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Managing Your E-mail Inbox

Thursday, October 11, 2012 in Collaboration, General by slowe | 3 comments

I tweeted earlier today that I managed to achieve “Inbox Zero” (an empty e-mail inbox) while at a major industry conference (I’m in Spain for VMworld EMEA). A follower on Twitter asked if I would share my “inbox secret”. It’s not a secret, really, but I thought I’d share it here just in case others are interested in trying to emulate a similar methodology (or are just interested in getting control of your e-mail inbox).

First, you’ll need some infrastructure:

  • Get yourself some sort of “to do” system. I don’t care if you use Getting Things Done (GTD), or just make notes in a plain text file—but find a system and use it. I mean, really USE it. Be ruthless in putting your actions (tasks, “to do’s”) in the system. Personally, I use OmniFocus, but ultimately you’ll need to find the right tool that works for you.

  • Determine an archiving strategy. In other words, what are you going to do with e-mails that have information you might need later, but don’t represent something you need to do? There are a variety of strategies here; some people have a complex hierarchy of folders while others just dump all their messages into one big archival folder. Personally, I use a time-based approach—I archive messages I might need later into an annual folder. So, I have folders for 2012, 2011, 2010, etc., all the way back to 2004.

  • (Optional, but recommended) Find an automation tool. What do I mean by “an automation tool”? You’re looking for some sort of macro/scripting tool that can help streamline common tasks for you. Simply creating (or customizing) some keyboard shortcuts within your e-mail application might be sufficient. Personally, I use AppleScript and a tool called FastScripts to allow me to execute those scripts via application-specific or global keyboard shortcuts.

Once you’ve accomplished those three tasks, then we get to the actual work of managing your inbox. Here’s how it works. For every message that comes into your inbox, one of four things happens (this is your DECISION TREE):

  1. If the message represents something you can do and get done in just a few minutes (a quick reply or an action you can complete), do it and then delete or archive the message.
  2. If the message represents something that will take some additional time (a more lengthy reply or an action/series of actions that will take time to complete), create a task/”to do” entry in your system and then delete or archive the message.
  3. If the message represents something that is not an action but contains information you might need later, archive it.
  4. If the message doesn’t match any of the above rules, delete it.

It’s really a simple system, but it requires discipline. You have to school yourself not to use your inbox as a task/”to do” system—that’s why you find/use a system. And finding an automation tool (as I suggested) helping remove friction or resistance to the system by making it easier to archive messages or create task/”to do” actions. For example, using FastScripts, I have a single keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Cmd-A) to archive a message to the current year’s archive folder. So, when I’m done with a message in my Inbox—after I’ve responded or created an action—I can archive it with a quick keyboard shortcut.

Hopefully some of this information helps. Feel free to speak up with additional tips, suggestions, or questions in the comments below.

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So Long, Status Quo (Again)

Tuesday, August 7, 2012 in General, Personal by slowe | 29 comments

A little over two years ago, I wrote a blog post titled “So Long Status Quo.” (The title is taken from the Nichole Nordeman song “Brave”, in case you didn’t catch the reference.) At the time, I was making a pretty big move in my life, moving from a career in the VAR/reseller space—where I’d been for over a decade—into a job working for EMC Corporation on the vSpecialist (aka the VMware Affinity) team.

The last couple of years have been a whirlwind of change, a fitting culmination to a period of my life that started way back in the early 2000′s when I first installed VMware Workstation and started down a path dominated by VMware’s virtualization solutions. Since starting down that path with VMware, a lot of “milestones” have been achieved:

  • This web site really took off during VMworld 2007 in San Francisco, where I liveblogged like a madman.
  • At VMworld 2009, I spoke for the first time and released my first book, Mastering VMware vSphere 4.
  • My second book (with Jase McCarty and Matthew Johnson), VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference, was released later in 2009.
  • In early 2010 I achieved the status of VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX).
  • In 2010, I had the privilege of being a co-author on VMware vSphere Design, with Forbes Guthrie and Maish Saidel-Keesing.
  • In 2010, I also spoke at VMworld again. Unfortunately, I didn’t do a very good job that year, but I did learn some important lessons—from that perspective, it was useful.
  • I spoke again at VMworld 2011, leveraging the lessons learned from the previous year, and managed to end up with one of the 5 most highly-rated sessions at VMworld US.
  • Between VMworld US and VMworld EMEA 2011, I released my fourth book, Mastering VMware vSphere 5, and managed—just barely—to actually get some books to Copenhagen for VMworld EMEA.
  • This year, I produced my first Train Signal video training course, titled Designing VMware Infrastructure.

Most importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of great people, and I’ve been told that my talks, my writing, my website, and my books have been genuinely helpful. To me, that’s been the best part of this journey with VMware—knowing that I’ve been able to help other people in some small way.

Now, two years after my last “So Long, Status Quo” post, I am preparing to enter another period of great change. It is not without some sense of trepidation, much like so many years ago when I first started focusing on VMware. The phrase, “So long, status quo” is as relevant to me today as it was then. Very soon, I’ll transition into a new role at EMC. I’m leaving the vSpecialist team to join a small team called the Solutions Innovation Group, where I’ll be helping to create new solutions built with emerging technologies and partners. That, by itself, is not that big of a change—a new manager and a new job role with a new job description, but not a major change. The major change is that, in this new role, VMware will no longer be my primary focus. I’ll still be working with VMware, but it won’t be the central focus. My new role necessitates that I will be working extensively with OpenStack and CloudStack as well as VMware’s products.

It’s a brave new world, that’s for sure. Trust that I’ll continue to share lots of solid technical content here, although it might be a bit less VMware-centric moving forward. I’ll be learning lots of new products and technologies, and you can almost bet the learning process will generate quite a fair amount of new content. I hope as I continue on my own journey of personal and professional growth that the information I share here will be as useful and helpful to others as it has been in the past.

So long, status quo (again)…

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Spousetivities at a New Conference

Monday, May 28, 2012 in General by slowe | 3 comments

In case you hadn’t heard, Spousetivities—the spouse activities that had their genesis at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas—has expanded once again! Last year, Spousetivities expanded to include EMC World, and just last week Crystal concluded her second year of activities at EMC World 2012 in Las Vegas. This year, Spousetivities expands to not only include VMworld and EMC World, but also Dell Storage Forum 2012, located this year in Boston, MA.

This is a great opportunity for Dell Storage Forum conference attendees to bring along their families to Boston and have confidence that their families will be well cared for and offered a great set of activities. Here’s a quick peek at what Spousetivities has planned for Dell Storage Forum:

  • A whale watching tour (get to know Zeppelin, Regulus, Ember, Eden, Tear, and the other whales!)
  • Private trolley and walking tour of MIT
  • A sight-seeing trolley tour
  • Trolley and walking wine tour
  • Boston Freedom Trail sight-seeing tour
  • Private lunch cruise on a paddle wheel boat
  • Private trolley and walking tour of Harvard

If you ask me, that’s a pretty impressive line-up of activities. Dell Storage Forum 2012 starts in only a couple of weeks, so hurry and visit the registration page to sign up for your activities. Also, help spread the word to anyone you might know who is also attending Dell Storage Forum. Given that Crystal and Spousetivities is new to the Dell community, I know that she could use all the help she can to get the word out about Spousetivities at Dell Storage Forum this year.

If you’re headed to Boston for Dell Storage Forum and considering taking your family/spouse/partner with you, you definitely need to take a look at the list of activities. Your family/spouse/partner is worth it!

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Giving Thanks on Thanksgiving

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 in General, Personal by slowe | 7 comments

Here in the United States we are preparing to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, and it’s a time of reflection. It’s a time to be thankful for what we have and what we’ve been given. This past year has been a tremendous year for me, both personally and professionally, with lots of things for which to be thankful:

  • Along with Forbes Guthrie and Maish Saidel-Keesing, in March we launched VMware vSphere Design (available here from Amazon). Even now—as far as I’m aware—it’s the only book on the market to comprehensively address vSphere-related design considerations.

  • In May, my oldest daughter gave birth to her first child, a girl.

  • I relocated from Raleigh-Durham, NC to Denver, CO. I’m very thankful for this relocation—my family and I are really enjoying the new area.

  • In October, Mastering VMware vSphere 5, still one of the only vSphere 5 books on the market (and the only comprehensive look at the new virtualization suite from VMware), became widely available.

  • In November, my 1998 Chevy Suburban (still with its original engine) rolled past 300,000 miles. Now that’s something for which to be thankful!

While I can thank a number of people who have helped me this year—people like Forbes and Maish, for allowing me to join them on the Design book; my editor, Agatha; my co-workers at EMC on the vSpecialist team; my wife, Crystal, for her never-ending support and tireless cheerleading; Forbes, Gabe, and Glenn for their help with the last version of Mastering—my greatest thanks is reserved for the Lord. All my successes and all my triumphs come from Him.

So, in this Thanksgiving season, while I extend my thanks to my family, my friends, and my co-workers, I’d also like to extend my thanks to the Lord. Thanks for blessing me, thanks for providing for me, and—most importantly—thanks for saving me.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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Switching to EagleFiler

Wednesday, September 7, 2011 in Macintosh, UNIX by slowe | 6 comments

Over the last month or so, I’ve taken a strong interest in moving a fair number of my files that are predominantly text-based back to “standards-based” formats such as RTF and plain text. I’ve started using Markdown as a means of storing formatting information in plain text files, and then using tools like Pandoc to convert these Markdown files into the desired destination format. I’ll likely discuss this in more detail in a future post, but what I wanted to discuss here was the affect of this decision on my software usage.

If you’ve read any of the posts I’ve published on my Getting Things Done setup, you’ll know that I used an application called Yojimbo as my “anything bucket.” Yojimbo is a native Mac OS X application that operated as part of the consumption phase of my workflow and provided a way for me to collect and organize all the various bits of information that pass in front of me. Yojimbo is a pretty handy application, and I made it even more handy with some home-grown AppleScripts that made it easier and faster to get information into and then back out of the application.

However, I recently started examining other applications in the same space as Yojimbo, in an effort to ensure that I was using the most effective tools possible. (Consider this a “sharpening the saw” exercise.) I evaluated DEVONthink Pro and EagleFiler, testing each of them within my workflow to see if either of them added some value above and beyond what I currently had with Yojimbo. This was occurring at the same time that I started shifting my text-based formats back to plain text, RTF, and Markdown, and so part of the evaluation process was testing how well those applications fit into this new way of managing my text-based data.

What I found, surprisingly, was that EagleFiler was a great fit for this new workflow. One of my long-time complaints of Yojimbo was that I couldn’t use my preferred applications (Skim for PDFs or TextMate for text-based files), an issue that was even more of a problem now that I was making greater use of TextMate with plain text files and Markdown. I explored ways of using AppleScript to modify Yojimbo’s behavior, but it was beyond my simple AppleScript skills. EagleFiler, on the other hand, simply leveraged the default applications I used with Mac OS X. PDFs opened in Skim, text files opened in TextMate (where I could then use TextMate bundles to convert formats between HTML, plain text, and Markdown), and RTF documents opened in Bean (which I’d adopted as a lightweight editor over the oh-so-bulky Microsoft Word). This made it a great fit for the new way I was working with documents. In addition, EagleFiler came with some useful capture functionality built-in, eliminating the need for some of my home-grown AppleScripts. Finally, EagleFiler used an “open” library format that stored my items as files in the file system. If, for whatever reason, I ever decided to ditch EagleFiler, all my information would be easily accessible. This was a real attraction for me.

So, after only a week or so of testing, I switched completely away from Yojimbo and started using EagleFiler instead. Thus far, I’ve been quite pleased with the results. While it seems simple, I like the ability to mark items as unread (something I couldn’t do in Yojimbo, so I had to approximate that functionality with certain tags). I still prefer the way Yojimbo displays metadata about bookmarks in the same window (in EagleFiler you have to open the Inspection window), but this has not been a significant problem.

I also anticipate that the use of the file system will make integrating tools like Pandoc into my workflow possible; it didn’t seem possible before with Yojimbo. Because EagleFiler’s library is file system-based, it should be possible to use AppleScript to manipulate records by manipulating the underlying files in the file system. This will be an area of exploration for me over the next few months as I also refine my Markdown-Pandoc workflows for document generation.

In my opinion, if you’re considering an “anything bucket” for your Mac to help keep your information organized, EagleFiler should definitely be on your list of applications to consider.

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The Move to Colorado: Day 3

Wednesday, September 7, 2011 in General by slowe | 2 comments

Day 3 of our road trip to Colorado completes our trip and puts us in Denver. The trip today was pretty straightforward. We left Kansas City this morning and just followed I-70 across Kansas into Colorado. When it was all said and done, it took about 9 hours of driving to go from Kansas City to Denver.

Now that we’ve arrived in Denver, we’re in a hotel for the next few days until our house in Castle Pines North is ready for us to move in. In the meantime, I’ll be handling all the various move-related issues that need to be addressed—change of address forms, insurance, driver’s licenses, etc. That also includes buying some furniture, a task we got started on tonight with a quick trip to the new Ikea store here in Denver.

I have a couple of blog posts in the works that I’ll try to get published over the next few days, but with all the move-related tasks that need to be handled I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to get them finished and posted. I’ll do my best!

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The Move to Colorado: Day 2

Monday, September 5, 2011 in General by slowe | 1 comment

I’ve just wrapped up Day 2 of my road trip to Colorado. I started the day in Nashville, TN and ended the day in Kansas City, KS (actually Overland Park). If I had two words to describe today, those words would be windy and corn.

Why those two words? Well, if you’ve ever driven across Missouri, you’ll understand why I chose “corn” because you’ve already seen the fields upon fields of corn, as far as the eye can see. And why “windy”? Well, simply put: it was very windy today. Yesterday we had to deal with some pretty heavy rainfall getting to Nashville; today, we had to deal with lots of wind as we made our way out of Tennessee into Kentucky and across Illinois and Missouri. Fortunately, the wind died down as we approached Kansas City, and driving became a lot easier.

Those of us who live in the US have a pretty good idea of how far the distance is between Raleigh, NC, and Denver, CO, but for readers outside the US I thought a few comparisons might be handy. The driving distance between the two cities is about 1,677 miles, or approximately 2,700 kilometers. That distance is:

  • roughly comparable to driving from London to Edinburgh and back again—twice
  • about the same as the driving distance between Gibraltar on the southern edge of Europe and Amsterdam, The Netherlands on the northern side of Europe
  • greater than the driving distance from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia to Melbourne, on the southern coast of the continent
  • about the same as the driving distance from Cape Town, South Africa to Johannesburg and back again

Hopefully this gives the readers an idea of the distance we have to cover. All in all, it’s quite a road trip (and quite a move). Granted, not as significant a move as some international relocations of which I’ve heard, but significant nevertheless.

Tomorrow, we’ll leave Kansas City bound for Denver, shooting to make the entire distance in a single day. If all goes well, we will arrive in Denver tomorrow evening around dinner time or shortly thereafter. From there, we’ll have a couple of days to prepare, then we move into the new house on Friday.

I’ll have more updates tomorrow!

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The Move to Colorado: Day 1

Monday, September 5, 2011 in General, Personal by slowe | 3 comments

The move to Colorado has begun. I’m typing this from a hotel in Nashville, TN, where we wrapped up our day 1 travel just a short while ago. We’ll be here only one night, leaving in the morning to get to Kansas City for our second night.

The last few days have been a whirlwind. Crystal and I got home from VMworld 2011 on Friday night; Saturday we jumped in with both feet on getting our Chevy Suburban (nicknamed “Big Red” because it’s a big red Suburban; I’ll post a picture at some point) packed and ready for the trip to Colorado. Today (Sunday) we made our last visit as regular members to our home church in North Carolina so we could tell everyone bye. Saying good-bye was harder than I had anticipated. There were so many people that we’d grown close to over the years, and we’re really going to miss them. Of course, we know we’ll make new friends in Colorado, but that doesn’t change the fact we’ll still miss the old friends.

After attending church and saying our good-byes, we headed back to the house in Knightdale, did the final packing, and then finally hit the road around 4 PM Eastern or so. Our goal was Nashville, and we while we did make our goal (about 1 AM Central) it would have been easier if it hadn’t started raining before we even got to Knoxville. The rain slowed us down a fair amount, and I’m hoping that we’ll leave the rain behind tomorrow as we turn north toward St. Louis and then west toward Kansas City. Tomorrow night we’ll stay over in Kansas City (I need to take Crystal to eat some KC barbecue); if any KC-based friends are home and want to get together, let me know.

And that’s it for Day 1…another summary tomorrow after the end of Day 2.

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Time for a Fresh Start

Tuesday, July 19, 2011 in Personal by slowe | 24 comments

I’ll bet that when you saw the title for this post, your first thought was that I was leaving EMC and starting a new job with a new employer. C’mon, admit it! No, I’m staying at EMC; this post is about getting a fresh start in a new location. That’s right; I’m relocating to the Denver, CO area. In fact, I signed lease papers on a house in the Castle Pines North area, just south of Denver, yesterday afternoon.

I’m pretty excited about this move. I’ve lived in the Raleigh-Durham area for a really long time, and it’s been a great location for a technology guy like me. Even so, I’m looking forward to settling into the Denver area. Crystal and I want to make some lifestyle changes—get into shape and spend more time being active—and I’m confident that the new neighborhood and new area will encourage those lifestyle changes. If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed me inquiring about mountain bikes; mountain biking is a sport I intend to take up after the move to Denver. My two youngest sons (the only two kids still at home with Crystal and me) are also looking forward to learning to snow ski and snowboard, something I also plan to join them in. All in all, everyone in the family is really looking forward to the move. Certainly, there are close friends that we will miss, but we’re anticipating new friends and new experiences in a new region.

The move won’t affect my job; I’ll still continue in my role as field CTO for the vSpecialist team. My function isn’t tied to any particular geographical region (my role is global, actually), so as long as I live within a reasonable distance of an airport I’m fine. I have to say that I really appreciate the vSpecialist team and team management; they’ve been awesome and completely supportive of the move.

Given my current work schedule and other responsibilities, the move isn’t actually going to take place until early September, after we wrap up VMworld US in Las Vegas. So, between now and then, it’s all about uncluttering and packing for the move! If any readers are Denver residents, I’d love to hear any “tips and tricks” you’d care to share. Thanks!

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Merry Christmas!

Saturday, December 25, 2010 in General by slowe | 5 comments

I’d like to take this moment to wish all of my readers a very happy, very joyous, and very blessed Christmas holiday. Don’t forget the reason for the season (Luke 2:10-11)!

If you don’t celebrate Christmas, then I wish you a very happy holiday season!

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