The Sound of Young America host Jesse Thorn commanded a stellar panel at the recent IMA Public Media Conference in Atlanta:

Merlin Mann of 43Folders, Homestar Runner creators Mike and Matt Chapman (aka The Bros. Chaps), and Jeff Olsen, creative director of adultswim.com.

The Sound of Young America

The panelists talked about how to do something on the Internet that people will actually care about, to paraphrase Thorn. Merlin Mann fans might recognize that this was a kind of John the Baptist for a panel that Merlin and John Gruber led at SXSW.

Keith Hopper developed the concept for this session. (I may have contributed the session title “Blow up your Brand” for which I apologize profusely.)

My e-reader arrived on Wednesday, so my experience so far is limited, but I have a few observations. First, a long setup.

I haven’t read printed books in some time. Aside from a few keepsake books that have special personal value, or copies that get a fresh reading regularly, I’ve largely divested my book collection, giving hundreds of volumes to charity and the public library. I don’t feel comfortable with the resources required to create a physical book, and I’ve downsized my stuff and my personal space to support a more compact, (hopefully) environmentally friendly lifestyle. While the creation and consumption of digital content also has an environmental impact, I feel marginally more comfortable with that, and I purchase carbon offsets.

My reading, up to now, has been listening, mainly: audiobooks. I have a monthly subscription with Audible.com, and I’ve listened to dozens of audiobooks while in the gym or out walking. (Disclosure: I have a relationship with Audible, as a contract narrator.)

Audiobooks have a number of advantages, but there are some genres that don’t work for me in the audiobook format. Intricate histories are hard for me to follow, probably because I listen to audiobooks while doing other activities, like working out. And Audible’s library currently offers around 50,000 products. The bestsellers are there, and so are the classics, but the catalog isn’t deep, and I’ve been adding more books to my Amazon wishlist in the past two years, reluctantly conceding that I’d need to buy them in book form.

So, enough scene-setting. A few observations about the Kindle 2:

• * Amazon’s store currently offers about 250,000 titles. The first thing I noticed was that every book I’ve dumped into my wishlist is available for the Kindle. It’s surprising how deep a 250,000 volume “library” can be.
• * The buy-and-download-instantly model is almost an exact replica of the iTunes experience, by which I mean, it’s perfect. Buying books is so simple, delivery is effortless, and the result is: I spent $50 on books in the first 20 minutes of Kindle ownership; that makes it dangerous, too, for people like me who like to consume books.
• * To think of the Kindle as simply an e-book reader is to misunderstand the power of the device and its capabilities. Andy Ihnatko still has the best piece on the Kindle, and its true killer app: the Sprint EVDO connection, coupled with a (simple) web browser. This is a simple Internet device, and there’s a lot of power in that.
• * The new design is sleeker, cooler, still not perfect. The five-way toggle switch is annoying from an ergonomic standpoint, the “next page” buttons closer to the bottom of the device than I’d like (I hold it closer to the top, for some reason.) E-ink has to flash the page to display it, and that, combined with the delay is bothersome, but not greatly so. After reading for several minutes, you kind of forget about it.
• The experience of reading on a Kindle is immersive, more so than I expected. It takes some time but the device does seem to melt into the background, in the way that a physical book does. The interface doesn’t strain my eyes, and the reader is light enough to hold and substantial enough to feel like a small book.

I like physical books, but I’m not interested in turning them into a fetish. They aren’t inherently better or more pure than any other kind of book; that’s entirely a matter of personal preference, and I refuse to debate anyone over their personal choice in this matter.

For me, the Kindle is a new way to transport and enjoy books and it has a lot of potential as an always connected Internet device (within Sprint territory).

Note: I bought the Kindle 2 with my own money. I don’t accept review copies of items; actually, I’m not an A-list blogger, so I never get offered review copies of anything.

In the last (almost) 5 years I’ve been using Gmail, I’ve used a variety of email software to access it, from Outlook to Thunderbird, Apple Mail to Entourage. And while I’ve never had major issues with how Gmail’s IMAP works, there have been a few annoyances and a variety of tweaks have cleared some of them. but not others.

So, inevitably, I return to the web interface, and that’s why extending the capabilities of desktop software to Gmail in the browser has been at the top of my wishlist.

It’s a beta product and I’ve encountered some minor problems with it, but I’ve not lost any email, and frankly, I’m used to a few quirks with Gears on Google Reader and Docs, so I don’t get too ruffled by it.

I’m about 28,000 feet over eastern Washington state as I write this, and my core tools are open and working: Gmail, Google Docs and Google Reader… all of them running on Gears. It won’t be long before Internet access is available on most domestic mainline aircraft, so we’ll have reached the final frontier. But even then there will always be slow or flaky connections that we encounter – times when it’s easier to “work local” rather than fight the net. The real power of Gears is how it creates a seamless experience, bridging online and offline.

Many GTD-type software programs allow users to assign a priority to a to-do item. Gorsline argues (persuasively, in my opinion) that hard-assigning a priority to individual tasks doesn’t take into account the reality of how we engage with the things we do – or at least how GTD assumes we do.

Now, of course, we prioritize how we’re going to complete our tasks. But Gorsline writes that, at any given moment, our priorities will be determined by the context in which we find ourselves (am I at my computer? am I on the phone? am I at work?) – something that GTD asks you to determine as you create each task; the time available to you at any given moment; and your level of energy at the moment. Are you too tired to make the phone calls now? Better that they wait until you can give them the attention that they require.

Our priorities are constantly changing based on how this matrix interacts with our current situation. Assigning priorities to tasks means you’re likely to spend a lot of time shuffling the deck, changing your priority codes, when you could be getting real work done.

This article won’t end the debate over priority by any means, but it’s one of the best defenses for GTD’s more fluid approach to priority.

From my experience, this works better for me than hard-assigning a priority to each task. I find that after I’ve made it a “1″ or “2″ priority item, I tend to ignore priority… and, on-the-fly, I do the things I’m able to do at a given moment (context) or have the energy to do. The official priority that I’ve attached to an item becomes meaningless, essentially.

Now, what is still meaningful to me is when the task has to be completed. That’s something concrete. I realize that due dates are questionable in true GTD, but all bibles are open to some interpretation. The reality of my work environment is that some tasks can be completed soon, and some must be completed by a certain date.

Fake Due Dates

Interestingly, I’ve discovered over time that I have a strange habit of arbitrarily assigning due dates to some tasks, not because they must be completed by then, but because I think they might be or should be. This undermines the trust in my system and adds an unnecessary psychic burden, as tasks without a concrete due date begin to pile up in the “overdue” column. That aint good. The reason I haven’t completed those tasks is because I haven’t had the time or energy to do them. Making them artificially overdue is like being punished for something that’s not my fault.

That was an important insight for me, enough to make me open my task list and remove due dates from every task that doesn’t explicitly require one. I feel a lot better already.

Todd’s Six Workflow Requirements

Your list may differ.

• * Syncing to-do lists
• * Syncing calendars, contacts, mail
• * Document access
• * Notes
• * Voice recording
• * Cross-platform blogging workflow

To-do

I need easy, ubiquitous capture to make my to do list effective and trustworthy, but I also need immediate access to the full list. I use Remember the Milk to capture long-range thinking (the “Someday/Maybe” stuff in GTD parlance) and Omnifocus for managing day-to-day lists and projects.

RTM is web-based and I have all kinds of ways to get stuff on the list. I can email tasks to the list, send them via IM or Twitter, enter them directly on the phone, configure a browser bookmark to popup, etc. RTM has excellent functionality and it’s easy to use. Since it’s web-based, there’s no need for syncing; your modifications show up everywhere immediately. If you use RTM in Firefox, you can take advantage of Gears technology to get offline access to all your lists.

Omnifocus has been a favorite of mine since it was in alpha release. It’s a thoughtful implementation of GTD and it’s packed with capabilities. The software is somewhat opaque, however, and it loses a point or two on usability. There are fewer open doors into the device, but the ones that matter to me are available: I can email tasks into the system, and with the launch of iPhone’s 2.0 software, Omnifocus introduced an excellent app that syncs to the desktop using either MobileMe or WebDAV.

I feel more tightly connected to my to do list than ever, and fun perks like Omnifocus’s ability to use GPS to remind you of tasks that you can complete nearby, add to its indispensability.

Calendars, contacts, mail

Do I need to say much about this? Probably not. I have Gmail and MobileMe accounts; I can work with my mail on all web-connected devices, and both accounts play nicely with Apple Mail, thanks to IMAP. Contacts sync across devices with MobileMe, and my calendars are a web of syncing: basically, MobileMe and SpanningSync ensure that any change made to any calendar gets expressed everywhere, from iPhone to iCal to GCal.

Contacts and Calendar data also port to my Windows desktop at work, and here, your syncing method depends on your platform. GCal can sync with Outlook’s calendar with Google Calendar Sync; MobileMe has a Windows client that pushes contacts and calendar data to Outlook, too.

Document access

This is even easier – choose your preferred puffy cloud and go for it. I use a few: Google Docs for things I’m doing at work, particularly for stuff I want to share with others. MobileMe’s iDisk lets me put all of my personal documents in the cloud and keep a synced local copy on my MacBook Pro; they’re also accessible on my Windows desktop and my phone. I’m also a big fan of Zoho Writer, and I’ve used Writewith and Buzzword with good results. Zoho and Google Docs have good iPhone interfaces, which will help keep you sane if you want to review a document using your phone.

Notes

One of the most annoying things about the iPhone is the land-locked nature of notes on the device. Yes, you can email them to yourself, but that’s not a way to maintain notes that are synced across devices. Into this gap steps Evernote, which brings its strengths as a note-taker and capture tool to the iPhone.

Evernote’s first appearance on the phone was as a web-app, which allowed little more than access to notes that one had already stored in the system. (Evernote allows one to capture notes, sync them securely to Evernote’s servers, and make them available on other computers, or even make them public.) Since then, Evernote has evolved into a full-featured app for the iPhone. You can create new notes, edit them, sync them with the server, and access or edit them on your other computers, using either Evernote software, or Evernote’s web interface.

It’s free, but Evernote limits the amount of content you can upload each month. If you upload a large number of notes, you can buy additional space, too. I keep notes for work and home, all of my receipts, pictures of business cards I receive (Evernote’s software can recognize text in photos and make it searchable), and scraps of code… and I come nowhere near to maxing out my free account. (I you upload lots of photos into Evernote, you’ll want the paid account.)

Voice recording

Sometimes, it’s easier to record yourself a reminder than take the time to transcribe it. Jott is a service I use constantly to record small bits of information, which then get transcribed by a nice person somewhere and sent to me via email or sms. Jott also lets you set reminders. The Omnifocus iPhone app lets you attach voice recordings to tasks for those times when your task is a detailed plan for taking over the planet. There are also several iPhone apps devoted to recording memos or complete meetings and lectures. I use QuickVoice for recording items that aren’t task-related. Recorded to-do list items move through the Omnifocus system as attachments to tasks. If, six months ago, you’d told me I’d be using voice memos as a task input mechanism, I’d have said you’re crazy. But it works for me.

Cross-platform blogging workflow

I’m not going to pretend that I enjoy long-form blogging on my iPhone. I like the keyboard, but not that much. Chuck, on the other hand, uses the iPhone WordPress app to write short posts and edit his blog. It works for him. I don’t mind writing short posts in that format, but mainly my blogging workflow depends on MarsEdit, where I can publish posts to a number of blogs, work offline, edit existing posts, etc. I also edit draft posts on my phone.

As for microblogging, I use Hahlo and Twitterific on my iPhone.

Will I always use both Google and MobileMe apps? Probably. As long as they sync to each other easily, I don’t think there’s any reason not to. I like knowing there’s some redundancy, just as I like knowing that when I’m offline, I have local copies of everything. Thus far, I’ve been a very lucky MobileMe user, with about 6 hours total downtime that I’ve noticed since the first days of the launch of the service. Everything has worked almost without a hiccup. (Others haven’t been so lucky.) Should my luck run out, I have something to fall back on.

I’ve used Gears on Firefox religiously since the day it launched, to maintain access, when I’m offline, to my feeds in Google Reader, documents in Zoho and Google Docs, and tasks in Remember the Milk. I’ve also used Gears to speed up some of the functionality in my various WordPress installations. I like Firefox a lot, but I’ve always had a more stable browsing experience with Safari; and even though all browsers tend to acquire a large memory footprint over time, Firefox has been the king of memory hogs. As a result, I’ve found myself handling basic browsing in Safari, and tasks that require specific plugins or Gears in Firefox.

I won’t stop using Firefox, but getting Gears on Safari is a big step forward from my perspective, and it makes sense, given Safari’s support for this kind of offline caching.

• * Gears for Safari beta
• * Gears Drives the Next-Gen Web
• * Offlining with Google Gears
  

I think I may still write something about it – perhaps while flying on Wednesday – but probably as part of something that more broadly assesses GTD workflow, which shifts as often as the sands, don’t you know.

My own view of Chandler is a mix of most of the above – it’s interesting to me because it’s ambitious, but other times the ambition seems like overreach, and the longer I live in the Mac world, the higher my expectations are about concepts like beautiful software design, marriage of form and function, and flawless performance. (I use WIndows XP at work and that’s fine; I’m not a hater.)

And let’s just say it: in this day and age, fundamental activities like email, document creation, calendars, and contacts must work and sync seamlessly across every platform, whether multiple desktops and notebooks, or to your handheld device. In this reality, software like Chandler or 99% of all those to-do list programs in the iPhone apps store that don’t offer seamless transfer are dead in the water with web workers. I’ve got a killer flow going on, from iPhone to MacBookPro to, yes, Windows desktop at work, and I hesitate to introduce a deaf-mute application into this connected, multi-lingual world.

What was that about vacation?

Chuck and I are going to San Francisco on Wednesday, transporting a couple of 30 year old bottles of wine with which to toast our friends, Michael and Bob, who are getting married. I’m still so surprised that this is actually possible. I mean, I was born and raised in the US; I understand that the concept of equality is designed to be available to some in this country. I just never expected it to be available to Michael and Bob… or to us. Well, one step at a time.

Our weekend includes a long-anticipated dinner at The French Laundry, and three days in Napa at Calistoga Ranch, guests of our friends. I expect to twitter about it, Brightkite it, Loopt it, Friendfeed it.

Heck, kind of makes writing a big blog post about it seem downright old-fashioned.

It’s rough, it’s clunky, it’s not all pretty, but it’s interesting. I’ve been fooling around with it for a few days and I’ll write something about it this weekend.

If you have any thoughts about it, leave ‘em here in the comments or on Friendfeed.

• Lifehacker on Chandler
• Web Worker Daily on Chandler
• Chandler’s intro video

Now, there’s a more direct way to sync your calendar. Google Calendar has added CalDAV support – which is the web protocol that iCal uses for calendar data. The current flavor of CalDAV works only with iCal, although other calendar programs support the protocol and will presumably be able to sync at some point.

Google’s instructions for setting up CalDAV on iCal.

I set up the syncing for my principle calendar earlier today, and in a couple minutes (it can take up to 15 minutes) my Google calendar appeared as a separate calendar in iCal. It’s easy, this is a two-way sync, and it updates about eveyr 15 minutes.

It’s not as full-featured as Spanning Sync, however. With SS, you can sync multiple calendars, and designate existing iCal calendars to sync to GCal – the CalDAV creates a new calendar. You can sync multiple calendars with CalDAV but it’s not as straightfoward; that said, it ain’t rocket science.

So, if you use Calgoo or SS or another syncing program, you might want to investigate CalDAV – you don’t have to abandon your chosen program to do so. Or if you’d rather not… carry on!

I experienced some calendar downtime for a couple hours on Monday, but otherwise, I’ve not had trouble. Syncing remains almost immediate between the iPhone and the cloud… around every 15 minutes as far as the computer is concerned.

I’m going to have to pay attention to this over the next couple weeks, and I have no intention of shutting down GCal, but I’m surprised how quickly I’ve taken to the calendar function on MobileMe.

So, to answer the question in the title of the post, not yet, but this bears watching.

Firefox 3 looks better, runs faster, and runs somewhat more efficiently than Firefox 2 (your results may vary). It’s built on a brand new version of Gecko, and besides the speed improvement, I’ve seen a slightly smaller memory footprint. (Thank goodness for that!)

I’ve written about Gears (formerly Google Gears, now open source) a few times, usually starting with my excitement over being able to access web apps offline – apps like Google Reader, Zoho Writer, Google Docs, and Remember the Milk, among others. As Gears celebrates its first year, it’s begun to appear in new places, like MySpace, where it’s speeding up online functionality.

Cubrilovic gives an overview of the development of Gears, its commitment to standards-based architecture, and its potential on the playing field with Flex and Silverlight.

Also worth reading: Josh Catone’s piece at ReadWriteWeb.

Firefox 3 users: Gears is now available for the updated browser, which launches officially on Tuesday, June 17!

I still have a shortlist of extensions that won’t work with FF3, but this was the big one; for a while now, I’ve been working with FF2 and FF3, reserving FF2 for travel so I could use the offline functionality of Gears. Now, I can “offline” using FF3.

I’ve written more about my LIKE for Gears here.

Thanks to Sally Church! Her tweet about Gears reminded me…

I’ll be transitioning to iPhone 3G on July 11th, but not without feeling nostalgic for the way Apple’s first iPhone changed how I view phones. (Is that too Apple-centric for your delicate tastes? Well, bite it, won’t you? Perhaps if I had owned a Blackberry, I’d be just as attached to it. But such was not my fortune. I owned a Treo 700p, which was the worst device – I went through two of them trying to get one that went longer than a couple hours without a reboot – I’ve ever purchased. Your mileage may vary; that was my experience.)

But the updated iPhone is almost secondary to the announcement (expected) of Mobile Me and the new commitment to cloud computing unveiled by Apple. I’m excited about the “push” data functionality that will extend to Mail, Contacts and Calendar. But what I’m really interested to see is how this will impact my current array of “software and cloud.”

At present:

Mail: Exchange via Outlook at work; Gmail and .Mac mainly through a browser, secondarily through Mail.app. iPhone accesses Gmail and .Mac mail through IMAP; doesn’t access Exchange.

Calendar: iCal and GCal, synced using Spanning Sync. At work, Google’s sync software keeps Outlook tuned to my GCal. iPhone gets iCal data through a thin white USB cable.

Contacts: Apple Address Book; Gmail contacts are built based on an occasional import of Address Book contacts. This is highly haphazard. Syncing through Spanning Sync’s new contact sync was marginally successful; syncing through Address Book’s new port to Gmail was successful but a big mess. A messy export from Address Book gets my contacts to Outlook. iPhone gets Address Book data through a thin white USB cable.

How will a more complete syncing experience – a more cohesive experience for all my devices, delivered by Mobile Me, assuming Apple actually delivers it – mean for my setup?

One possible scenario:

Mail: beginning next month, iPhone will work with Microsoft Exchange; OS X will extend Exchange to computers when Snow Leopard is released, apparently. That covers work email; my Gmail path may remain unchanged – IMAP; my Mobile Me email will become more compelling with “push” behind it.

Calendar: Mobile Me will maintain one calendar across my computer, iPhone, Windows PC at work and any other device I connect, potentially replacing Spanning Sync, Google’s sync software, and providing a solid challenge to the relevance of GCal in my workflow. iPhone will sync without the thin white USB cable.

Contacts: Mobile Me will easily maintain one set of contacts across all devices, including Outlook at work. And if I can get syncing with Gmail’s contact database to work the way I want it to, it will take care of Gmail, too. Again, for iPhone, no white cable needed.

What I’ve wanted for myself for a long time was the ability to put all of my stuff in the cloud and have access to it seamlessly across all devices. The first piece of that is relatively easy; the second piece has been problematic. Apple seems to be serious about giving users a new experience with the cloud, and I’ll be watching for indications that this is the case.

With those features working flawlessly, plus revamped photo sharing capabilities, document capabilities, and the doubled storage capacity of Mobile Me, it’s possible the successor to .Mac will bring us closer to Merlin Mann’s cherished .Mac dream, and bind those of us who use it more tightly into the Apple orbit, with a suite of tools that will make, to quote Merlin, your entire digital world safe, fun, ubiquitous, and flawlessly integrated.

In my personal scenario, who are the losers if this strategy works? Google Calendar, potentially Google Docs (at least as far as cloud storage of docs is concerned), Spanning Sync, Google Calendar Sync. I’m hesitant to look at my own patterns and divine some greater scenario in which Google suffers because of Mobile Me; for one thing, Google is so big, does it ever suffer? Second, Apple and Google have a great relationship and I would be surprised if their futures weren’t more tightly intertwined around apps like Google Docs, etc.

There aren’t many places in the urban sphere anymore where we can’t get a speedy, reliable connection to the Internet. There’s just one big exception: airplanes. We’ve seen a few baby steps toward in-flight Internet, but for most of us, the metal tube is an network-free zone.

Yes, there are benefits to this – no loud phone conversations, no new mail dribbling in while you’re pursuing Inbox Zero. But, many of us have shifted our email, task lists, and other key operations to web apps; five hours on a transcontinental flight without those apps is a long time to be deprived of your tools, and improvising with text files and sticky notes just means more work once you’re online again.

Google Gears has been around for awhile now, but I’m only writing about it now because it’s just now having a real impact on how I work when I’m not connected to the tubes.

Google Reader

When Google launched Gears, Reader was the first Google tool to sport the functionality. (That was the case till just a few days ago.) I track all my feeds in Reader, so the ability to download up to 2000 articles, read offline, share and star them, and sync up later, gave me reams of reading material and ended in-flight purgatory.

Remember the Milk

I love this task management system: it integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar, Quicksilver, Twitter, mobile, etc., etc., which means you have all kinds of ways to get stuff into the Trusted System and track it. RTM was also an early adopter of Gears, enabling full offline access and syncing.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

As I write this, Google is progressively rolling out offline functionality to Docs users. The Docs implementation is somewhat more sophisticated: it syncs and then responds automatically, going local when you’re offline, reconnecting and syncing when you’ve acquired a connection again.

I’m highlighting these three services because there the ones that matter most to me. Other webapps also use Gears – a list is here.

Pre-Board Workflow

Now, when I’m about to pull the plug on the Internet, I open three tabs in Firefox, one each for Google Reader, Google Docs and Remember the Milk. Docs auto-syncs, and for the other two applications, I press the button to go offline. The switch to offline is nearly immediate, except for Reader, which downloads articles. This generally takes less than a minute.

When I open my laptop after take-off, I have access to these apps in an environment which mimics almost exactly the experience of being connected.

Almost. You can write and edit documents, create, tag, modify and delete tasks in RTM, and highlight blog posts to share on Google Reader. You can’t make changes to application settings, and in Docs, you can’t create a new document while offline. (This is also the case, at last check, with Zoho Writer’s offline functionality.)

In fact, this thing with creating a new document is the only thing that regularly annoys me about offline Docs. But I created a simple workaround: an empty document called “offline notes.” Any new document I want to create while offline goes on this empty page. Once I’m online, I copy it to another new document or rename the existing file and make a new “offline notes” file.

What if something goes wrong with sync and all your offline work disappears, never to be seen again? I take an extra precaution and copy the text into TextEdit, Word or Pages, so I have a local backup just in case.

Offline Wishlist

Every geek has their own version of this list. Mine includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook, Google Wiki, Backpack, Buzzword and WordPress software. I don’t doubt for a second that developers of these webapps are working on it, whether they’re building it on Gears, or Adobe’s offline platform or whatever.

But web-to-local software integration also helps bridge the gap. Gmail POP3 and IMAP means I can write email in Mail.app or any other traditional email program and send it when I’m back online, and Spanning Sync (or similar programs) seamlessly keeps iCal and Gcal in lock-step, making iCal my offline Gcal.

There are a few keys to making this functionality successful – and the centerpiece is a seam-free blurring of boundaries between online and offline. Ubiquitous wifi is reducing the white space in between our internet connections; technology like Gears helps to make the white space somewhat irrelevant.

UPDATE 6/10/08: Gears now works with Firefox 3!

Given that outpouring of response, I thought I’d give you an update. But first, a recap: in September, I determined that my vital archive of around 65,000 emails – maintained for so many years on laptop after laptop, then carefully uploaded using IMAP to GMail where it could live in the cloud, safe from catastrophic loss, then backed up on a second GMail account because one can never be too careful – was really just a useless waste of space – even when it’s Google’s space.

I began the rampant deletion of email; in total, I round-filed about 50,000 emails; my current trove, once again living on my hard drive, numbers about 15,000 emails.

For 4 weeks, the trashed emails lived on in Gmail purgatory; this week, they reached their 30 day limit and disappeared forever. What’s the impact? Well, in the first 2 weeks after trashing them, I made somewhere between three and five visits to the Gmail trashbin to search for something I needed. That’s not exactly an overwhelming endorsement for the Vital Email party, is it?

I’m not going to pretend that getting rid of the email has helped me feel whole again or achieve defined, meaty abs… but the point is getting rid of clutter. I have come to believe that clutter impedes energy, and without getting all Deepak Chopra on you, I think that having less clutter frees the mind.

Want to know my cheat? The backup Gmail account? It still exists, with all 65,000+ emails. It’s going to be my safety net and in 6 months, I’m going to delete those copies, too.

It’s worth delving into this concept of “safety net” for a minute. Why did I keep all that email? A variety of reasons; for instance, I would probably save lint if one could easily mount it in a scrapbook. But my biggest reason was that those email messages contained information that I was afraid of forgetting or losing or not having. Yes, most emails we get or send consist of the response “OK, see you soon!” but a fair number contain information vital to our work or life.

For a long time, keeping the emails has been my haphazard way of holding on to that information. I say haphazard because, although it’s “all in there,” you have to dig through the haystack to get to it. I’m slowly but surely trading in the “keep it all” approach for a new method: process the inbox every day, harvest all the important actionable or reference information out of the email, and get into a trusted system where I can see it, synthesize it, create tasks around it, delegate it or defer it.

I don’t throw away all the email. For work, there’s some stuff I have to keep. There’s also some stuff I just want to keep. That’s fine, but the reason I’m now keeping it is because the email itself is a document that has value. All the usable information locked away in it, however, has been lifted out and transported to another system that I use daily to track my tasks and projects.

I won’t pretend that it’s working perfectly; I won’t win Miss GTD. In fact, I’ve discovered an early warning sign of stressful periods – I start putting every email I get in the archive box and neglecting the data mining. But the system seems a lot smarter and when it’s working, it leaves me feeling more relaxed.

Perhaps I’ve been scared by some of the recent work on productivity and distraction, the exploration of the myth of multi-tasking, and the impact on the quality of my work from having information flowing at me non-stop, all through the day. These are very real problems that all of us contend with, but I think each of us has to determine how we’re going to cope, and what strategies we’re going to use to bend the odds in our favor.

Well, 2006 has become my Year of Productivity. January began with a close reading of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done,” which has shown me a range of tools to reorganize how I plan and execute projects. I’m not a master yet, but I’ve already started to experience what Allen says is the result of using his method – a peace of mind and sense of relaxation about my work that I’ve never experienced before – a sense of being in control. If you’ve not read his book and think it might be good for you, then it will be, and this Amazon link to “Getting Things Done” is just for you.

This year, I’ve also undertake a major effort to control my email. This effort is, in part, the result of my shift from Windows to OS X. In the Windows Outlook environment, I used the Neo Pro database sitting on top of Outlook. It was perfect – and if you get more than 20 emails a day and you use Outlook, you will be amazed at how this piece of software simplifies your life as far as email is concerned. It gave me a level of organization I’ve never had with email before – and I’ve not really had since I switched to the non-Neo world of OS X and Entourage. One thing about Neo: it beautifully controls the chaos of the inbox for you – but there’s no substitute for controlling some of that yourself. Last week, I began unsubscribing from dozens and dozens of emails I receive – sale updates from LL Bean and Eddie Bauer that I no longer want (when was the last time I bought something from LL Bean??), scads of newsletters that I haven’t read in more than a year, information dropping into my inbox that I can now get on my RSS reader. It’s a somewhat laborious process but it’s important if you want to take control of your inbox. In fact, I should restate that: I had all kinds of rules to shunt all of those emails off to folders, but the distraction of a little bell going off around 120 times a day has reminded me that new mail, even when it’s automatically routed, still interrupts the flow of work. I haven’t checked yet, but it looks like I’m down to about 100 emails a day from 200-220, and I think I can cut the number further. I’ve also shut off the new mail sound.
I’ve reduced the clutter on my desktop to two folders – one for personal projects and one for work projects, and I’ve cut the size of my dock in half. Merlin Mann at 43 Folders recommends tools to eliminate distractions on your screen entirely, and this may ultimately be the direction I’ll go, but for now, i can’t quite bring myself to accept having only one thing on the screen.

I do a great deal of my work in cafes – either the closest cafe to my house where I can pick up my wireless connection, or other nearby cafes. I find I concentrate well with a blend of noise – the buzz of customers and cafe sounds – all at a level that somehow contributes to my productivity. Who would’ve thought? I’ve augmented that with soma.fm – Groove Salad is is pleasant electronica/chillout – the music keeps me moving, masks outside distracting noise and yet isn’t foreground enough to distract me from my work.

I’m still tweaking these tools and I may add others. Some things work for me and some things don’t – I find that good old-fashioned experimentation helps me find the best mix for my own level of concentration and work productivity. I’ll update you from time to time on what I’ve discovered.

I’ll leave it to others to ruminate about Google’s next move in the “office” space – a document product like Writely or a spreadsheet. I want to talk a little bit about my quandary – should my calendar live online or on my computer?

This would be an easier question to answer if it weren’t for my own particular quirks. I’m obsessive about keeping my calendar entries – all of them – as a permanent document. I’m not even sure why I want to do this – but I can’t shake the feeling that I must do this, nor can I forget the wrenching pain of my hard drive crash in 1997, in which I lost all my calendar data. Recognizing that I can’t change that obsessive desire to preserve this kind of lifedata, I’ve formulated my desire for an online calendar product around the following short list of requirements:

• The online calendar must feature simple, easy functionality – Ajax or near-Ajax functionality
• The online calendar must sync effortlessly, in the background, with any desktop software I might use to access my calendar during those increasingly rare times when I find myself offline
• Any handheld or smartphone I use must be able to sync either with the online calendar (my first choice) or the desktop software. In any case, all versions of my calendar should display exactly the same information within minutes of an addition or change to the calendar on any device I’m using.
• The online calendar must be capable of exporting its contents to a file, for archival purposes.

Seems so simple, and yet it’s not easy at all, is it? Six years ago, I used the Yahoo calendar, clunky by today’s standards, and synced it to my Outlook calendar, until Intellisync stopped working most of the time. That first attempt at an online calendar fizzled. Then I used Outlook to publish my calendar to the web. That was nice for getting a view of what I had going on, but the web page version was static and I had to remember to publish the page regularly. And then, of course, there’s always been my trusty Palm handheld. I’ve owned three of those over the years, all of which offered easy syncing, but it wasn’t automatic.

So, where do I find myself today? In the past 6 months, since switching to the Mac Powerbook, I’ve tried iCal but have settled on Entourage as my calendar application. This morning, I activated my Google Calendar, and began the round-about process of getting my calendar from Entourage to Google: not as easy as one would like. I opened iCal, imported the Entourage calendar, exported from iCal to a file, and imported the file into Google, which accepts iCal format. At this moment, I have a great looking Google calendar that works wonderfully. Using a private iCal feed offered by Google, I can now open iCal and see my Google calendar. iCal syncs to Google every 15 minutes, but it’s a one-way sync – if I add an event to iCal, it won’t add it to Google. And where’s Entourage? It’s sitting quietly on the other side of the room. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it won’t subscribe to the Google calendar, nor will it sync to it. What about my handheld? Don’t even ask; it’s not WiFi or EVDO capable.

This is not the way things should be. All of this content should sync across platforms, even when the companies are competitors or rivals or sworn enemies or whatever. Perhaps Ray Ozzie’s Simple Sharing Extensions will be the carrier for this new platform interoperability.

Or perhaps I’ll be able to make the transition to a life online. This is hard for me to do, and I think the biggest reason is “that’s not how I was raised.” Software on my computer has always been the basis for the majority of my interactions. Even GMail ports to my Entourage email software – I rarely compose an email on my browser. It’s probably a generational thing. As WiFi and EVDO have given me continuous high-speed access to the web, I’ve brought my cluster of software packages along for the ride.

I find myself thinking a lot about my workflow patterns. In a world of GMail, GCal, Writely, etc., do I need Microsoft Office? Or any other flavor of a computer-resident software package? Can I be comfortable making the transition? Which means, do I have automatic syncing for those rare times when I’m offline? And do I have the kind of export capability I want for archiving?

Don’t expect this to be resolved anytime soon. No obsessive geek makes a quick and easy decision.

So, without further ado, Massively Useful Resource:

Inbox Zero is Mann’s continuing series on getting control of your email inbox. It’s among his best work, synthesizing some of the GTD concepts with a variety of other approaches to stay on top of an avalanche of email. He covers software and techniques, all of which are helpful, but I think his best work is in addressing the right attitudes with which to approach email – what email is for, how do plow through it, what’s important and what’s not.

I’ve followed the series religiously and added several of the techniques to my own arsenal, and the result is an email inbox with 7 items today, compered to the 50-100 emails I used to be dragging behind me. My system is far from perfect but I’ve not only been able to take care of my email faster, I’ve also felt more organized and more in control than ever, and that improves one’s sense of well-being immeasurably.

I recommend both 43 Folders and Allen’s book!