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Email and Productivity: Clash of the Titans

Email Rules (AKA “I’m not your OB/GYN”)
Clash of the Titans? But email is necessary for productivity…right?

Unless you let it eat your productivity, in which case, well, it’s not so useful. And it’s really, really easy to let that happen.

  1. Don’t respond to email on your phone.
    Email correspondence is worth your time and complete focus. Banging out a quick response on your phone is a great way to forget details, misspell important things, and immediately forget about the conversation you’re having. Require immediate response? Make a phone call. Doesn’t require a thoughtful response? Maybe you don’t need to respond to that email anyway.
    Bonus tip: remove the “sent from Android/sent from my iPhone/sent from Blackberry” message from your phone signature. You may think it makes you look cool, but it’s just tacky.
  2. Do use canned responses.
    If you find yourself typing basically the same response again and again, save it as a canned response and send that out. Gmail does this natively, but it’s easy enough to do with a text editor or note taking app as well. Taking a moment to personalize such a response is still a lot faster than typing the whole thing in every time (and DO personalize these emails!) and that way you’ll know you haven’t forgotten some important part of the answer this time.
  3. Don’t keep your email open.
    You don’t need to keep your email open, waiting for something to come in. You really, really don’t need an audio-visual reminder telling you when new email has arrived.  Pick a dedicated block time (or two or three) in a given day, and write and respond to email then. Give each email your full attention – your clients and colleagues are worth that, no? Add tasks to your task manager or to-do list, create new projects, let people know you’ll get back to them – and then close your email.
  4. Do write short, concise responses.
    Say what you need to say — quickly, clearly, and completely — and get out. Your time’s too precious, and so’s the time of the person you’re writing to.
  5. Don’t let people get into the habit of expecting an instant response.
    If you’re really only checking your email twice a day, people aren’t going to get those instant responses we’ve all gotten used to. And unless it’s an emergency, they shouldn’t. You’re not their OB/GYN; it’s pretty unlikely that their contractions are four minutes apart (and if they are, you’re not the one they should be talking to!). So it may take a couple hours to get a response from you…and that’s fine.
    Bonus tip: Don’t expect me to respond right away, either. I’m your website designer, not your OB/GYN.

made this mess on April 28th, 2011 | discuss

Common Twitter Mistakes

I’ve got my Twitter pet peeves. We all do, I think — I certainly ran into a lovely variety of them when I asked around! And of course one person’s pet peeve is another’s favourite thing to do — we’re human, after all. But I got some thought-provoking answers when I asked, and I’ll follow them up with some things I’ve found on my own.

  • @lilacave brought up the one we all fear… “Forgetting you are in a public forum, and saying something unbecoming.” We’ve all been there; we’ve all done that. The Red Cross did it recently, and followed it up with an absolutely wonderful recovery.
  • @9thcircledesign noted that “Unless your entire purpose in life is to be a news regurgitator, you have GOT to post something besides links.” Content! It’s all about the content.
  • …and then, upon seeing how I had to squeeze her words for the retweet, @9thcircledesign followed the previous up with “Seeing your RT, add: making posts too long to be retweeted as is.” I do this ALL THE TIME.
  • @daniellenelson chimed in with a peeve I share (these days), though I was guilty of it in the past… “ugh…auto-DMs. It’s an automatic unfollow for me.” Yep, I did that. I admit it. Never fear, I’ve stopped.
  • @lizstrauss asked, “If you don’t have time to put up a pix, a bio, or tweets, why would you think serious people have time to click “follow”?” She’s got a very, very good point. (Content!)
  • And lastly, a commenter who’s asked to remain nameless brought up multiple tweets of single blog post, even if flavor text changes. Saw it 1st time, just hogs space/attention. I’ll admit I don’t mind this one, since it gives me a better chance of catching posts from the people I follow, but that’s me — and if one person’s bothered enough to say something, there are certainly more who disagree with me.

There are a couple themes I’m seeing here, and a couple of things I’d like to add from my own experience. As @9thcircledesign and @lizstrauss both said, what you’re saying (and whether you’re saying it at all) is important. Talking more than you listen, talking about only whatever you’re selling and nothing else, is a real turnoff for followers. I agree with this — I’ve got a fairly strict follow policy, and simply don’t follow people who post nothing but retweets, or links to whatever they’re selling, or, well, nothing at all. I want to talk to people, not follow endless links.

A point to be taken from @daniellenelson‘s comments is this — don’t try too hard to make a connection where there is none. Auto-DMs, random @-replies, random retweets — you want to make a connection with people, yes, but it’s got to be a real one, not something you force.

And last but not least, if you’re trying to connect with the people you’re following, it’s just not going to work if there are too many of them. I made the mistake, when I was just starting out, of following people randomly, in the hopes that they’d follow me back. And I signed up for one of those gain-automatic-followers services.

My advice on both of these methods? Don’t. They simply don’t work. Yeah, you’ll get followers. You’ll get followers who are, like you, signing up in the hopes of getting more followers. They’re not there to listen to you. They’re there (like you) in the hopes that you’ll listen to them. In the end, nobody’s listening to anybody.

I’d given up on Twitter entirely, in fact. Despite all the people who were following me I had very little interest in most of what they were saying, and none of them seemed to have any interest in my words, either. On my last try I cut down who I was following radically — unfollowed about three-quarters of them, in fact, people I had nothing in common with, people who posted nothing but links to their own products, people who never posted at all.

And now I follow people who interest me. We have real conversations. I follow their links — because I know and trust that they’re posting things I want to see — and they follow mine for the same reason.

And all those people I unfollowed? Not one, not a single one, has said a thing to me, @replied to anything I’ve said, retweeted my words, anything. I guess they weren’t reading what I said anyway. And if they weren’t…why follow them in the first place?

made this mess on April 26th, 2011 | discuss

Happy Easter!

Greetings, and happy Easter!

Hot Glue Media will be closed on Friday, April 22, and Monday, April 25, so we can go spend time with family, eat lots of ham, and do all those Spring things.

As always, in an emergency you can reach us at batphone@hotgluemedia.com.

Have a happy and safe Easter!

-Dani & Mer

made this mess on April 21st, 2011 | Comments Off

Quick Drip: Streaming Netflix Woes

It’s a little off-topic, but when has that ever stopped me before? Besides, I nearly danced with joy when I learned this.

If you have streaming Netflix, you’ve probably had trouble at one time or another with jumpy, freezing video. Sometimes it’s just a small jumpiness, sometimes the picture locks for several seconds, but the audio keeps going just fine. Restarting the program helps for a moment, restarting the browser doesn’t help much, and you end up resetting the computer. It happens in Firefox and Chrome, but less so in Internet Explorer. If you’re really observant, you’ll see that the cached video in the progress bar has jumped way the heck out and cached a lot more than it normally does.

I call this overcacheing, and there’s a solution. If your video starts freezing and Netflix starts overcacheing, click on the video, then hit CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+S, and you’ll get a little popup that’ll look something like this: 

Different videos have different settings, so your numbers could be different from the example, but you get the idea. See how the buffering rate is higher than the playing rate? You want to select Manual Selection, and set the buffering rate to match the playing rate or lower. Then close the Stream Manager box, and your video will clear up momentarily.

Best I can tell, sometimes the Netflix application just loses it’s mind and blows out it’s own cache sometimes, and resources that are supposed to be playing your video get swamped by resources downloading your video. Thankfully, it’s easy to fix if you know how (and now ya do), but as the flagship consumer application of Microsoft Silverlight technology? Nice job, guys. *sigh*

 

made this mess on April 19th, 2011 | Comments Off

Wicked Plum Weekly Update

We’ve got three new things for this week’s Wicked Plum update.

The first is our new business cards — they’re wicked cool! I’ve spent a lot of time talking up Wicked Plum to the local crafter folk, and without business cards to hand out it was getting a little difficult.

So I pestered Dani until she designed some, and they are, yes, wicked awesome. Mine showed up in the mail a couple days ago, and I’ve been handing them out like nuts.

And telling folks about all of our awesome themes — which brings us to the second thing in today’s post. Kerilea has been busily working on the Steampunk theme, and it’s ready for go.

I love the scratchy, almost abstract (though required) gears, the neo-Victorian wallpaper, and the tiny little ray-gun-wielding lady just visible down there on the left side of the theme.

That brings us to some entirely ridiculous number of themes — there are four pages of the things now, and I know that Dani and Kerilea have more in the planning. We really, really don’t want everyone’s shop to look alike, and with all the options at hand, they’re really, really not going to.

And in the position of most honored announcement for the week — PrettyCoolShops, one of our newest Wicked Plum shops, is officially ready for go! She’s been adding items, tweaking her shop, and giving me all sorts of ideas for new tutorials, and while it’s not a Grand Opening yet, she’s certainly ready to sell!

She’s also been raving on Twitter about Wicked Plum’s features — our tech support, our customization possibilities, and the fact that in Wicked Plum, you can put a single item into as many different categories as you like. So thank you!

Welcome, PrettyCoolShops, and congratulations!

made this mess on April 15th, 2011 | Comments Off

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