There are a lot of different strategies out there and each person has to find what works best for them.  Here are a few queries that might help you think about how well your strategy is working for you:

1. Are you able to work through your e-mail inbox in a reasonable amount of time every day, respond to or delegate time-sensitive questions/comments, convert messages into to-do items, or otherwise file them away on the first pass through?
2. Do you make good use of e-mail filters available in your mail reading program to highlight/tag/sort messages in ways that make you more productive?
3. Are there mailing lists or other regular notifications that you could unsubscribe from or have re-routed, to minimize the e-mail that you just delete or file on a regular basis?
4. Do you have a system for filing email that allows you to quickly and intuitively retrieve messages (sent and received) that you need to review without a lot of searching or jumping around to different folders?
5. Are you purging or archiving old messages in a way that makes sense for your role and your use of email?
6. Are your auto-”check for new mail” settings calibrated to (or turned off for) being productive? (i.e. Do you really need to know about a new message the instant it comes in, or would it be okay to review new messages once an hour?  A few times per day?!?)

If you’re not employing any particular email management strategy, may I recommend the “Inbox Zero” series of articles from 43 Folders?  There’s a great video of a presentation about this approach to get you started.

What other tips or strategies do you use to keep email useful to you as a tool, instead of getting overwhelmed by it?

What a world of pure and unflinching justice we could then live in!  To walk around knowing that the slogans and invitations on billboards, newspaper ads and television were all required by law to be true, and that onerous fines and the shame of the public eye awaited the occasional miscreant who would stray from this noble code.  No need to worry about being deceived or misled as a consumer; we could always have confidence that advertisers would stand by their claims.

Like I said, I was young.

But at the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I do think there’s been a notable shift in the standards we hold marketers and public figures to when it comes to truth in advertising.  Seems like somewhere around the mid 1990′s, we kind of gave up on it.

Was it when the Coke vs. Pepsi wars heated up?  Or maybe it was when product manufacturing was being outsourced to other countries and business owners became disconnected from quality controls in their production processes?  Or maybe it was when we stopped expecting politicians to tell the truth and started betting on just how outrageous their lies were.  Or maybe The Internet made it so much more difficult to police advertising claims that no one even bothers anymore unless it’s a particularly egregious case.

But there are more important things to worry about, right?  Caveat emptor and everybody for themselves, and let’s focus on the national debt or poverty or obesity, right?

I’m not so sure.  I think deceptive marketing practices deserve more of the blame for the state of the world than they get. I’m glad to hear that some high schools and colleges are teaching young people to be more aware of how marketing influences their buying choices, but the majority of us are still very much subject to the power of the marketing machine.  And when that machine is telling us to do things that are against our own best interests, it matters.

A few recent examples I’ve heard or seen just driving around town:

“Fast and fresh!”
Many fast food restaurants caught on long ago that fast food was associated with unhealthy eating, and that dietary advice was shifting toward recommendations of freshly prepared food with more natural ingredients.  The end result is the self-contradiction that you can have mass-produced food from a restaurant that is both “fast” (because it was pre-prepared halfway across the country in a warehouse and trucked to you frozen or full of preservatives) and “fresh” (because it has a piece of lettuce or tomato on it that was recently washed).  Or, “we have a salad on our menu, so we offer healthy eating options for everyone!” This undermines people who are trying to make healthier eating choices for themselves and their children by convincing them they can have it both ways, and it undermines local/regional food producers who actually ARE bringing you fresh food that you could prepare within a few days for a healthy meal.

“Hurry in to our store to save!”
I heard this one on the radio this morning.  ”Be the hero of your household’s budget,” the ad proclaimed.  They want you to come in to the store and spend money so that you can “save” money.  Buy things you might not have bought otherwise and might not need, so that you can feel good you’re getting them at a slightly lower price than…someone else somewhere else might or might not be selling them for.   This approach twists the notion that “saving money is good” into the idea that you have to spend money to save money.  No wonder we have unprecedented levels of personal debt and bankruptcy.

“For a limited time only!”
This one is tried and true: the idea that a time pressure will almost always result in consumers making different choices than they would make given time to think through the value of what they’re getting.  ”I might not have bought a case of gummy bears THIS week, but surely I’ll need a case in the coming year or two, and this sale ends TODAY!”  Marketers are telling us that rational responses are not to be trusted and that our gut instincts are what we should go with.  Instant gratification is okay because…then you’ll be gratified, and that’s all that matters, right!?

There are many, many more.  And I’m sure none of them are all that surprising to you, because again, we’ve come to accept that marketers are trying to mess with our sense of reality, and that we should just deal with it the best we can.

But why do we accept that?  Why are we willing to subject ourselves to that dance of pain when all we get out of it is some cheap plastic crap, stomach aches and buyer’s remorse?  I’m accepting comments for a limited time only.

I try not to give my my money to companies that practice false or misleading advertising most blatantly. But for me, one of the long-term solutions is to be very, VERY intentional about how I market myself and the products or services I’m associated with.

When I market my own business and our technical services, I try to make sure we speak plainly and clearly about what we can and cannot do, so that no one is misled and no end result is hyped up.

When I tell people who I am and what I stand for, I’m careful to note complexity and messiness where it exists.

When I talk about my qualifications for being voted into elected office, I’m careful not to spin or inflate my experience and accomplishments beyond what’s real, and to give other people credit where it’s due.

When I mess up or say something that might be misleading, I try to go back to correct it as soon as I can.

Sometimes it’s harder to be accurate and honest than it is to be catchy and broadly appealing.  Maybe it’s that younger version of myself still wandering around in oblivion waiting for the FTC to make it all better, but I still hope for a world where we all practice – and expect – truth in advertising at every level.

Sometimes this reinventing and rediscovering happens because there’s been a change in staffing, sometimes it happens because people just don’t bother to write things down.  But I’m amazed at the “shortcuts” people think they’re taking to work around those cases:

• We couldn’t find our username and password to manage our website domain name, so we just registered a new one and re-printed our business cards.  Problem solved!
• We forgot that our last IT person already had a Facebook page setup, so we setup a new one and then asked everyone to like the new page.  Problem solved!
• We’re not sure where the source design files are for our marketing brochure, so we’ll just design a new one.  Problem solved!

Meanwhile you’ve lost a bunch of would-be visitors to your website who still have your old business cards, halved your population of Facebook followers, and wasted someone’s week on solving a problem that was already solved.

Sometimes it is faster to take a shortcut – I’m guilty of using the “forgot my password” feature on web applications WAY too often because I haven’t bothered to do a good job of tracking the password used when I don’t use the service but a few times a year.  And there can be value in having a given process considered with fresh eyes and new perspective, even if it is because the old way wasn’t well documented.

But when you find yourself repeating this exercise over and over again, spending time and energy (and money?) reinventing or rediscovering some core parts of your operations, you have to wonder if there’s room for improvement:

1. Encourage the building and documenting of shared knowledge using tools like wikis, intranets, internal blogs, and shared document repositories, and train staff on how to use them (“All of our key account information related to our corporate website is in that folder on the shared network drive.”)
2. Facilitate easily checking in with coworkers before launching something new (“Hey, I’m gonna create our new Facebook page, anyone see a reason not to?”)
3. Audit the time your staff spends getting up to speed on core business practices or resources.  (“The last three marketing department hires each spent 10 hours researching and documenting area printing services we could use – maybe there’s something wrong here.”)

What parts of your organizational operations are being unnecessarily reinvented or rediscovered on a regular basis?

How do you make sure your staff members build on what you and your coworkers already know?

In a non-profit organization board meeting, it might be the Executive Committee or the board chair.

In a small business, it might be the business’s owners or managers.

In a city council meeting, it might be the President of the council or the group’s political majority.

In a community of faith, it might be church elders.

Sometimes we forget the power that the agenda setters can have.  We focus on the outcomes of the conversations that we do have, but we forget or overlook that some conversations aren’t conducted in the first place.

Sometimes this is out of practical necessity – a given group of people can only cover so much ground in a given gathering – but sometimes it’s because the agenda setters don’t feel a given conversation should be had.

In the best case, this choice to exclude certain conversations from the agenda happens because the agenda setters are using their collective wisdom and experience to make the best use of the organization’s time and resources.  Sometimes, though, it happens because the agenda setters are afraid of what might come out in the conversation.  A conflict they can’t mediate.  A decision they don’t agree with.  A bringing to light of things that they would be more comfortable keeping out of sight.

Different approaches to agenda setting work well for different kinds of organizations, but it’s always important to remember the power that the agenda setters are imparted.  As an organization evaluates its effectiveness, it might also ask these questions of its agenda setting process:

1. Is it clear who sets the agenda for the conversations we have as an organization?
2. Is it clear what process is followed for suggesting items for organizational conversations?
3. How well do we equitably handle differences of opinion in what the agenda contains?  How do we identify when something is being left out because of pragmatic considerations versus ideological disagreement?
4. Are those who set the agenda representative of the interests and needs of all who are affected by the organization’s decisions?
5. What important conversations does our agenda-setting process seem to systemically exclude from our time together in discussion?

Are there other queries that are useful to consider in creating a structure for agenda-setting?

In the organizations, businesses and relationships that you’re a part of, what kind of power does the agenda setter hold, and how well is that power used?

I was only scheduled to give one presentation (“How to talk, or not talk, to your clients about Perl”) but after hearing some of the opening remarks at the conference that spent too much time and energy, IMHO, declaring that “Perl is not dead!” I signed up to give a new talk about possibilities for re-framing that sentiment.

You can view a video of the talk, or you can view my slides [PDF].

Well, you’re in luck!  I really enjoy cataloging and categorizing these kinds of things, and so I’ve put together this list of 12 kinds of social networking status updates.

Most every status update will fall into one of these categories:

1. I want you to know how happy I am. I have really amazing family, friends, career, hobbies, food, or some other factors that I will go on about publicly to hundreds of strangers, and I just want you to know how perfect everything is in the world right now.
2. I am incredibly busy and productive. But, I’m taking some time out of my incredibly busy schedule to tell you how incredibly busy and productive I am.  But as soon as I’m done with that, it’s back to being incredibly busy and productive!
3. I am kind of a big deal. Here’s some information about me that’s only thinly veiled as informational, but is actually designed to show you how important, successful, athletic, skilled, wealthy, well-connected and/or influential I am.
4. I want you to know how unhappy I am. You won’t believe how pathetic and unworthy I am, but I’d like to try to tell you about it anyway.
5. I am really clever and insightful. Let me just say this really clever or witty thing and let you bask in how amazing I am.
6. I would like to tell you about my physical location. Here is where I am right now.
7. I’d like to share about the activities of my child or children. Let me show you how cute and/or irreverent they are.  If you don’t have children, consider taking this opportunity to feel inadequate.  If you do have children, consider taking this opportunity to feel like you don’t enjoy your children as much as I do.
8. There is an injustice that needs your attention! Some person, organization or company has done something unacceptable and I need you to take action RIGHT NOW to help make it better.
9. I have a link that I’d like for you to click on. It’s really interesting, and it’s possibly going to change your life.  Come on, just click on it.  What if it’s a really cool photo of a cat in some situation you’ve NEVER seen before?  There, wasn’t that amazing?
10. I have a medical condition that I’d like to share about. I’m sick, or I’m getting better, or I’m having surgery, or I broke something, or someone or something threw up on me or I threw up on them.  Let me tell you about it.
11. I would like to comment on some aspect of popular culture. Allow me tell you why a particular television show, movie, celebrity, singer, actor or athlete is in or out of my favor right now.
12. I am mysterious. I would just like to post this string of characters that may or may not resemble words in your language, hoping to increase your confusion while also instilling some sense that I know something you don’t.  598234.

Do you have other categories to add?  What kinds of status updates do you tend to post?

1. Really RUN the meeting. Make it known that you’re in charge and that this is your meeting – nothing will be discussed or decided unless you are the one initiating and guiding it. If someone else tries to show leadership in the conversation, shoot down their ideas as unfeasible or laughable, and then change the topic. If someone tries to step in and take control, talk louder and longer than they do until they sit quietly. Don’t be afraid to end the meeting abruptly.
2. Pretend to ask for input from others, but never actually stop talking long enough to receive it. You can create the appearance of a collaborative meeting environment by saying things like, “let’s take a moment to go around and see what other ideas are out there,” but then continue to talk about what those ideas might be, who might have them, the weather, etc. until the time for input has been used up. If someone does start to get their thoughts in, pretend to take an important call so that you have to leave the room.
3. Don’t have an agenda, or if you do, make sure it’s vague and that you don’t really follow it. Agendas only serve to focus the discussion, and your goal here is to allow for wild tangents and distracted commentary without really getting to any action/decision points. You also can really throw people off nicely by putting the most pressing and critical issues at the very bottom of the list while mundane items that don’t require a meeting at all are at the top – this insures you will never have a meeting of substance.
4. Abuse everyone else’s time and plans. In advance, ask everyone to be there promptly, and then start the meeting late. Let the meeting run longer than the scheduled time and if anyone tries to leave, keep saying that it will be just a few more seconds. Change the location of the meeting at the last minute and berate anyone who shows up late. If one person dominates the meeting, encourage them by asking follow-up questions and say affirming things like, “I’d really like for you to expand on that more.” Take lots of time to have everyone get out their calendars to schedule follow-up meetings, and then pick a time when only a minority of the people present can attend.
5. Don’t take detailed meeting minutes. Detailed meeting minutes (and expectations that people read and incorporate them) are a huge barrier to running a meeting poorly. If you see anyone taking notes that might make it out of the room, declare that “we’re just brainstorming” and ask everyone to put away their paper. If you have to take minutes, insure that you only include short, one-sentence summaries of any discussion, and never identify anyone by name. This insures that all future meetings will be spent re-discussing the same topics, and that new people joining in will have free reign to ask everyone else to start from the beginning.
6. Use lots of jargon. Make people feel like they’re being productive by inserting lots of feel-good organizational jargon into the conversation: action items, synergy, moving forward, utilize, task force, strategic memo, focus in, sync up, touch base, connect with, goal-oriented, put it in the cloud. And so on.

I realize that these tips are only the tip of the iceberg, and that there are many more ways to run a meeting poorly, but I hope this is helpful. What are some of your favorites?

1. Visit public Twitter feeds in a web browser. This may seem fairly obvious, but you can view anything that anyone posts to Twitter just by visiting their Twitter profile page (as long as they haven’t marked their updates as “private”).  So, to view all of my Tweets, just visit http://twitter.com/ChrisHardie – no account required.
2. Subscribe to Twitter feed updates via RSS. Even if you don’t have a Twitter account, you can subscribe to receive new status updates from any Twitter user (again, assuming their updates are public) via RSS.  By putting the feed in a feed reader like Google Reader, you can be aware of new status updates without even visiting the site in a web browser.  So, on my twitter.com/ChrisHardie page, just look for the link that says “RSS Feed of ChrisHardie’s tweets”
3. Use Twitter’s real-time search. You can visit http://search.twitter.com/ and enter a few keywords to see recent Tweets that relate to those words.  This can be useful to find mentions of you, your product/service/company, or just news and events in the world.  It’s also a fun way to see what conversations are happening right now.  (If you like that, you might enjoy TweetGrid or Twistori.)  You might also consider using the Greasemonkey plug-in that will show you relevant tweets as a part of a Google search on any topic.
4. Find people in your community using Twitter. Using Google, you can look for people in your geographical area who are using Twitter, and see if there are any individuals or organizations you want to follow.  For example, I can use the search terms ‘site:twitter.com location (“richmond, indiana” OR “richmond, in”)‘ to find Twitter users in Richmond, IN (as long as they’ve identified themselves as such in their Twitter profiles).  Services like NearbyTweets.com make this search even more fun and interesting, and if you want to expand beyond your local area, TwitterVision shows a neat visualization of Tweets coming in from all over the world.
5. Monitor Twitter for mentions of topics of interest. If you’d like to be notified when someone on Twitter mentions you or your organization, you can set up a Google Alert.  For example, I can decide to be e-mailed by Google Alerts every time they index a tweet mentioning Richmond, using this search: ‘site:twitter.com Richmond, IN’.  Services like TweetBeep.com also provide this kind of feature with additional options.

I hope that’s helpful.  If you have other ways to use Twitter without being a Twitter user, please post them in the comments.  You can also follow along with my Twitter-related bookmarks on Delicious.com.

I generally don’t mind this standard when I’m in “work mode,” but I’ve noticed a very undesirable side effect on the rest of my life: I’ve been slowly losing the ability to spend open-ended social time with people, without my brain trying to fit it in to some predetermined scheduling blocks. The end result is that I think I’m less open to the wonderful, serendipitous experiences and discoveries that one can make in the comfortable and unregulated presence of friends and loved ones.

I’ve written before about the cues we give and get for when a conversation is going to go deeper, and when it’s probably not.  To answer my own question about what kinds of states of being allows you to go deeper in conversation, I’ve been actively working on spending more open-ended time with people I care about and want to get to know better.  I have a few thoughts about how it’s going, and what approaches are working:

• Scheduling fewer things in a day:  Again, modern corporate scheduling culture encourages us to stack a bunch of appointments/meetings/tasks together one after the other, but that doesn’t work for “quality social time.”  By putting fewer scheduled items in an afternoon or evening, I can be much more comfortable letting one of them go on longer than I might have expected, seeing where the time takes us.  There’s a “risk” that if something ends early and you have free time, there will be a sense of missed opportunity, but since I’m trying to make up for missed opportunities in the other direction (spending nurturing time with good people), I don’t mind that so much.
• Clearing out mental clutter in advance: Even if I’ve kept my calendar open, if I go into a social setting with things weighing on my mind, items I know I’ll have to work on later, etc. it’s much harder to be truly present to those I’m with.  As much as possible, I’m trying to find the mental and emotional space to fully engage, whether it’s through actually getting those weighty tasks taken care of ahead of time, or just finding the discipline to put them away for a while.
• Paying attention to silence and pauses: Pauses and silence are often as important in a social setting as the words that are spoken.  They can mean so many different things: “there’s something on my mind and I could share it now if you want me to,” or “I’m content here,” or “I’m uncomfortable here,” or “Let’s talk about something else now,” or “I’m done with this conversation now, how about you?”  We’re so bad at listening and being in silence together in this culture, but I find it worth the significant effort to try to navigate those moments, and I’ve been getting better about letting them come and go without needing to fill the space with my voice.
• Paying attention to body language:  It’s amazing how easy it is to indicate “I’m probably done with you now” via body language.  A glance at the door or a clock, closing up a bag or a notebook, a yawn, shuffling keys or coins, even just changing seating position.  I know that I’ve trained myself to do these things well at the right times in my business meetings, so now I’m training myself not to do them subconsciously in social settings.  I try to sit calmly, arms and chest open, eyes and head engaged, trying to convey a sense that “I’m here with you for as long as we should be in this place together.“
• Not overdoing the open-ended-ness: I still believe in finding comfortable ending points to any given interaction, so it’s still important to be on the lookout for those, to achieve a kind of closure.  There are also people out there who might never notice that many, many hours of a conversation have passed without a break, trip to the bathroom, sleep, etc. and I have to be careful to avoid letting their own obliviousness (said lovingly!) take up more of my time than I want to give.

The result?

Sometimes I definitely find myself outside of my comfort zone – “gosh, I probably should have been done with this a while ago” or “hmm, I wonder if he/she is trying to go, maybe I should give them a way out!”

But for the most part, it’s meant that I’ve had much more rewarding interactions with those I spend time with, and I have found some depth that I probably would have preemptively participated in squashing otherwise.  I’ve also found myself noticing more the people who really have a hard time being in the moment themselves, sitting through pauses and silence, asking me questions and engaging me fully – these things are more apparent now that I’m not covering that up as much with my own mental preparations for the end of our time together.  It’s been very informative.

How do you work to make sure that you’re present to the people you spend time with?  What ways do you find to cultivate all that a given exchange might have to offer?

1. Please don’t assume that you know me because you read my posts or status updates. I’m not saying this because I think I’m mysterious or hard to know, I’m saying it because I believe reading someone’s status updates does not constitute an engaged and genuine human relationship.  I do use the Internet to express myself, but only one very particular slice of myself.  I hope we can talk “in real life” or even via more direct online communication if we really want to get to know each other better.
2. Please don’t assume that I know you because of your posts or status updates. I sometimes try to keep up with what people are saying about their lives on social networking sites, but sometimes I definitely don’t bother.  If there’s something exciting, hard, important, or otherwise noteworthy happening in your life, you should assume you need to tell me about it in an “old fashion way” (e-mail, phone, letter, in person) if you want me to know or care. (Hopefully I will also be asking you how you are doing once in a while too.)
3. I have a sense of humor that sometimes doesn’t translate very well to written electronic form. Sometimes I type things that sound absolutely hilarious in my head, and come out quite confusing (or even worse, alarming) in pixel form.  I guess you should assume that if something I type sounds weird or problematic, it’s just a poorly executed attempt at humor, but you’re still welcome to call me out on it.
4. I don’t act on ambient invitations. Just because you think I may have heard about your (non-public) event, gathering or party because other people are mentioning it online or because you mentioned it on Facebook, please don’t assume that I think of myself as invited.  This may be old fashioned or even self-absorbed of me, but I generally still want to know directly from someone if they want me in attendance somewhere (and will generally give you back the courtesy of a direct RSVP).
5. I don’t really use Facebook for anything other than status updates.  I generally do not respond to requests for joining causes or groups, and I never accept requests to take quizzes, play games, or send or receive strange little objects via applications.  I often don’t have time or interest in responding to comments people post on my status updates.  I know, I know, some people will be like “Dude, you’re DOING it wrong,” and maybe I am.  Just don’t take it personally.
6. I use Delicious.com for social bookmarking, and you should too. If I see a website link that I think you might enjoy, I’m 27% more likely to follow through on that thought and make you aware of it if you have a Delicious.com account so that I can bookmark it for you there.   If I have to send you an e-mail message, I’m less likely to bother.  I’m sorry, it’s lazy, I know, I know.

I realize that this may sound curmudgeonly, especially coming from someone who works with the Internet for a living and who encourages people to use it as a tool for better communication.  But if you do read my blog, you know I feel strongly that we need to be very careful about replacing genuine human interaction with stalking each other on Facebook.

I know it may be futile, but it’s important for me to draw some of these lines in the sand about what kind of life I will and will not live online.

If you maintain some sort of presence on the Internet (via Facebook, Twitter, a blog or otherwise), what are some ground rules you set for yourself, and what should people expect (or not expect) from that online existence?