Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
Powered by: newtelligence dasBlog 2.3.9074.18820
Disclaimer The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
E-mail
I find it interesting that Scoble is having a hard time sticking with GTD, but is finding that ClearContext is helping him manage his mail.
I think the fact that Scoble understands the value of a prioritization system based on something other than the intrinsic meta data of an email is a sign that the tools of today, are not suitable for the volumes of email that some of us receive. ClearContext just scratches the surface of what’s possible when your entire work life is driven via mail.
On “What’s the next action” I found this interesting post.
GTD is about habits, not software. Don’t worry about what software or outliner to use. Learn the habits first and keep it simple.
This is why I happen to love ClearContext and hate the NetCentrics GTD Add-in. The NetCentrics addin is waaay to prescriptive and not flexible enough. I find it too heavyweight, meanwhile ClearContext is just there to help me, not force me. This is the reason I wrote my own Getting Things Done Add-in that only does one main thing. It helps me to create tasks from email w/o mucking up Outlook so dammed bad with views and other nonsense.
To illustrate…
I recently took a two week vacation and didn’t take my laptop. I checked my hotmail account 3 times on vacation and my work account zero. Upon my return I checked my mail and found 800 unread items in my inbox (I left with zero). By Monday I was down do 90. Today I have 10, and will have zero by Monday morning. You know what helped me get there? ClearContext and David Allen’s book which I haven’t read in 18 months. I have a system now that’s far better than what I had 19 months ago, but I don’t follow GTD to the tee. That’s ok, cause I do what works for me. As I’ve said before. The book is not written for people who get > 100 message a day in their inbox. To deal with that you need to find your own way, ClearContext helps you get there but doesn’t solve the problem completely. Software never will; you need to find a system that works well given your work style, and work environment.
This is now the second vacation I’ve taken this year that was email and work free. Both times I got from hundreds of messages to under 20 in about a day using ClearContext and GTD. I’m getting closer and closer to Zen.