You think you need email to be productive? Yahoo struggles

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I wouldn’t say I’m an email power user but I know this guy who was complaining that his job meant he gets six emails every day. You and I have just had six emails since the top of this paragraph. So we are at least, shall we say, email-dependent. If I had to rely on phones alone, for instance, I wouldn’t be a fiftieth as productive as I am now. Which means it’s a big deal for anyone when their email isn’t working properly.

It’s worse when your company makes the email software you don’t want to use because it’s rubbish. Yahoo (does it still have the exclamation mark?) is having some trouble. AllThingsD details them and then says:

“They have also declined to return emails inquiring about the issue and others related to Yahoo Mail from this site for weeks, in perhaps the most astonishing display of PR incompetence I have experienced in a very long time.”

Harsh. But also a little bit funny: maybe they’ve been emailing back and it just hasn’t worked.

As with so many things, though, all this has happened before and all this will happen again. When Time/Warner bought AOL, probably the first sign that this was a calamitous mistake came in their email. AOL had an email service, naturally Time/Warner moved everyone over to it. You can’t sell an email service to customers if you won’t use it yourself. Very, very many Time/Warner staff wouldn’t use it. Because it was rubbish. Eventually, the firm relented and its staff could go back to whatever they had before. This wasn’t heavily mentioned in AOL publicity

Here’s AllThingsD’s article on Yahoo Mail today:

http://allthingsd.com/20131211/kick-the-can-yahoo-mail-is-a-consumer-disaster-but-companys-response-is-even-worse/

Start isn’t stopping (Windows)

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Time magazine on how Microsoft will and/or must bring back the Start button – and the whole Start menu – to Windows: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/time/topstories/~3/7wNDUzFuLcY/I

I think they’re right that there is an issue and that it isn’t about the Start button per se. When I’ve used Windows 8 it’s been exasperating because it feels like you have to be an insider to know how to find anything. The trackpad and mouse stuff where you get certain settings by moving left and back, left and back, left and back.

There’s a similar thing now on iOS 7 for iPhones. Once you know it’s there and that you can do it, it’s very useful to be able to swipe down from the top of the screen and get your calendar. Or swipe up from the bottom and get quick access to a lot of settings you regularly want to change. I don’t like that you have to know they’re there, that it isn’t obvious.

But then you do at least get a clue that these features exist: when you switch on your phone or wake it up, the lock screen includes little handles at top and bottom. Windows 8 didn’t seem to have anything like that.

More, if you don’t spot the handles on the way in and you never know that such functions exist, so what? Their presence is a boon but their absence wouldn’t stop you doing things.

Whereas I really did once have to force restart a whole Windows 8 machine because I could not find another way to get out of Word.

If Time is right, and the time is right, Microsoft is likely to make all this better. But will it help the most productive computer users? It won’t make a pixel’s worth of difference to me because I so rarely have to use PCs at all. And if you’re able to get Windows to work brilliantly for you, I wonder if you haven’t long ago moved beyond rooting around the Start menu.

Since I don’t happen to like Windows – XP stands for Fisher Price – I was glad to see Microsoft making a big departure. Use all this processing power, make me something that doesn’t get in my way as much as old Windows did. So far I think it’s been a failure of nerve as you get these whizzy new features but keep crashing out to the old ones. Be bold and move forward but take us with you, the people who need to be productive with this stuff right now.

I’m not sure that pressing on while giving up and adding back an ancient feature just because it’s familiar is the way to go.

But then the last time I used Windows was in France a couple of months ago. Windows 8 was all in French, as you’d expect – except actually, no, it wasn’t. You’d use the Fichier menu and all that, then you’d get some d’accord French dialogue boxes. And then you’d get an important warning. In English.

Microsoft can’t be arsed to finish what just might be the easiest job in the whole of Windows. Forget Start buttons and hidden controls, it’s this insulting disinterest in what your users actually need that makes me dislike Windows.

Okay, okay, ignore me about priorities. Sulks.

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Quick version of my position: spend all the time you like prioritising your To Do list, you’re going to have to change that the moment your boss or big client phones with an urgent job. So nuts to prioritising, just get on with things. This is not everyone’s opinion and those who disagree with me make some daft points but also a lot of very good, strong and undeniable ones. Such as this.

“Most of us stress out about cleaning off our to-do lists, and that’s natural. After all, why jot it down if you didn’t want to get it done, right? Marissa Mayer, however, Yahoo’s CEO and former Google executive, explains that sometimes it’s making the list and prioritizing it that’s important—not finishing.”

Lifehacker’s standfirst intro to the article: Marissa Mayer Explains Why Having To-Dos Is Better than Finishing Them

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/iDAsgT4tebk/marissa-mayer-explains-why-having-to-dos-is-better-than-1480109287

Blimey. Is this the definitive article on To Do lists?

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No.

For one thing, I don’t agree with all of it – I’m an advocate of not spending time prioritising things, just get on with them – but then it also claims to be the history of the To Do list. We may never really get a history of that. But this is the closest I’ve ever seen and it is stuffed with both stories it didn’t know and links out to more interesting articles.

This is a three-biscuit kind of article:

http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-origin-of-the-to-do-list-and-how-to-design-one-that-works

That’s on The Buffer and I saw it first on Lifehacker

Make 46 Meals for Under $100 in 4 Hours

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I make a big deal about spending effort now to save a lot more time later but usually I’m thinking about work and specifically writing work. Here’s someone who saves a lot of money by making freezer meals in big batches. I read this and I don’t think about the money so much as I immediately leap to the point that this saves hours. Quite possibly days.

Sold!

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/ZqBDJ-Ek2-8/make-46-meals-for-under-100-in-4-hours-1480339310

Via Lifehacket

Ask for what you want and ask it now, ask up front

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I do talk about this in my book, The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers but I’ve just now, this minute, had to put it into use for a new reason. When you want something and you’re emailing somebody to get it, say so right at the top. Line one.

The reason I give in the book is that we’ve all had emails where we’ve wondered what in the hell this person wants. And when they do that very British thing of working up to the point by reminding you who they are, how we met, how, gosh, you said some day you could send me something, maybe, hello, it has an unintended effect. I read all this about that time we met in ‘Nam, how we stole a taxi together in Saigon and wrote Les Mis 2 together and as it goes on, as it gets ever more specific, I can’t help but worry. This is going to be big, I think. This is going to be really serious. This may be trouble.

And then they just ask for a link to the book. (Here, have the UK link and the US one too. It’s no trouble.)

But there is also the fact that saying what you want right at the start is a difficult writing task. Especially today. I had to write to my agent with all sorts of issues. All good, you understand, but just the sheer volume of things to discuss about new projects, things I want him to do, things I should’ve told him I’d already done.

The more I thought about it, the more I could think of other issues I needed to cover. It’s fine to think I should pick one and only email about that, leave the rest to another day but this is a real job and a real email about a real thing. Anything like stripping it down would be a correct writing exercise but not what he or I needed. Too much, too intertwined, too complicated.

So I started with line one. What I want.

There is always something that you want most, there is always something that you want first. So I wrote that down.

And having written it, every single other thing fell into place. It turned out to be what I call a three-biscuit email (it’ll take him those and some tea to work through the things in it) but as a reader today he will fly through the email and know exactly what is going on and exactly what I’m after.

Because I spent so long thinking about the first line, the rest of the email poured out of me in a flash. 

It’s a big deal for me, it’s a complicated subject, but wallop, that email is done and I’m on to the next thing. Specifically I’m on to talking to you. And now I’ll just pop off to get some breakfast. I’m starving and saying all that about biscuits did not improve things.

Start here

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Okay, so things got in the way and you didn’t start the project over the summer like you planned. There’s Christmas: you can start it as soon as you get off work for Christmas. Easy. Come 1 January, it’ll all be done, you’ll see.

Well, okay, Christmas was a bit rough. But when you get through the year-end reports, you can start then. It’ll be easy.

Start now instead. Start here.

On your way to work, as you stand in the kitchen cooking, as you finally go to bed tonight, start here. Just start with one thing, possibly the smallest thing you can think of but definitely the first thing you can find. If you’re going to write a book about your family history, write down who the best relative to talk to is. Just their name.

If you want to produce an event, do a Googly search for any similar ones coming up this year and write down their dates so you know which ones to avoid.

Then carry on in to work, finish making the meals, turn out the light and sleep.

You can very easily keep putting projects off but they never get done. You can’t very easily get a project done – but you can get them started.

Just start now. Start here.