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?

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?

It’s a pretty simple exercise in the end.  Make a table of all of the things you spend time on in a week, and compare that to the total hours available.  If you’re over, then you have to change something.  If you’re at or under the available time, then you still might need to change something to be happy, e.g. increasing the amount of time available for fun, sleep, or just relaxing.  Or you may find that you spend time exactly the way you want to!

Here’s what my chart looked like, in no particular order:

When I filled out a version of this chart more than a year ago, I found that I had 184 hours/week of stuff I planned to do, 16 more hours per week than actually existed.  I made adjustments and scaled back or ended some of my time commitments, and got it down to 168 hours.  I’ve rarely found myself feeling continuously overwhelmed since (short periods of oh-no-how-will-I-do-it-all still come and go), and once in a while I update the table to see where I’m at.

Of course, it may be difficult or undesirable to commit to some firm number of hours for each activity every week, and we all know that life has an impressive way of nullifying even the best made plans.  But the exercise itself can help you see any disparity between your mental model of how you want to be spending time, and what reality might actually dictate.

How does your first column of hours add up?  Any line items that surprised you (or that I forgot!)? Which items are you going to change so that you can spend your time the way you want to?

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?

Many people refer to this act as “cutting the grass.”

Over the last few years I’ve tried quite a wide variety of approaches to and implements for “cutting the grass,” and I’d like to share them with you now, because imparting unsolicited and only moderately useful information to a halfway-interested audience is what blogging is all about, no?

1. Not mowing the grass at all.
   This is the approach I always try first when I move into a new space.  As the warm season comes around and the grass gets taller and taller, you can see the land start to return to its natural state, and it’s exciting!  Unfortunately, I’m often not the only one watching this growth with anticipation, and the neighbors on either side of me are often not as excited as I about the prospect of a rewilded yard.  Some have even given me subtle hints about their concern by, oh, say, mowing my yard for me without asking.  I do suppose there is  utility in being able to walk across some parts of the yard without encountering snakes, dead mice, abandoned vehicles, warning flags placed by the City, etc.  So, as a matter of neighborly politeness and practical landscape planning, I’ve usually been compelled to take on some sort of mowing activity.  (A blog post for another time is why we put ourselves in that position in the first place.)
2. A neighbor’s gas powered mower.
   It seems kind of silly that in most every garage or tool shed up and down most every street in this country, there sits a mowing device that is used an average of twice a month, and otherwise collects dust and rust.  Having been exposed to the clever practice that some people refer to as “sharing,” for a while I decided to try “sharing” a neighbor’s gas powered mower with them.  It was generally successful – I would just call and make sure it was okay to pick up, pick it up and gas it up, and use it, and return it.  I won’t go into the details of why this “sharing” system became insufficient for my needs, but eventually I did decide that I had to break down and get my own mowing device.
3. My own gas powered mower.
   Oh, wow, there’s nothing like it is there?  Pour a little dinosaur juice in a hole, crank that puppy up, and you’re wreaking havoc on that grass left and right.  Let me show you exactly how tall you’re going to be, little plants!  Oh, and the smell! – oh, wait, no, that’s kind of gross since it’s that gas smell.  But the sounds!  Oh, wait, no, it’s actually kind of annoying and loud, and especially if you’re a neighbor trying to enjoy your back porch or have dinner or sleep in or meditate.  But the energy efficiency!  All we have to do is drill deeply enough in the Earth to convert ancient sunlight from millions of years ago into a highly flammable substance, truck it across thousands of miles, and sell it to each other all so that we don’t have to put too much physical effort into carving up the plant life that we voluntarily arranged around our living spaces.

   Oh wait, maybe there’s a better way.

4. The scythe.
   I asked myself, “how did people mow their yards before there were lawn mowers?”  The answer (when it wasn’t, “they didn’t”) was “with a scythe.”  I read about the amazing, almost meditative practice of standing in the grass, quietly whisking a scythe blade back and forth around you, falling the grass quickly and peacefully.  It sounded great, and I decided I wanted to try using a scythe to mow my yard.  I had one custom-built for me by the amazing craftsman at Scythe Supply, located in Maine.  I was giddy with excitement when it came and while I put it together, and then I realized, I have absolutely no idea how to use this thing. I read up on scythe usage on the Internet, and I read the book that came with it, and that was definitely helpful.  I tried my best to put it into practice, and did quite a number on my yard in the process.  Somehow “Figure 4-1″ wasn’t happening.  I tried it a few more times, doing my best to keep from turning red as the neighbors looked on at the crazy guy with the death blade next door, but the rhythmic cutting motion didn’t come to me.  I realized that this simple but useful knowledge – how to cut grass with a scythe – was something I would need to learn in person from someone who already knew how to do it.  And then I realized that the number of people with that knowledge in my area is probably minimal, and the psychological barriers to using my scythe built up from there.  I still want to learn how to use it for real, but after a long week and a unruly yard staring me down, I haven’t found the patience for that yet.
5. A human powered push mower.
   Ding ding ding – we have a winner.  This is the technology that I guess emerged post-scythe and pre-gas mower.  You know what I’m talking about, right – it’s the cylindrical blades that rotate around as you push the mower device, trapping the grass between the blade and another plate, slicing it off.  They’re quiet, mostly effective, and (for my yard anyway) a good balance of appropriate physical effort and time efficiency. They should generally last many years without maintenance or sharpening, and they don’t take up much space at all.  I settled on the Scotts 2000 Classic model, which has a 20″ deck on it.  You know this last size detail is a big deal because it is written in italics on the box AND on the mower itself.  It’s taken me around 45 minutes to mow my current yard with a gas mower, and tonight it took me 50 minutes to put the Scotts 2000 together AND mow.  (“Ah,” you say, “we’re being subjected to this blog post because you happened to mow your yard tonight?  Get a life!”)

   Anyway, I know that not everyone can take the time to use a push mower, but if you can at least see all of your yard from one place without needing to walk for a mile, or even if you can’t and just want some more quiet outdoors time, I recommend it.

Okay, that’s my mowing history.  I welcome your comments, suggestions, alternate realities, etc.  If you want to try out any of these implements or strategies (remember, “sharing”) just let me know.  And remember, ask about someone’s mowing history before you get too close to them (and especially before you mow together) – it could save you a lot of heartache later.

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?

My suggested tips for success:

1. Don’t leave the subject line blank. When you send someone an email with a blank subject line, they are lost. They have no idea what the message is about. Even if they know you, even if they’re expecting an email from you, there will be that moment where they just don’t know what’s gonna happen when they open your message. That kind of uncertainty breeds fear and paranoia, and you don’t want to be a part of that, do you?
2. Don’t put the name of the person you’re sending the message to as the subject line AND don’t put your name as the subject line. The sender/recipient information is already embedded in the message in these handy little fields called the “To:” line and the “From:” line. You need not repeat them, and it’s a waste of subject line space.
3. Don’t replace the subject line of a reply with something completely different (unless the topic has really completely changed). Even if the subject line is no longer completely accurate or timely (e.g. “feedback about this afternoon” still being used 3 days later), it’s still an important cue to the reader that tunes them into the ongoing conversation quickly. When you obliterate it just because you can, you make your recipient work harder. In some cases, mail reading programs also take advantage of the repeated subject line for better sorting and searching. One possible exception: if you’re forwarding on a message to someone for the first time, you can enhance the subject line for their clarity of understanding.
4. Be specific but concise, don’t use generic words. Your goal is to help the recipient know in about 5-10 words exactly what they can expect to find in the content of your message. If it’s a request that requires action, say so. If it’s an FYI, say so. Use nouns and verbs that will evoke meaning, and don’t use words that just take up space (e.g. “a message about…”).
5. If it’s time sensitive or high priority, indicate that. If someone gets a lot of email, they may not read your message right away, so don’t wait until the message body to indicate your expectations for how they will prioritize it. If you need a response by a certain date, tack that on to the end of the subject line, e.g. “reply by 10/5/08″. If it’s just generally high priority, you can say that instead (and in addition to using your mail program’s priority flag, which not all other mail programs recognize), e.g “high priority”.
6. Be careful about words that may be caught by junk mail filters. Sadly, a modern consideration for email sending is whether or not your message will seem suspicious to automated spam filters. If you use words that reference items of a sexual nature, pharmaceutical solutions, or money-making opportunities, know that your message may be more likely to be delayed. In some cases, your recipient may not ever see it.

Of course, efficiency isn’t always the only consideration in writing email subject lines. You may be writing to be clever or mysterious, or to brighten someone’s day, in which case you can happily throw out the above and I promise not to call you out on it.

How do those work for you? Do you have other tips and suggestions to add?

Before I tell you more about how it works, let me first assure you that I’ve tried the alternatives:

Past Solutions

• I have carried a Franklin Covey Day Planner around, and it wasn’t too bad. Plenty of space to keep track of events and to look into the future. But it felt like a waste of paper, and I felt silly buying filler replacement kits every year. I also noted that as my todo lists grew more complex and with varying priorities and deadlines, it was much harder to get the big picture of what to be working on.
• I have carried around a Palm Pilot PDA, and it’s probably the closest I’ve come to finding a solution that involves an electronic device. Manage calendar items and todo lists on my desktop computer, sync it with my Palm, manage them there, sync them back, and presto. But I didn’t like the awkward geek factor I felt in busting it out at meetings and in public places – especially since I used the optional portable unfolding keyboard – despite (or maybe because of) the fact that I geek out in plenty of other ways. I also found that even though it was pretty small and convenient to transport, it was still an expensive thing that I had to remember to carry around with me all the time, and I felt a bit tethered by it. Subconsciously, I think I want to know that at any minute I can jump in a lake and not have not to worry about what devices I’m ruining.
• The sense of tethering was probably why I thought the Timex Ironman Data Link Watch would be such a good solution. This puppy was straight out of a James Bond movie or something like that, at least back in 1999 when I had it. You could manage your events, contacts and todo items on a computer, and then synchronize it to this wristwatch just by holding the watch up to your computer screen! Yeah, I know. You could even add some stuff to the watch while you were away from the computer and then sync it back later, though the interface for typing was limited to the four or five buttons it had. I *thought* it was cool and it was a conversation starter at parties, but somehow those conversations never went very far, and looking back, I think people were just humoring me while they planned the most direct route to the punchbowl. Stupid parties.
• I have tried Getting Things Done (GTD), mostly in the form of various software packages for the Mac, and so far, I can’t say that I like it. I probably started out with a predisposition to dislike it because of all of the hype it received, but even so I just didn’t find it to be that revolutionary, and in some cases, found the structure it imposed to be too much. I’m glad it’s working so well for so many, but it didn’t stick for me, at least not in the form of a software tool.
• I’ve tried using my cell phone as a PDA, and it worked okay for a while. It was a lot harder in the days when the synchronizing involved manual copying and/or fumbling with cables, but now that Bluetooth is pretty standard, I can get my calendar, contacts and notes synced up pretty quickly. The problem is that I just hate having to type anything using a cell phone keypad…some people have that down, but I am NOT a fast texter. I also notice that the screens on most cell phones are too small for meaningful interfacing with, say, a week or month calendar view.
• I use a Powerbook laptop for most all of my computing needs, and it’s a logical choice to have as a single organizational gadget. It’s where I maintain my primary calendar and addressbook, and there are myriad todo-list managers out there. But I come back to the same distaste for having to carry a computer with me just to be on top of all the stuff I want to be doing. It works sometimes, but there are still meetings, trips, walks, etc. where lugging a laptop along is too much.

FAIL

Okay, so you see that I’ve experimented quite a bit…this hasn’t been cheap, either. Between the gadget prices (only part of which were ever recovered on eBay) and the significant time spent, this has certainly been an exercise in poor return on investment. I’ll also take a moment to say that I fully recognize that a life and culture requiring such ridiculous mechanisms just to have a smooth daily existence is probably in need of some serious examination.

But, I hope you’ll believe me when I say that this isn’t the result of some dysfunctional lack of self-discipline or self-created artificial busyness just so I can feel important. I take on a lot of stuff, and I like to leave as much of my brain as possible available for creative fun stuff instead of “administrivia.” So I like to have stuff written down, externalized, discretely managed.

The Envelope System

And so it’s writing down that I do. On plain white 9 1/2″ by 4 1/8″ envelopes that have been sent to me and opened, their contents long gone but their utility still very much intact.

My main envelope is usually divided into four quadrants, denoted by folding the envelope in half the long way and then orienting it vertically, one column of items in each quadrant. Each quadrant is devoted to a major part of how I spend my time…for some time now, three of them have been devoted to Summersault and one of them to personal projects.

Until recently, I was using that last column for both personal items (“pick up some soy milk”) and organizational items (“review the minutes from the board meeting”), but organizations now have their own envelope, also in quadrants.

If a quadrant has so many items in it that they don’t fit in the single column, then I know I have laid out too many things to do in the near future; tasks that won’t REALLY require my immediate attention then go into other organizational structures for later retrieval (whiteboards, software ticketing systems, etc.)

The main envelope usually only lasts about 1-2 weeks before it needs to be replaced. Fortunately, used plain white envelopes are plentiful and free.

The benefits are clear:

• I can pretty much take the envelopes with me wherever I go, and I can update their contents at any time without being self-conscious of using an electronic device inappropriately.
• The system doesn’t require any financial investment beyond being the recipient of postal mail.
• Depending on what kind of ink I use, I can probably jump into a lake and be okay.
• Re-using existing resources!

Some drawbacks:

• I still can’t schedule future events in real time unless I have my laptop with me too.
• I tend not to make backups of the envelopes, so if I lose them (which happens rarely), I’ll have to count on things being important enough to make their way back to my mental list so that I can then re-record them on paper.
• People who have been using paper to manage their todo lists forever can laugh at me for thinking this system is anything new.

So, that’s what I’ve got. I put it out there in part to see if anyone wants to improve upon it (please, resist the urge to tell me to get an iPhone), but for now the simplicity and reliability is hard to beat.

• Block incoming e-mail that isn’t related to the specific projects I need to make progress on, but allow others through
• Block outgoing web requests that are more than one degree removed from the original topic matter I was working on, but allow others through
• Only allow streaming of net radio stations without lyrics or other spoken words
• Deliver a brief electrical shocks to the base of my spine every time I attempt to circumvent the above.

I asked about this at the local consumer lighting store, and they didn’t have one. Searches on Amazon have been fruitless so far. Surely Linksys or Belkin make something like this? Anyone?

(This is a repost of a comment I made on macosxhints.com a few months ago, as a part of a discussion on blocking Internet access to avoid distractions.)