I’ve long been a fan of Merlin Mann‘s Inbox Zero philosophy, although not with the religious fervor of some. One of the biggest problems with email is that it ends up being your to-do list. This isn’t bad in theory, but it allows almost anyone to put tasks on your list without your consent. This is not only unreasonable, but it is also highly inefficient and can be stressful.

As Merlin says:

It’s not how many mes­sages are in your inbox–it’s how much of your own brain is in that inbox. Especially when you don’t want it to be.

My good friend Daniel Fraser of Smiling Albino has recently been fighting with an overload of information vying for his attention in his inbox, so it was timely when I came across a page recently by Keith Rarick that outlined a quick method for getting to Inbox Zero with Gmail. Continue reading →

This is part 3 of a 3 part series-  “Tricking-out Your OmniFocus Perspectives Video Summary”.

As mentioned in my previous posts in this series, I had links to a few videos saved in Instapaper for a about a year because I didn’t make the time to sit down and work through them for the full two and a half hours.  Once I spent the time, however, I found some of the information useful and so have decided to provide this distillation of information that I took from them in order to (hopefully) save you some time.

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This is part 2 of a 3 part series-  “Working the the OmniFocus Bookmarklet in iOS Video Summary”.

I had links to a few videos saved in Instapaper for a very long time because I didn’t make the time to sit down and watch the full two and a half hours of video.  Once I took the time, however, I found it useful and so have decided to provide this distillation of information that I took from them in order to (hopefully) save you some time.

Continue reading →

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Instapaper, but sometimes it brings out the worst in me in terms of procrastination.  This is ironic since the topic of this post is OmniFocus, which should, in theory, be just the tool to help me overcome this disability.

At some point, I came across (probably via the OmniGroup twitter feed) a series of videos from Omni at MacWorld (2011) with tips and tricks on how to get the most out of OmniFocus.  Since I usually read my twitter feed on the go, a lot of interesting stuff ends up in Instapaper to languish until I can spend the time going through whatever it was I found interesting to begin with.  That was especially the case with these three videos as between the three of them it was two and a half hours of watching to do.

Continue reading →