Email is a modern Sisyphean tragedy for many of us. The mythic Greek King Sisyphus received a unique punishment to roll a rock almost to the top of a hill only to have it slip and roll back down to the bottom. Then he’d have to do it again and again. Sisyphus was cursed to have this back breaking, rock-rolling punishment in hell for eternity.

Sounds a little like email, right?

I get about 200 messages per day to roll back up the hill. If you know it’s going to go on forever, you may as well get good at it.

For ArcStone’s weekly staff meeting, I assembled a few tricks that I’ve been using to help me roll-up my inbox. Here are the eight tactics I shared to help ease the pain of email purgatory…

1. Adopt a habit of “Inbox Zero”. Inbox Zero is an email practice of reducing your inbox to zero messages on a regular (read daily) basis. The main set of tactics are to immediately to: do it, delegate it, defer it, delete it, or file it. The strategy is simple – but the practice takes practice. A cool new plug-in (if you use gmail) is the email game – it teaches good email habits in a fun, funny way. Also check out David Allen’s Getting Things Done for his inbox clearing strategies. 
2. Only check your email at designated times with full awareness. Once or twice per day if you can get away with it. Hourly if you must. But don’t do it all the time and fracture your focus.
3. Use a to-do list for your tasks – not your email inbox. There will be fewer dropped balls and less clutter in your inbox.
4. Use the subject line smartly. Start informational emails with FYI: (Subject) and actionable items with Action: (Subject).
5. Be concise. Three lines max if possible. Email is meant to convey short messages. Think about the long six or seven paragraph emails you get versus the short ones – which do you actually thoroughly read? Save your readers’ time – go for concise, punchy messages.
6. List actions first and also number them. Don’t put a big block of text first and then put the tasks at the bottom – put the actionable stuff up top. Don’t assume people with 200 + messages per day are going to scroll down, they’re gonna be scanning.
7. Don’t “Reply All” unless everyone needs to truly see it. This will save your team members a lot of time and insure that they read your messages when you send them.
8. Never, ever send emails with a lot of emotional content. No angry, contentious or hurt emails – ever, ever. Emotionally fraught emails tend to create additional rounds of long, angry, hurtful, legally damaging, time sucking email. Seriously, don’t send emotional emails unless you like to painfully waste your time.

Any other tips? Please comment!

You can’t get to wonderful without passing through all right.

-       Bill Withers

I love this quote.

The thought works on both a macro and micro scale.

Over their lifetimes our great artists, writers, musicians, and designers all went through “all right” before they came into their genius.   The arcs of their careers contain at least one or two periods that aren’t as good as others.  The important thing is that they did the work.  They got it out there.  They kept going.

On a smaller scale a well-executed project typically goes through multiple iterations – it never pops out fully formed, perfect, “wonderful”.  Impactful creative people all sketch, prototype, and make drafts.  Their individual works travel through the land of “all right” on their way to wonderful.  The rough drafts and requisite wrong turns help create the happy accidents and intuitive leaps that make something great.

So – do the work. Then make it better. Travel through that land of all right on your way to wonderful.

I don’t have a bank account because I don’t know my mother’s maiden name.
Paula Poundstone

OK – so I feel a little weird with this one, very much like an old grumpy dad giving his kids unsolicited financial advice. I can feel the virtual eyes rolling even now, knock it off.

ArcStone has a 401K plan.  We don’t do any matching, but the vehicle is there for saving if anyone wants to participate.  I was reviewing our quarterly report and I realized that the level of staff participation is barely over what we pay each month to have the plan in place.

I’m going to try a few things to see if I can get participation up – I hate paying for a benefit that people don’t use.

Anyone have any reasonable ideas?

I’ll post what we came up with as a follow-up to this.

Now off to my bully pulpit to lecture…..

I did something new when we ran an ad for an administrative assistant last week.  I asked three questions;

1. If you could have a super hero power what would it be?
2. What was the last book you read?
3. If everything went according to plan in your life, what would you be doing 10 years from now?

I will forevermore ask questions like this in every job post we do.  I was very pleased with the outcome.

Asking the questions did a number of things….

1.  I was able to weed out the people who didn’t answer the questions.  They didn’t follow the directions.
2.  I was able to see a genuine, off-the-cuff writing sample.  Clear and concise written communication is vital in our business.  This was an effective, simple test.
3.  I was able to see if they had spelling or grammatical errors in their answers – indicating to me a lack of attention to detail.
4.  I could check for personality fit and sense of humor.
5.  I could insure for myself that their personal longer term vision of themselves fit within ArcStone’s longer term vision.
6.  The questions enabled candidates to get a feel for us before responding.

If you’re tasked with hiring for your organization, ask some questions like these up front.  This is a wonderful way to begin a hiring dialogue.  Let me know how it goes….

One of the great achievements during the dawn of history was the religious text called the Rigveda.  Passed via oral tradition from father to son in the ancient Indus Valley, the Vedas contained a collection of the earliest recorded religious wisdom.  Large portions of the Rigveda are dedicated to the mysterious drink Soma.

Scholars today disagree about what Soma was, but we do know a few things.

It was derived from a plant, it gave power and energy to those that drank it, it was highly recommended that one consume it before battle, and it was considered the drink that created the gods.

From the Rigveda’s Ninth Mandala:

We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered.

Now what may foeman’s malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man’s deception?

Is coffee America’s soma?

-

No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee’s frothy goodness.  ~Sheik Abd-al-Kadir

Over second and third cups flow matters of high finance, high state, common gossip and low comedy.  [Coffee] is a social binder, a warmer of tongues, a soberer of minds, a stimulant of wit, a foiler of sleep if you want it so.  From roadside mugs to the classic demi-tasse, it is the perfect democrat.  ~Author Unknown

Way too much coffee.  But if it weren’t for the coffee, I’d have no identifiable personality whatsoever.  ~David Letterman

I believe humans get a lot done, not because we’re smart, but because we have thumbs so we can make coffee.  ~Flash Rosenberg

You will always return to your dark master.  ~Nick Longtin

Health Benefits of Coffee:

• Coffee contains antioxidants that help prevent cancer and heart disease.
• Studies indicate that regular coffee drinkers are up to 80% less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease.
• Drinking two cups daily could reduce the risk of colon cancer by 25% and halve the risk of gallstones.
• Emerging evidence suggests that coffee may help manage asthma, stop a headache, boost mood, and even prevent cavities.
• Decaf coffee has been found to provide the same stimulative effect as regular coffee, without the caffeine.

So consume coffee my friends – unashamedly with vigor and gusto.

And check out our newest robo-staff member the Jura Z7 – sweet!

I love this video – his exuberant delivery and hopeful message are inspiring. Throw in some well done statistical animations / info graphics and Hans Rosling has masterfully turned what could be a boring topic into a viral video with over 3 million views.

I recently had a beer with a client of ours and the subject turned to Groupon.  We didn’t talk about how they turned down Google’s $6 billion dollar offer.  Nor did we discuss how they started 2010 doing business in one country and ended the year having expanded to thirty-five countries.

With beer inspired hubris, my friend and I talked about how we’d make it better (as if they weren’t doing well enough) and what we would do to improve their service.

So I did a little research – what would it take to build a system like Groupon?  In typical web programmer style I did some sleuthing to find out if the wheel had already been invented – sure enough it has.

I ran across three different systems which will enable you to roll your own Groupon, relatively quickly and easily.

Chompon.com – appears to be more oriented for publishers looking to run their own Groupon like sites and sales.

Tippr.com – has white label “Powered by Tippr” widgets to embed within existing sites and they’ll also bring deals to the table.

En Masse (www.matamko.com) – is a Joomla plugin that adds a social buying widget to the popular open source content management system.

Groupon has had amazing growth, but will they be able to maintain it given the intense competition from LivingSocial, EverSave, Google and dozens of others like the ones above?

2011 will be an interesting year for group buying – I’m gonna go get my deal on!

I just ran across this and had to share it – even though it is old news, I figured maybe there are a few others out there who hadn’t heard about it either.

Here’s the story.  In 2005 a young Englishman named Alex Tew was trying to figure out how he was going to pay for college.  He came up with the idea of creating a 1000 x 1000 pixel web page and selling links at $1 per pixel – 1,000,000 pixels – $1,000,000 bucks.  As part of the deal he guaranteed that the link would stay up for 5 years.   In true crazy viral Internet fashion – he sold out within six months – actually auctioning off the final 1000 pixel block and netting $1,037,100 in gross income.

Ain’t technology wonderful?

It’s sad to see a trusted and talented employee leave your business.

I received notice last week that Nik Rowell, TechTranslated contributor, friend and fellow ArcStonian will be leaving us to work for the social e-commerce start-up Alvenda (which I have to say seems to be a pretty cool business).

Thank you Nik for all the fantastic work you have done here at ArcStone.  Time and again you have made us proud – you’ll always have friends here.

We’re excited to be working with tap|QA – a highly experienced software QA and testing consultancy based here in the Twin Cities.  One of their fundamental business tenets is the importance of looking locally first, finding and training smart people to do QA right (QA stands for Quality Assurance, the sometimes under appreciated “red-headed step child” of software development).  Their tap|LAKSHORE software testing service competes very well against comparable offshore testing services.

We enjoyed working with two of the firm’s partners, Don Peterson and Tim Guilfoil and we’re happy to have had the chance to help them develop their new site.  Good luck tap|QA!