With everybody from Britney Spears to the New York Times talking about Twitter these days, I have been thinking a lot about the tool that I have seen from novelty to necessity over the last 2 years.
Twitter has become a great source of ambient intimacy for me. I use it to keep tabs on my close friends and network contacts, enabling greater connection when we meet face to face. I know what they have been up to and what is important to them.
CampMojo.com
New website launched for Bill Brakemeier, expert in personal development and integrating purpose with actual, tangible life strategies.
Camp Mojo is a 7 week program designed to bring out your deepest purpose and get you clarity around your values, strengths, and opportunities.
Built on the WordPress platform with Premium themes from WooThemes.com, this site is set up as a brochure, a blog platform as well as a podcast platform with Amazon.com affiliate integration. Build time was approximately 2 weeks start to finish. monthy cost to maintain is a mere $10.
Beware business cards, there is a new player at the table, and it’s pretty hot.
contxts.com is a new web app in alpha that hopes to catch the ole handshake networking game up to the 21st century. No more stacks of analog business cards, use contxts.com and get the digits electronically.
Basically, just tell the new friend to text ‘youraccountname’ to 50500 and in a few minutes they get a text back with all your contact info on it (or whatever other message you want to throw in there I suppose.)
I have tried this service a few times with contacts recently, the most common response: “whut?”
It might take a bit for people to warm to the concept, but it seems perfectly suited to the mobile, connected, world were in today.
I love the idea, and I have been wishing for a business card alternative for a while now. They just don’t make sense with my workflow and I usually just ask the person to email me. I use moo.com cards as a friendly reminder to hand over to new acquaintances or client prospects but I fully expect about a 50% effectiveness rate with these. I usually email follow up with new contacts so they have all my contact info.
Contxts.com is fun and novel now an I look forward to going to a trade show or event to really put it to the test.
gmail interactive favicon
My first response…”how the heck did they do that!!??”
Second response…”thanks! This is great!”
If you are like me you are a multi-tab firefox browser. It is great to have this new dynamic favicon letting me know when I have new mails subtly. It updates as soon as new mails show up in my inbox.
I can now stay more focused on what I am working on and only occasionally glance over at the icon to see if I need to check the inbox.
Thanks again GMail!
This is my best friend Ryan Hoffman on his second season in the Ski-chair after an injury at work left him paralyzed from the waist down. Ryan is a true inspiration and lives life to the fullest, despite all challenges.
Apologies for the crappy video quality, it was taken with my point and shoot camera 
Ryan Hoffman – Extreme Para-Skier from Casey Capshaw on Vimeo.
This post is an exploration of using Gmails new “Multiple Inboxes” Labs app to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done system of personal productivity.
Gmail Labs just rolled out a new gem for gmail users and I had the inspiration to use this as a supplement to the online side of my personal GTD system. I use Gmail for all my email and organize all of my business around a detailed labeling practice. Multiple Inboxes sparked an opportunity to refine my system.
Ok, this one gets a little dicey for GTD purists so bear with me.
I know the holy grail for GTD masters is the fabled ‘inbox zero’ at the end of the day and especially at the end of the week. I am personally a big fan and adherent of this principle of GTD so why on earth would I want more inboxes!!??
The first thing you have to do to use Multiple Inboxes for GTD is forget that the name is “Multiple Inboxes.”
Think of these as, Multiple folder dashboards or something. The goal is still (and always is)inbox zero for the real inbox.
I am currently practicing using Gmail tasks as my GTD action Items with mixed results. Gmail tasks are easy to use, but they exist outside my email workflow and thus require additional energy to maintain integration. I just moved off of Things for mac and iPhone, and may actually move back (though things is technically a workflow breaker as well.)
So back to Multiple Inboxes.
Since most of my “follow-up” actions are email related, I set up one additional “inbox” to show my “status=follow up” emails. I have a label S/ FollowUp that I automatically tag to anything that needs further action in the future without a definite date. It’s like an ongoing tickler file, somewhere between someday/maybe and action.
This status label is very important to my work as a freelancer, where I often get referrals or send out bids to clients and will benefit from following up with them at a future date.
So here is the tricky part I ran into, how to get the content you want into the new “inbox.” There are no real instructions for this as Multiple Inboxes is a labs feature and not yet fully supported.
I tried inputing “Label: S/ FollowUp” in the field for the additional box, the name of the desired label as it appears to me and it didn’t work. There is a little syntax thing that happens in Gmail labels that can hang you up here.
Click on the label you want in the extra box. This will bring up all the emails with that label. Notice in the search box the way the label is displayed. For me “S/ FollowUp” becomes “S–FollowUp.
Copy/paste this tag into the Multiple Inbox field and your new box will show all the content with that label. I set the Extra Panel Positioning to be “below the inbox” so it is less of a distraction when I am working. Save the changes and refresh your browser.
If you are using the same system as I do, you will see a new box below your inbox with all the messages you have tagged for follow up. On daily review you can skim these and respond to any that are timely.
This system is brand new to me so I am still reviewing it for effectiveness. Let me know If you have any suggestions or innovations using Multiple Inboxes.
I have been emailing habitually since 1995 and the creation of my first Hotmail account. Over the years I have accumulated new email address, let old ones die and woven an intricate system of forwards, pop fetching, labels and filing systems and filters.
Using gmail, my system was really effective…until I decided to move.
Inspired by some insightful feedback from a good friend, I decided to take my principle email identity over to a brand new hosted gmail account, casey[at]caseycapshaw[dot]com. I no sooner started the process when I realized this would be more complex than it appeared.
I found a great tutorial for pulling emails into the hosted gmail account. Figured I would pull all 27k emails from my old email “hub” (using the “get mail from other accounts” feature in Gmail) into the new one in case i needed anything from the archives. At the time of writing this, it is actively pulling mails. We’ll see if they all make it.
The main problem with this is that I have a system of labels in my old gmail hub that neatly parse all the archive emails so I can find old things easier. I can find a way to preserve the labels through the transfer so I bit the bullet and will rebuild labels anew. The start of the new year is a good time to purge filing anyway right. If I really need to find an old thing, the labels will still be active at the old gmail hub and I can go login there to find them.
I had no idea where some of the mail I had forwarded to my old gmail account was originating or how to tie all this to my new email profile. This called for a map.
I mapped out all my accounts and the forwarding/pop/imap action happening in each. This wasn’t too hard as I had most of them forwarding to the gmail account anyway. It’s just a matter of pointing them to the new account. This web of forwarding seemed to be the most important job to tackle first. I would worry about organization later.
In my new account(we’ll call C-mail for now) under setting>accounts, I added all the email accounts and verified them so I would have the ability to “send from” those email addresses within C-mail. That’s how I had it set at my old gmail so as not to confuse when replying to an email that was forwarded in. I did this while all the accounts were still pointing to the old gmail to make the verification process a one stop affair.
One at a time, I logged in to all my email accounts and reset the forwarding to point to C-mail. It helped to use Safari for these accounts and leave C-mail open in Firefox.
For the accounts that are in gmail or hosted gmail, this can be found under settings>forwarding and pop/imap. I set mine to forward and ‘leave a copy in the inbox.” I then created a filter to “mark as read” all emails that come to that address (this is just a personal preference, you could just as easily leave them unread.)
Then came the labels. This got a little ugly.
I use a system for my labels in gmail. P/ projectname for active projects, OLD/ projectname for old projects. I also have an S/ Action and an S/ Reference for status. I am going to try out gmail’s new task feature with this transition so I may no longer need action and reference.
Finding no elegant way to make the transfer, I simply copied all my existing labels from the old gmail into a spreadsheet. I created new labels, one at a time, in C-mail corresponding to each of my P/ project labels.
I replicated my filter system, which automatically applies project labels based on the account the mail was sent to. Something sent to contac[at]thenewmanpodcast[dot]com get the handy label P/ The New Man right when it comes in the door, saving me a few cycles a week. I only had about 10 filters in use so I just replicated them manually.
Calendars were easy. I simply added the C-mail account to all the calendars I had access to “make changes and manage sharing.” I had to request an invite under my new C-mail account from two calendars that had been shared with my old account.
Contacts were easily exported from gmail and imported into the C-mail account. The one problem is that it did not preserve my “groups” so I will have to recreate these if I want them in C-mail. If anybody has any suggestions on this, please leave it in the comments.
Wow, that was geeky! But I feel so much better about my unified email system and updated personal brand. I updated my system map for my own reference and ended up with 11 email accounts, all integrated into a streamlined and efficient Google hosted mail account under this domain.
Branding is preserved across multiple projects and domains without any of the hassle of multiple logins. My personal brand feels more solid and professional with email under my own domain.
If you would like help setting up your own system, email me at casey[at]caseycapshaw[dot]com for an analysis.
Shawn Phillips
This week The New Man hosts Shawn Phillips, strength expert and physical training pioneer. Shawn tells us how important focus is for any of our efforts, whether in the gym or in the boardroom.
The is a great show to help you kick off 2009 with strength.
According to The Typealizer, this blog’s author (your’s truly) is of the type:
INTP – The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are espescially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.
The Typealizer scans the text of the blog and determines which Myers-Briggs typology the author is writing from. More on how it works here.
My only surprise is that this app nailed my personality type. Very cool.
If you ask Brian Johnson what he is up to, he’ll tell you he is giving away 1 million subscriptions to his popular educational service Philosopher’sNotes. What you may think is, “what is the catch? What is the business angle here?”
There is no doubt a business case to be made for this kind of attention, but I will offer, what Brian is really doing is creating a tribe.
I am listening to Seth Godin’s Tribes
Brian is stepping into that leadership role. You know Brian’s tribe already. They are the folks that find most mass media intellectually un-stimulating, and find exciting tidbits here and there on the internet. They feel a vision of a better world and would love to lend a hand helping us get there but they are not yet clear just how to do it. They love exploration in their own ideas and the world around them. They are ready for change and would love for someone to point them in the right direction.
I am joining Brian’s tribe. Not only am I joining, but I am recruiting!
Aside from the fact that Philosopher’s Notes is a great way for busy people facing information overload to digest and understand essential ideas from the great thinkers of the past and today, and the fact that he is giving us a subscription for free; joining this tribe is the first step in connecting me with a virtual township of like minded individuals.
I expect Brian at some point to ask me if I want to receive information on special offers and products similar to the content I find in Philosopher’s Notes. I will eagerly click “yes.” Part of my participation in this tribe is the sincere hope that Brian will leverage the power of 1 million people to guide me to the things that are relevant to me. I want him to edit the deluge of information online for me so I can focus on what I really want to be doing.
I have argued about the death of the banner ad and the evolution of how businesses and organizations promote themselves. I would rather participate in a number of tribes than be constantly bombarded with irrelevant information.
I agree with Godin in that tribes like Brian’s are the future of promotion (read connection) in our evolving marketplace. Good luck in your goal Brian, I look forward to reaping the rewards of my participation.
