Web Worker Daily

All but the youngest of web workers grew up learning not about email but about paper correspondence, as dictated by the likes of Emily Post. I personally learned to type on an electric typewriter in high school, and can write a perfectly polite thank you notecard thanks to the schooling of my mother.

Email didn’t become a regular part of my life until well into adulthood, and I rapidly learned there were no hard-and-fast rules governing the rapidly evolving email frontier. I had to learn with the rest of the world as the rules evolved that “all caps” was the equivalent of shouting, and that it was rude to forward everything you thought was funny to your entire address book.

As email became a more integral part of my business life, the questions about what was the correct way to use it became more complex. And yet I had no Emily Post to turn to for guidance on the correct etiquette in this new form of correspondence. Or at least I didn’t, until I found “SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home” by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. Read the rest of this entry »

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu caught on with the advent of cage fighting in the early ’90s. Now, some 20 years later, we associate this martial art with the brute strength and violence of Ultimate Fighting Championship television shows. But the core practices of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu don’t only belong in the cage. We can apply them to other things, too, like better email management.

The beauty of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) comes from combining three core principles: patience, control and efficiency. These principles can be applied to your email management practices. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine who is new to teleworking was complaining that her overseas prospects wanted to speak with her on the phone. Since she didn’t want to have to pay for international calls, she turned down these lucrative offers. “I don’t want my fees to be consumed by phone bills,” she said.

“You don’t need to use the phone, you can always use voice chat or VoIP,” I suggested.

“What’s that?”

It seems that not everyone who sets out to do web work knows how to establish their communication methods. There are many tools that allow us to sidestep more traditional — and usually more expensive — means of communicating with our clients, such as client visits and phone calls. For those who are just starting out, here are your options: Read the rest of this entry »

I love Gmail. With it I can flag emails and sort my mail into folders, have multiple email accounts forwarded to one Gmail account, and it has great calendar and map integration. I have my email with me wherever I go: I can check it on my iPhone, on my MacBook Air, or on a friend’s computer. I also have elaborate auto filtering and tagging systems set up to make sure all my client emails stay sorted. Oh, did I mention offline mode? I can have all my emails downloaded to my computer so I can see them even when I am not online.

Recently I discovered a new Labs feature that makes me love Gmail even more: the “Send & Archive” button. Read the rest of this entry »

How many times have you wished for a simple and easy way to create and export email lists by mining your email inbox?

Wait no more! Clear Context, a San Francisco-based start-up that makes an in-box management plug-in for Microsoft Outlook has come up with a new product called, Contact Exporter for Outlook. Of course you will need their inbox management plug-in, a for-pay product.

The Contact Exporter is a beta feature in ClearContext IMS v4 that lets you create and export groups of email addresses found in messages stored in the Outlook folders you select.

What it essentially does is create a list of email addresses found in messages from a set of folders users choose. And these can be used to create distribution lists. You can create say, an email list for a birthday invite and export the list in the CSV format. You can export files and import them into any application that will allow you to import CSV files. Facebook and Socialzr are two such web services. I think this export feature is quite handy. If you want to know more, check out their website.