Results tagged “e-mail”

Until now I always had a very simple e-mail signature, with just my name and usually one of my web sites. But now that more and more people are active on several social networks, I have created a new signature with links to my profile on several social networks and even a link to download my vCard. What do you think of it?

 Jeroen Sangers • www.jeroensangers.com

El Canasto: Productividad Personal
Brain Tags: Themeless blog

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Image taken from Luis Suárez

Last weekend I attended the Evento Blog España conference in Seville, and one of the more attractive talks on the schedule was called 2.0 services and technology in business by Luis Suárez, technology evangelist at IBM.

Luis explained how he stopped using e-mail completely and replaced the functionality by a variety of web 2.0 tools, each specialized for a specific task. When he started talking, I remembered how Tim Ferriss also 'attacked' e-mail in his book.

email exists to stay on top of things,… I am much more interested in getting to the bottom of things

Via Adventures in Home Working

Op 6 oktober ontving ik een mailtje van een andere Nederlander in Lleida. Helaas ben ik door mijn gebrekkige IT kennis dat mailtje kwijt geraakt, en heb dus je e-mail address niet meer. Kun je me a.u.b. nogmaals een mailtje sturen of me even bellen? Sorry voor het ongemak!

The productivity guru of the moment, Tim Ferriss, writes in his book how he was able to reduce the amount of e-mail received by setting up an autoresponder to tell that he only reads his e-mail once a day and that it is better to phone him for urgent matters.

I believe him, when he tells that this technique has reduced his e-mail load significantly. But what he doesn't tell is what happened to the number of telephone conversations he received. In my case, I notice a clear increase in telephone calls when I am very busy and cannot answer e-mails within the usual 12 hours. And guess what, when I am very busy, the last thing I am waiting for are telephone calls! When somebody phones me, that person decides what I will be doing for the next two minutes and when I will give attention to him (now!), while with e-mail I am the one deciding who should get my attention and when.

Tim's trick only works because his workload is very low. When you're workload is higher and you need to spend more time in the zone, it makes more sense to change your voice mail message to tell people that you can only be reached by phone during one hour a day and that they get faster response when they send their inquiry by e-mail.