Step away from your inbox! Don’t think you can? Well, this simple service called AwayFind will allow you to do just that.
One of the reasons you feel the need to check email email every 20 seconds is the fear that there might be something urgent sitting in your inbox. If you are serious about being more productive with email, you’ll need to eliminate the urgency from your inbox. If you’re not sure where or how to begin, AwayFind provides the means.
Once you create an account at AwayFind.com, they’ll place a link to your AwayFind contact form in your email signature or auto response message. When someone completes the contact form, you’ll receive a text message or you can elect to route messages for delegating to others based on the category selected.
Read about some of the common and creative uses for AwayFind here & here.If that’s not enough, at the end of the process you also get a few helpful bonuses in the form of video tips, a downloadable “Guide to NOT Checking Email” and specific instructions for how to turn off notifications within YOUR email application.
I met Jared Goralnick, the creator of AwayFind, at a local DC event and he invited me to try out the next version, AwayFind 2.0- Orchant, currently in beta, by invite. He was also kind enough to provide a link good for 10 invites . You should definitely check out Jared’s blog at http://www.technotheory.com/- he definitely GETS how to be productive using technology.
Even though this post has nothing to do with technology, I felt the urge to share it here anyway. So, I received my February issue of Real Simple yesterday and the article on pg. 140 titled “The Ultimate in Organizing: 4 Real-Life Systems” by Nicole Sforza just got me thinking… So much so, that I woke up thinking about it again this morning.
The article features lots of pretty images, as you may have guessed, and it highlights four “brilliantly organized spaces”. It’s nothing that Real Simple or Nicole said specifically that offends me, it’s just that the message the media sends time and time again about ‘organized = perfection’ that is so bothersome to me.
When I started out as an organizer 6 years ago, I definitely bought into the pretty pictures, colorful bins and perfectly ordered supplies but I knew then (and feel even more strongly now) that living organized is about so much more.
Many of the solutions featured are achievable to some degree, depending on your budget. But what the article doesn’t highlight is what ‘real-life systems’ are about it. Living organized is not about having your bookshelves sorted by color; it’s not about having your system be so pristine that no one else is allowed (or wants) to use it; and it’s certainly not primarily about purchasing a product or hiring a contractor to automagically create the perfect system for you…which is really all you’ll read in magazines & see on TV.
You can create your own definition of what living organized is about! In general, I think you would agree that it should:
Allow you to find what you need when you need it & have the ability to store it quickly and easily without frustrating you.
Work for everyone who needs to use it.
Ease your stress.
Free up time for the things & people you love.
Keep things simple…
And, finally, what it doesn’t have to be is PERFECT!
Many productivity experts talk about the “two-minute rule”, which dictates if a task will take 2 minutes or less to complete, rather than defer and push it off until later (whenever that may be), you should do it now.
Recently, I received an inquiry from another experienced professional organizer. She was partially playing devil’s advocate but also wanted a measurable answer to the question: “How do you know when something will take 2 minutes or less?” So, I set off on a quest to find a clear, defined response. While I’m not there yet, I did come across a fabulous and thorough post exploring frequently asked questions about the 2-minute rule from Tools-for-Thought.com. Andre Kibbe begins with a little bit of history behind the “2-minute rule”:
“The two-minute rule was originated by business consultant Dean Acheson (no relation to the former Secretary of State), then incorporated into the Time/Design (Time/system in the US) methodology and later picked up by David Allen for GTD.
Acheson, who also coined the Next Action technique, would guide his clients through an in-basket processing session by having them ask of a next action, “Is it a short action?” If the answer was yes, the rule was to do it immediately rather than write it down for later review or action. Later, as Acheson came to realize that “short” was overly subjective, he changed the framing question to, “Can this be done in less than two minutes?”
Why: I serve on the chapter board of my professional association and had a PDF that required updating but did not have a copy of the text version of the file…and I will do just about anything to avoid retyping a document. Of course, I only support using this tool for good and not evil- it should be used on documents that you own the copyright to. It’s quick and easy to convert a document:
1. Browse to attach file
2. Select the language
3. Select whether to rotate the document
4. Click ’send file’
Viola! Within seconds, you’ll have access to download the file as a text file or Word document!
For converting other types of document check out this Tech Toolkit tip.
“One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my quasi-scientific approach to sustained laziness is the value of storing thoughts in appropriate places, as soon as I have them. That means parking them where I will later evaluate their merit (or lack thereof) and dispose of them accordingly. Having a thought once is what the mind is for; having the same thought twice, in the same way, for the same reason, is a waste of time and energy. I also found out that having a place for good ideas produced more of them, and more often.”
David Allen, Quote from WIRED Magazine- Be creative amid chaos By David Allen|11 May 2009
Step away from your inbox! Don’t think you can? Well, this simple service called AwayFind will allow you to do just that.
