 30 days ago. Once a month I go into this Smart Mailbox, select all messages and move them into my permanent, local archiving folder.

MailTags and OmniFocus Projects

As mentioned in the overview of the MailTags functionality, it pulls the list of projects from OmniFocus (if running) and allows you to associate emails with a certain OmniFocus project.

There are two reasons why I do not use this functionality at present:

MailTags pulls all Projects and Single Action Lists from OmniFocus, regardless of their status, i.e. projects with future start dates appear as well. If you have 60-90 projects like myself, you’d also like to see your folder structure for easier association.
My projects typically have a relatively short lifespan and change frequently; Consequently it provides little value to me spending time associating emails to projects that might be done next week

However, I can see where this makes sense for others. If you only have two dozens of projects in OmniFocus or some of your projects have a very long lifespan this feature is definitely worth a consideration.

In summary

MailTags lets you do lots of great things and even offers full AppleScript for those that like to tinker even more. It’s the most powerful solution for Mail.app and you should really consider it, if you are sick of email taking control. Start with a simple setup before exploring and exploiting it. And remember that the tool itself doesn’t really solve the problem you have, it only helps once you have decided to change your approach and habit.

OmniFocus Mail.app rule with attachments

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:00:06 +0200

OmniFocus Mail.app rule with attachments:

Bryan Kyle had an itch and scratched it.

One things that has always bothered me about it is that it doesn’t do anything with attachments. If you create one of these specially formatted messages and attach a file, you would expect that the attachment would be added to the newly minted action.

With his modified AppleScript Mail.app will now honour the attachments in any email being processed by the magic OmniFocus mail rule. Good luck with all these images people still have in their corporate signatures.