I had a goal of hosting open office hours at least once a month. I didn’t manage it last month — the holidays made things a little too hectic — but I am scheduling them for this month. If you’re in or near New York and want to get thirty minutes with me, please sign up here.
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I wrote something over at gdgt arguing that RIM needs to abandon BlackBerry 10 and adopt either Android or Windows Phone. Pretty great responses so far.
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I donated my original OLPC XO-1 to the Columbus School for Girls today. I bought one when they were first available via the Give One Get One program back in 2007, but it’d be mainly sitting in a closet since then. It wouldn’t boot when I tried to fire it up the other day, and after a little sleuthing discovered that these early models had an issue with their Real Time Clock battery if they weren’t used regularly. There’s a fix, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth, so after some searching online I found that the Columbus School for Girls has a program where they repair broken OLPCs and bring them, along with new ones that are donated, to a school in the Caribbean. Seemed like it’d find a good home there, and I was very glad to find a program that does something like this. -
About three or four years ago I resolved to get my inbox under control — like most people I was having a tough time keeping up with everything — and after a few weeks I was able to get there. Here’s what I do to stay on top of my inbox (and apologies if these are just completely obvious things to do):
1. Use GmailI know this isn’t an option for everyone and that there are plenty of people who don’t like Gmail, but switching from a POP3 client (I used to Thunderbird) to a cloud-based system was a big help for me. Seriously, before I used Gmail everything was mess. I couldn’t keep things in sync and I had a huge backlog of unanswered messages. Gmail’s system of threading and starring messages took a little while to get used to, but now I find it indispensable. Plus I can access my email on multiple devices without having to worry about keeping everything in sync. It’s something we take for granted now, but it’s hard to remember just how difficult this was for most people.
2. Don’t leave any messages unread
When you go through your inbox, delete everything that isn’t important right away. Don’t let anything sit unread, even if you already know whether you’re going to delete it or respond to it. Seriously, don’t do it.
3. Then either reply, archive, or star
Once you’ve deleted everything that’s not important, you need to either: reply to anything that needs an immediate response (or that can be responded to quickly), archive anything that doesn’t need a response but that you do want to file away somewhere, and star anything that you can deal with later.
4. If you can, take your time getting back to people
Email begets email, so unless you really need to get back to someone right away, feel free to just star their message and get back to them later. Otherwise they’re just going to reply to your response and then you’re right back where you started. That star is your reminder to yourself to deal with it later, so unless it’s urgent, don’t feel bad about getting to it when you can. It’s OK to have up to a couple dozen emails in your starred folder.
5. Use your phone to keep an eye on your email — but don’t obsess over writing back from your phone
I’ve been using my phone for email ever since I bought my first Treo in 2003, but I try not to write many emails from my phone. Rather then tap out messages on my phone, I use it mainly to process emails that come in whenever I’m out and about. Unless there’s something that requires an immediate answer, I’ll star anything that needs a reply and then hit them when I’m back at a computer and can more efficiently crank them out. Sure, there are times I’ll be in a cab with nothing to do and so I’ll hit a few messages, but unless you have some downtime you’re probably better off saving all those responses for when you’re at a PC and can write them more quickly.
6. Try to minimize how much noise hits your inbox
This is easier said than done, right? I don’t use Priority Inbox — I don’t trust an algorithm to make filter properly — so instead I try and eliminate emails that I know aren’t going to be important from hitting my inbox in the first place. Most people underestimate how much noise makes it into their inbox each day. Here’s my rule: If you find yourself deleting a recurring newsletter or notification or whatever from someone without reading it more than a two or three times in a row, either unsubscribe or create a filter that routes those emails out of your inbox and into the trash. It seems easy to just manually delete all those emails as they come in, but you’ll be less overwhelmed by your email if you just suck it up and keep them out of your inbox altogether.
7. Create filters
Part of minimizing that noise is creating filters for messages you want, but that aren’t super important. I don’t mind getting Fab.com and LivingSocial-type emails, but I don’t want them inundating my inbox, so I have a folder just for those that I filter all of those into. Same thing with notifications from any social network I’ve joined or email list I’m on that I don’t want to leave but also don’t want to be distracted by. Again, it’s easy to just delete stuff as it comes in, but we underestimate the cognitive burden that accumulates from doing that. Taking twenty seconds to create a filter is a pain, but they’re a small investment in lessening your inbox overload.
Anyway, I know everyone’s situation is different, so I’m not going to pretend I’ve developed some universally perfect system, but I thought others might find it useful to hear what I did. It’s definitely worked for me.
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I was on the Engadget Show earlier this week talking about the biggest tech stories of the year and our picks for gadget of the year. I went with the Galaxy Nexus and the 13-inch MacBook Air.
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What I really want in an online music service is something that combines the streaming catalog of an RDIO, Spotify, or Rhapsody with the ability to upload whatever isn’t in their catalog to a locker. I’d settle for a service that scanned my collection and then uploaded whatever wasn’t already available in Spotify to Google Music or Amazon Cloud Player. Somehow I don’t expect either to happen, though perhaps some enterprising developer will hack together the latter.
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One of my goals for 2011 was to read more, and while I fell short of my goal of reading a book every two weeks, I did manage to read more than did in 2010. Here’s what I read this year:
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
- The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
- The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke
- The New Capitalist Manifesto by Umair Haque
- The Next Decade by George Friedman
- Zero History by William Gibson
I also read all five A Song of Fire and Ice books by George R. R. Martin (I read through the first four in about a month so I could read the new one when it was released):
- Game of Thrones
- A Clash of Kings
- A Storm of Swords
- A Feast for Crows
- A Dance with Dragons
I’m also in the middle of three books:- 1491 by Charles Mann
- The Information by James Gleick
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
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I’ve obviously been neglecting my blog here. There are a variety of reasons why — I’ve been posting my tech-related writing to gdgt and more general stuff to Google+ and Twitter — but I’m going to try writing here more again.
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I’ve been blogging for a long time now — going on nine years now, even if I’m not doing it professionally anymore — and if there’s one thing that bugs me is the contention that blogs can’t live up to, or even exceed, the editorial standards of newspapers and magazines. In fact, I’ve written for magazines, newspapers, and blogs, and I can say that I’ve seen far more ethical lapses at magazines than I’ve ever seen at any of the blogs I’ve written for.
Which is why I think that Arrington did the right thing by going public about a TechCrunch intern’s acceptance of — and apparently demand for — compensation from companies seeking coverage on the site. It was important to draw a very clear line in the sand there and make it clear that this sort of thing is unacceptable and not business-as-usual.And to me that’s the crucial thing here, that this sort of quid pro quo is not common in the tech blogosphere. There’s a lot of cynicism out there about blogs, but I think that a lot of us forget that the core quality that defines any publication is credibility. It takes time to accrue it, and the way you keep it is by being honest with your readers and transparent about your relationships. And part of being credible means going beyond transparency and recognizing that there are things you simply don’t do. My basic rule when I was running Engadget was: Don’t do anything you wouldn’t feel comfortable disclosing any blog post, but also don’t pretend that simply disclosing something absolves you of all responsibility not to have an inappropriate relationship with the companies you’re writing about.
What frustrates me is that stories like today’s are only going to fuel the cynicism that’s out there, and widen this belief that everyone is on the take or has compromised their integrity. I can tell you that almost every single technology blogger I know (and there are always some exceptions) takes what they do very seriously and has a clear understanding of what their ethical boundaries are. And I can also tell you that people who level accusations like “Oh, I bet Apple paid them to write this” has absolutely zero understanding of how media companies work or even of how technology companies do their advertising, marketing, and PR.
I think it’s always a good idea to read things with a critical eye, but constantly asserting that every time someone on a tech blog writes something you disagree with does so because they’re on the take does nothing to improve the quality of journalism out there and actually does harm because it makes things like today’s incident seem less important and more common than it really is.
UPDATE: I put this up and then five minutes later see that Jason has some thoughts posted as well.
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I’d like to think that CES was the most interesting thing to happen to me so far this year, but more than a few people have emailed/IM’d/tweeted asking to find out what happened after I posted that pitch Ogilvy sent on behalf of AmEx’s Zync card, so I figured I’d post an update.
It actually didn’t take long for representatives from both Ogilvy and AmEx to call after my post — it was maybe half an hour before my phone started ringing — and over the past week I’ve had some really good conversations with people from both companies. Everyone I spoke with was apologetic and made it clear that this was a deviation from their usual way of doing things, and I accept both their apologies and that this isn’t usually how they operate (in fact the reason I posted this email is because it seemed so out there).Anyway, I wasn’t looking for an apology, but it was nice to get one and I sincerely hope they understand that my intention wasn’t to cause anyone any grief as much as it was to try in some very small way to reduce the amount of dumb marketing being done these days. It was pretty encouraging to hear from a lot of people working in marketing and PR who told me they agreed with what I’d written and also felt that there were smarter ways to do this stuff.