Web Worker Daily

Recently, I posted about singletasking, a new trend that many are turning to after having burned out on multitasking. One key component of singletasking is setting aside blocks of time during which you check and deal with email, instead of having it interrupt your work flow continually throughout the day. Ignoring email is probably the most challenging aspect of singletasking for me, and I suspect the same is true for many web workers. Read the rest of this entry »

As a web worker, I’m typically attached to my laptop. But there are times when using the computer isn’t particularly practical, like when I’m driving. Checking my email on the road is significantly easier if I don’t have to type anything — such as with Voice on the Go. The service allows you to check email, schedule appointments, send text messages and complete many other tasks just by placing a call on your cell phone. Read the rest of this entry »

As web workers, we are often asked to help friends and relatives fix computer problems. For me, the majority of these problems seem to be related to email. It’s ironic, as email is now less popular than social networks.

So why is email such a hassle?

• It’s more than 30 years old. Email has come a long way, but its underlying protocols haven’t changed much since the 1970s.
• It’s really three different systems. Sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP or IMAP) are totally separate functions, and are often handled on different servers. That’s why I often hear comments like “I can receive, but I can’t send” from clients.
• It’s being used for a lot of things it was never designed to do, like send images and attachments, highly formatted messages, signatures and calendar entries.
• It’s been overrun by spam, and even well-designed spam filters aren’t perfect, and cause unwanted side effects, like messages that get misidentified as spam, or just go away.
• Email software is too complex. These programs that were originally built for offline use; that is, they were set up so that users could read and write messages without being connected to the internet. Sending and receiving would happen in batches. That made sense when internet connections were slow, expensive and charged by the minute. Now that most people have always-on connections like cable or DSL, that process is less necessary. Desktop email client software is a pain to set up and use; as someone who helps many people with email, Outlook is the bane of my existence.
• Many of us connect to the Internet in more than one place — at work, at home, and on cell phones. It can be very frustrating to realize that we’ve left the message we needed to reply to at the office.
• Many of us have more than one email address. I try to keep my work and personal email separate, plus I have a series of email addresses that I use when registering on websites that might try to send spam. And I have several email addresses that were given to me, such as the ones that are automatically created when signing up for instant-messaging services like Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live/MSN.

What can be done to overcome these problems? Here are some tips that might help you and your clients and friends be more productive. Read the rest of this entry »

Whenever I feel like I’m battling to get writing done, and losing, I can hear my mom saying, “You’re human, not a machine.” She’s right. We’re all going to have days when we hit the wall and can’t muster up energy to do our main jobs. And that’s OK!

Instead of feeling guilty, I do other tasks that matter to my business but aren’t my main job, tasks that don’t require the same energy or “mood” as writing does. Whenever the writing muse decides to take a break without my permission, I can work on editing or reviewing tasks instead.

But even if I don’t have any reviewing or editing lined up, there are some tasks that almost everyone can do, guilt-free, regardless of your career. Try one of these next time you hit the wall. Read the rest of this entry »

For one of my new projects, I had to sign up for GetResponse, an email marketing service. Since I had to get a subscription anyway, I wondered if there was a way I could use the app to improve my freelance practice. Email newsletters are often used for product promotion, so why not use it to  market my services?

While it might seem to be too late for me to hop on the email marketing bandwagon, I see very few options that offer the same effectiveness for reaching my customers, particularly with my client base. Many of my clients aren’t tech savvy, which means they don’t have social-networking accounts, so I can’t contact them using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Also, I doubt that many of them return to my web site after we’ve started working together.

In order to maximize the effectiveness of my email marketing campaign, I had to plan what kind of messages I would send to my customers. Here’s what I came up with: Read the rest of this entry »

Sitting here scanning my email, I shake my head at the worthless information I see in many “From” and “Subject” lines. Not only do the poor choices I see make it harder to figure out what’s in the emails without opening them, but also the senders are risking recipients skipping their messages altogether.

The following are examples of what not to do. Read the rest of this entry »

After reading Aliza’s post about how she organizes her email, my biggest piece of advice in using Gmail is to embrace the organizational chaos. I’ve been using Gmail for over three years, and I use it as my primary email. I have a dozen or so email addresses, but they all get forwarded to Gmail. I use it as my central inbox for everything, so my email volume in that one inbox is high.

Prior to Gmail, I used Outlook for email, which has a less-than-optimal search capability. In other words, if I didn’t file an email into the proper folder, my chances of ever finding that email again were slim. When I first started using Gmail, I brought this filing behavior with me, and I obsessively tagged and labeled everything. I ended up with a bunch of labels that I probably didn’t need. At some point, I realized that Gmail’s search facility is so amazing that labeling and filing every email became unnecessary. Now, for most emails, I read them, respond if necessary, and archive. All without bothering to give them labels.

Now, to contradict myself. I also make extensive use of Gmail’s filtering capabilities to automatically add labels to some email. However, I reserve this capability for the really important stuff, like client email — you know, the people who pay me money to do stuff. I want to keep careful track of those emails. Read the rest of this entry »

Organize email? I must confess I use the term “organize” loosely. As I examine my own system for sorting and filing emails in Gmail, I cringe.

For many years, I used Eudora as my email client. I loved it. I could back my emails up easily, and I could create folders, and folders within those folders, and could further nest folders as deep as I wanted them. So for example, I could have a “Clients” folder and, within that, have a folder for each client, then within each client folder, have one for each project I was working on, and then also have an “Archival” folder to dump past project folders. I felt so organized. Read the rest of this entry »