Inbox Backwards April 14, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Collaboration, Email Management.2 comments
A few weeks back I sent an email to my team, I wanted to deal with two issues. First was to acknowledge that I was struggling with the amount of email I received on a daily basis and secondly to let them know that any email that had me in the cc box would be moved out automatically and reviewed at some point in the next week. If you don’t make use of Outlook rules then I stongly suggest trying a few to see what difference they can make.
I have created a number of rules over the years but the thing I noticed about my last effort was that having declared ‘email bankcruptcy’ (to a degree) the team have responded by not copying me in on as many conversations. The outcome has been a much reduced inbox and one that focuses more on inward email from clients and business partners.
Today I have gone one step further but in another direction, I have installed Xobni, which is the word “inbox” spelled backwards.
Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. It creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments. It’s free to download with the knowledge that a premium version will follow at some stage down the line.
Xobni is a San Francisco, California based startup that is revolutionizing the way people manage email relationships. Xobni was started because they believe that people spend too much time searching for conversations, attachments, and other important information in their inbox. I agree.
At APS we use and market Worksite Document & Email Management from Autonomy. This is a great asset for storing a retrieving email and other electronic content but at the end of the day you still have an Inbox to worry about. The latest enhancements to Worksite are great in that we can see which emails within an Inbox have been filed in the DM system but as Xobni show there are other threads and connections that need dealing with within the the Inbox.
Every little bit helps – have a go 
Blog & Email Discipline June 13, 2008
Posted by Brian Coventry in Blogs and Wikis, Email Management.add a comment
I had my monthly meeting with Caspar Craven & Mark Cunnah of Trovus today and was reminded that to get out of the the email swamp you need to use Blogs, Wikis and IM to greater effect.
With the pending roll out of Microsoft Communicator 2007 for APS in all geographies I feel confident we have one of the 3 implemented. Implementing an IM solution is very straight forward. We chose Microsoft beacuse it integrates with Exchange but a feature I quite like is the ability to save IM conversations into Outlook and from there into our Document Management system Worksite. Our IT team had some initial struggles but have managed to sort these out with the help of Microsoft. Rolling it out to the desktop is very easy so I recommend trailing this solution – you get a 180 day trial (I think).
As for the other Wikis I am looking forward to our next steps in relation to building Wiki based content and will keep you posted on our progress. Blogs – I’ll keep forcing myself to use this is as a mechanism to communicate conversations and experiences for our team and clients alike. Its all about discipline to avoid email where its not a necssary mechanism for communicating.
Tackling email overload May 2, 2008
Posted by Brian Coventry in Email Management.2 comments
Greg Mackey from the APS team drew my attention to this presentation regarding the problem of email overload that is taking a toll on our sanity. It highlights the need for a cohesive system for processing emails. This is a long presentation so I suggest you come back to this post when you have about 1 hour to spare !
Brian Coventry
