I love reading good prose, particularly a good narrative. Sometimes prose is called for in an email — to tell a story, explain your reasoning, provide some depth regarding your feelings on a topic, etc. Some people prefer the phone or face-to-face for those things, but in many situations, email is sufficient.

But many of the emails we send and receive every day aren’t this kind of content. They are instead heavily task-oriented — all about coordinating our work with other people. For these kind of emails, straight prose is generally a much less effective form of communication.

Over the years, as I’ve worked with people on communicating more effectively via email, I’ve observed that when people include more than one topic (even just two) in an email, all too often the recipient only replies to one of the topics. Then the sender has to reply back asking again about the overlooked issues.

Most people scan their email — they don’t read it closely. As a result, if there are action items, or items for which a specific response is expected from the other person, that needs to be clearly communicated in the email in a way that will still be effective knowing the recipient will likely just scan the email.

The solution? Numbered lists.

List each item that requires response or action with a number in front of it. You can then write a whole paragraph if you need to, but the numbered list accomplishes a couple of things:

1. Recipients are clearer as to what’s expected of them in terms of actions and responses. They can’t claim that it was buried in the email if it was specifically enumerated.
2. Recipients are less likely to skip an item when they respond. With the numbers, it’s easier to check for completeness of our response. If there are five items in the email, there should be five items in your response. I don’t claim this to be scientific — I just know it works.
3. If they skip an item, it’s easier to communicate back to them about it.  “Thanks for your response, but what about item #2?” No retyping — just a single simple question.

A few tips:

1. Numbers work better than bullets. I don’t have quantitative data on this, but I can tell you that both for myself and with my clients, I first tried using bulleted lists, and that was a noticeable improvement over prose, but people still tended to skip items. But with numbered lists, skipped items in responses fall to almost zero. Apparently, without the numbers, our brain kind of loses place. Also, you lose advantage #3 above.
2. Bolding the start of each item helps. Whether it’s complete sentences or just a phrase as a pseudo-header, bold-facing the beginning of each item improves scannability.
3. Two items constitutes a list. How often have you sent an email with two questions for the other person and they only reply to one of them? It happens, and numbering them helps prevent it.
4. One list item = one action item. It doesn’t do much good to create a list if each list item has two or three questions or separate actions. Break it down.

This clearly isn’t appropriate for every email, even those longer than a paragraph, but in the proper context, this has been a great tool for me and my clients in reducing email traffic and confusion. Try it for yourself and see.

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 Editor’s Note:  This is a re-post of an article I received from Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, parent company of Zoho. He tells of his experience with the dot-com bubble and how it wiped out most telecommunications service providers.  He explains what he did to help his company, AdventNet, weather the storm, and offers some tips that we would all be well advised to heed at this time of such significant economic instability in our entire market right now.

September 22, 2008

Surviving the Financial Crisis

Sridhar Vembu
CEO
GigaOm has a guest post on how start-ups can survive the financial crisis. We have some experience at AdventNet with this, which I want to share. First a bit of history: AdventNet was born as a bootstrapped company in 1996, and our initial business was selling software to network equipment vendors. By 1999-2000, there was a raging bubble in networking and telecom; while the media focused on the flashy dotcoms, it was really telecom service providers and their equipment suppliers that had, by far, the bigger financial bubble — amounting to over a trillion dollars of capital eventually written off, split between debt taken on by service providers to finance new network construction and the venture capital raised by their equipment suppliers. For every dotcom that raised $5-10 million dollars, there probably was a SONET or WDM start-up that was raising $50-100 million dollars. There must have been a hundred of them just in the San Francisco bay area; but Boston, New Jersey, RTP in North Carolina, Dallas and Toronto all had their fair share of bubble companies, and I must have visited each of these places at least five times during 1999-2000.
I had a really good vantage point on the bubble because I personally must have visited 80% of those equipment companies as a software supplier. Fortunately for me, I was aware of the Japanese bubble of the late 80’s (when Japan was going to take over the world) and its painful aftermath in the 90’s. So, even in the middle of the telecom bubble as a supplier, I could not help feeling it was going to end badly. There was a point when I realized that the same exact pitch was being made by dozens of companies, yet most of them didn’t know so many others existed, pursuing the same exact business plan.

Having said that, I have to admit even I wasn’t mentally prepared for the extent of the carnage to follow. In 2000, I would have thought approximately 20% of the start-up companies would survive. It turned out maybe 3 out of 200+ survived. By 2003, over 90% of the companies we had supplied to in 1999-2000 had gone out of business. That is something to keep in mind regarding the magnitude of wreckage bubbles can cause — for those keeping score in the bay area or in Chennai for that matter, it is worth considering that real estate prices in Japan eventually fell 80% from the peak they reached in 1990.

So how did we overcome that shock? Here are the things that helped us. In 2000, there was a venture capitalist who was offering us $10 million for a 5% stake in order to enable us to grow faster. After careful consideration, we turned that money down, because we felt the industry was going to shrink, not grow, and we didn’t want to commit to a growth projection when our instincts told us to get ready for contraction. We felt if we were to be honest to ourselves, we had to tell the VC we expected to shrink; yet the money was coming in at such a high valuation, it needed growth as far as the eye could see to justify it. One of my friends in venture capital did tell me I was a fool — but that folly saved us.

We didn’t expand our headcount in line with revenue in 2000. We simply banked the cash — which came in really handy in the subsequent nuclear winter. Indeed, it was that cash that enabled us to diversify in 2004 and ultimately led to Zoho.

It seems clear that we are heading into another nuclear winter, led by housing and financials. It is going to impact the tech industry, but this time as suppliers not as direct bubble-blowers. Companies that have a strong balance sheet (we prefer zero debt) and the ability to adapt and flex will survive the wreckage. Customers are hurting, so attractive pricing is a must — there is going to be price deflation in tech. These are the rules we live by at AdventNet and Zoho.

Sridhar Vembu is co-founder and CEO of AdventNet, parent company to Zoho, the most comprehensive suite of affordable, online productivity tools for today’s knowledge workers. You are invited to publish this commentary in part of in full, or we welcome you to join in the discussion on the Zoho blog at http://blogs.zoho.com.

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Did I Get Things Done, a great GTD blog that you should add to your aggregator if it’s not there already has put up a post today that I think you might find interesting.  It features two videos showing the office setup of GTD practitioner Jimmy Yukka.  If you’re in the process of setting up your workspace to be more GTD compliant this is probably something you will enjoy watching.  Check it out:

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I’ve got some big news for GTD enthusiasts and followers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done systematic approach to personal productivity.  David in conjunction with the David Allen Company have just launched a new YouTube Channel dedicated to Getting Things Done. This new YouTube Channel is a compilation of those videos that David or his staff feel are especially useful for helping people to put David’s GTD methodology into practice.

If you’re a regular YouTube viewer you may have seen some of these before but in any case this new channel consolidates these useful videos into one location making them easier to find and more accessible to the community.  Be sure to subscribe so that you get notifications as new videos are added and, if you’ve made any GTD videos of your own, be sure to let them know so that those too can be made a part of this new resource.

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Ahh…completion!

You know the feeling. Inbox…empty. Weekly review…done. Deliverable…delivered. Project…complete. That slight rush as you say, “It is finished.”

This can be a great additional motivation in getting things done. One little completion “fix” after another and pretty soon you’re on a major productivity roll.

But there can be a dark side.

See, the act of completion feels so good that it can become an addiction — to the point that we very easily find ourselves finishing something — anything — that we can finish quickly, rather than diving into larger, more difficult tasks.

We all know the joy of picking low-hanging fruit. On the up side, at least it’s productive — at least it’s doing something to help us move forward.I don’t know about you, though, but I could probably spend an entire month knocking out a backlog of low-hanging fruit without doing anything on any of my major projects. While a month might be a bit much, in reality I frequently find myself spending several hours – even an entire day — finishing things that are productive, but not truly the most important thing I need to be doing.

But that’s not the worst of it. When it becomes downright destructive is at the point that you start feeding your addiction by finishing anything. A game of Sudoku. Another level in World of Warcraft. Random house cleaning. Watching the last episode of the Monk marathon you recorded two weeks ago. Replying to all your Twitter and Facebook messages.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities, assuming they are truly at the top of your priority list. And yes, entertainment can be at the top of your list even when you have work to be done. Your brain needs a break in order to be at maximum productivity when you’re focused on work.

But the appeal of these things is in more than just their entertainment value. A big part of the appeal is the illusion that you’re actually accomplishing something — feeding that fix of getting things done, even if what you’re getting done isn’t at the top of your list.

So what’s the solution?

As with any habit or addiction, quitting cold turkey is difficult if not impossible. The best way to quit a bad habit is to replace it with a good one. It’s OK to be addicted to getting things done — just replace getting anything done with getting the right things done.

You don’t have to be perfect at it. In my own experience, I’ve found it just about impossible to leap directly from that completely wasteful time to maximum productivity. Just take one step up the ladder. If you find yourself doing something pointless just for a completion fix, start picking some low-hanging fruit instead. If you’re on a roll with low-hanging fruit and avoiding bigger tasks, choose just one. Pick the highest-priority task that you can get done in, say, an hour and do it.

No matter how good your system is, it’s still ultimately only as good as your ability to stick to it. If you find yourself having a hard time, this is one place to look. Watch yourself for a week and see if you may have an addiction to getting anything done, rather than getting the right things done.

Image: Missouri Bike Federation

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This is the first article of the two I have prepared for you regarding dealing with email – this one is about tips and tricks of getting a life outside of email. The second part will be about key practices of getting email done and processing to empty.

First thing – let’s try to get a life… a life Now, the big question  – how to deal with email? How to reply to all of these hundreds of emails that come flooding your email inbox daily?

Outside of Email.

There was a time when email was ruling my world – I’d have my email program popping up whenever I got a new message, I’d go and check my email messages every 5-10 minutes, I’d read some email messages three to five times…

And I couldn’t get most of my stuff done.

I had to take some drastic measures to get my life back and convert my Email from being my king… to being just a tool for communication…. ‘cos that’s what email is. It’s just a tool (or one of the tools) for communicating…

Here are three tips that work for me when fighting email addiction:

Step 1. Disable email auto-checking

Don’t have email check you – it’s you who should be checking email. Try to check email manually every hour or even every two hours if you’re so brave. It’s really a great thing for a start.

Step2. Remove auto-preview of emails
Many desktop programs like “Outlook” or “Thunderbird” or “The Bat” have an auto-preview pane where you can see the email message when you just move between messages in your inbox. This made me crazy. I was reading some messages many, many times…
When you disable this feature, you’d have to click on the email subject to actually “open the message” and read it. This is a real change – from just scanning the messages you’re deciding to open a message if you’re ready for it.

Step 3. Don’t create too many email folders.
If you’re an organization freak like me, you’d create email folders for anyone you’d correspond with.
Why would you do that? Why would you spend your day organizing and moving email folders? Are you a librarian or a busy professional? Stop today – just use the search feature to find the message you need.
That’s all there is to it for now – try to implement these three simply techniques as they worked perfectly for me:

1.    Disable email auto-checking
2.    Get rid of the message auto-preview
3.    Stop creating folders – use search

Make sure you try these and also let me know in the comments about your tips and tricks that help you regain your life outside of email.

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Greg Stevenson, an avid GTD’er recently wrote DavidCo to let them know about a new Meetup Group he’s started in Orange County, CA.  In the process of getting the word out about his meetup, Greg discovered Meetup.com and found out that there were actually 25 different GTD meetups taking place all over the country.  I think this is awesome.  People all over are getting excited about the profound benefits that GTD can have on a person’s life and they’re so thrilled by the positive impact that they want to share this with others as well as associate with like minded people.

Anyway, Greg wrote to let us know about this and to ask us to help get the word out too (which of course it is our pleasure to do, hence this post).  To see if there’s a GTD meetup near you, go to Meetup.com, and search “Getting Things Done”.  If there’s not a meetup near you, why not consider starting one of your own?  You can find Greg’s Orange County meetup here..

Another thought; if you’re attending one of these meetups, write up a report of what you did there and how you felt it helped you in your personal implmentation of GTD - we’ll gladly post accounts of the various meetups so that people considering attending one can get an idea of the value inherent in getting together with fellow GTD’ers to share ideas, help one another solve problems and generally just chill with like minded folks.

Finally, if the meetups prove useful and interesting, just imagine what the GTD Global Summit - which is essentially going to be a mega–meetup on a triple dose of steroids - is going to be like?!?

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Question: When you identify important projects, do you clearly define the successful outcome?
Do you clearly describe, either in the project title or description what success, even “wild success” will look like?

If you are not doing this, you are missing out on perhaps the most powerful productivity tool available to help you accomplish your goals and dreams: your brain.  In fact, if you don’t regularly do this, you’re leaving your brain in park when it could be driving you to accomplish wild success.

This fantastic image is from Joan M. Mas and

 her collection of amazing GTD Drawings

Visualizing the Successful Outcome
Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book. For many years I’ve written my projects in the past tense — as if they were “done” and I found that helped me to “see” done as the objective.  I thought that David’s example of writing a formal review of his book project was very clever and a powerful visualization tool, so I made note of it.
My Personal Application
When I set out to develop my eProductivity software, I followed David’s recommendation and wrote my own review. I determined to summarize the product in two sentences, one from the perspective of the Notes community since eProductivity is built on Lotus Notes; the other from the GTD community because eProductivity embodies many of the principles that I learned from David’s book.

For the Lotus Notes community, the most concise review I could come up with (after many iterations and variations) was this:  “eProductivity: The Ultimate Personal Productivity Tool for Lotus Notes.” This eventually became the marketing tag line and company mission. It is my hope that I have accomplished this and that people in the Notes community who evaluate eProductivity will tell us that we have accomplished this objective.

For the GTD community I came up with a slight variation: “eProductivity: The Ultimate GTD Implementation Tool for Lotus Notes.” For those aspects of the product that were specifically designed with the GTD methodology in mind this was my driving measure. As I worked on eProductivity I would regularly refer back to my “review”.  Not only did this help keep me motivated but it also helped me fix in my mind the final product and how it would work, how people would use, and how it would improve their ability to get things done.  For me, like for David, creating the review helped me to visualize exactly what done looked like.

Do you know what “done” looks like?
If you don’t know how “done’ looks for a particular task, not only will you be incapable of  knowing when you are done, you will also miss out on the ready help available to you from your most valuable and trusted resource — your brain.

How does this work?
In my experience, writing my project definitions in terms of their outcome creates a cognitive dissonance between what I have defined as done and the present reality. As a result, whenever I read that project statement (or in my case, look at the product logo and tag line) my brain has to subconsciously decide if it agrees with the statement. If it does, great. I’m done. If not, it usually identifies one or more things that I need to do to make the statement true.

A Built-in Personal Success Coach
It’s quite easy to enlist your brain to define the next actions you must take toward success: all you have to do is craft a clearly defined outcome statement and read it. Immediately, your brain will decide if it is true or not. It may say, “Self, well done.” Or, it may say, “Self, that statement’s not entirely true because this is not done yet.” If so, simply capture what has your attention on to an appropriate list and act on it. Shortly, you will be completing actions that are in alignment with your successful outcome and you will be accomplishing your goals.

This exercise of beginning with the end result in mind has been a powerful tool for me — a productivity tool, even — to help me in the decision making process. Whenever I had a decision to make about this project — whether it was in design, architecture, features, programming, or budget — I would ask myself “what decision can I make that will bring me closer to the two outcome statements I defined? There were times in prior years when I simply wanted to wrap up the current feature set and put the product out there, however, it did not meet my criteria for my successful outcome. So, we waited, and persisted, and continued working, learning, and refining until we are where we are at today.

I encourage you to think about creating one or more successful outcome statements for each of your major projects.

If you decide to try this, post a comment and let me know how your brain worked out as your personal success coach.

I think you will be amazed at the result.

Update: If you would like to see the result of my project, eProductivity, I invite you to watch the overview video

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Having a trusted reminder system is a critical success factor for GTD.   Given GTD is really an approach that is tool agnostic, nearly any tool will work as long as you have the right ingredients.

I laughed when I read a blog recently where someone tried swiping at GTD saying that “GTD is for techies only.”  David Allen’s roots in working this methodology, as well as my own, come from the paper planner world.  You can’t get much more low-tech than that.  In fact, some of the most elegant and accessible lists I’ve seen are paper ones.  Sure, there’s the rewrite factor of paper, but electronic list managers have the “over-featured” trap to watch out for. There are pros and cons to both.  I say, go with what works best for you.

Some of the most technically savvy people I know manage their lists on paper to shift their consciousness away from all of their electronic input.  It’s a fantastic pattern interrupt to switch over to a paper list when you stand in front of a fire hose of email and the Internet all day long. There’s also almost a zero learning curve with a paper system.  And, if you’re building it yourself from blank paper, you have a ton of flexibility on what it looks like.

So for any of you looking for a hard copy GTD system, with ingredients you can likely find around in your house or office, here’s what to do:

1.  Go to your graveyard of old 3-ring binders  (every company has one!) and find one you like.
2.  Find some divider tabs   (if you can’t find some, Post-it notes or flags will work to delineate each section.)
3.  Grab a stack of blank paper from your copier or supply closet and hole punch it into the binder.
4.  Download this free article on Setting up a Paper Organizer  from the GTD store and assemble the sections.
5.  Populate the lists with your complete inventory.

If you can’t find all those supplies at hand, even buying them from your local stationary supply store would only run about $6.  Could you spend more than $6?  Sure.  You could really trick it out with a leather binder and high-quality paper.  If you’re choosing one of the many web-based electronic systems out there, you’ll want to make it accessible from anywhere–especially when you’re offline.  This kind of paper system would work well if you’re doing a hybrid of digital and paper.  For example, electronic lists could be your home-base, but you print key lists to a binder for easy access and portability.

Next time you walk into a meeting, notice how many people have a paper lists or printed calendar with them. It’s more common than you think. If it’s your style to do things on paper, do yourself a favor and create a great hard copy system.

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Frank Tomizuka has just posted a great tutorial on how to make your very own hipster PDA over at Instructables - the world’s largest “How To” website.  For those of you that have never heard of a Hipster PDA, Merlin Mann introduced the idea over at 43Folders way back in September of 2004.  If you’d like a decidedly lower tech solution instead of a high tech device this may be just what you’re looking for…

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