The Round Up #25

Hey Everyone, as usual welcome to all the new faces around here. Since I’ve published my guide to Obsidian.md markdown I’ve seen 10% growth in the Round Up Subscribers week-to-week. The amount of visitors my website gets has also increased by 100% since I published that silly guide. If you’re one of those people and you’re here for the obsidian.md content, I am sorry to disappoint you but I don’t actually create that much content about obsidian.md. If you have any specific Obsidian.md content that you’d like to see, let me know. I am open to suggestions.

I am planning on doing a blog and video in the near future on my Obsidian.md workflow. I’ll let you know when that is out.

So what’s the point of this newsletter? This newsletter is where I share cool ideas that I’ve found around the internet. You can find previous editions of The Round Up here

How to spend significantly less time on email every day

Tiago Forte has this incredibly practical article on how he spends only 17mins a day on email each day. That may sound like a lot, but for someone like him who is answering 100’s of emails each day this is quite the accomplishment.

The problem

Most people, myself included, get caught in this worm hole when it comes to email. You see, you get different types of content in your emails.

1. Conversations
2. Purely Informational
3. Entertainment

And it’s so easy to get distracted by the constant context switching.

And these different types of email should illicit 6 different actions according to Tiago. We’ll go through those in a second. But, why is this cocktail of information a problem when it comes to email? When email first came around it was for one thing, and one thing only: Sending and receiving messages from peers. It was a dumb virtual mail box. Now, over-and-above conversations, we can get invoices, receipts, events, newsletters (Hey!), reminders, instructions and many other types of information. Your once boring inbox has now turned into a treasure trove of distraction.

A 2018 survey report by Rescue Time of over 500 knowledge workers from companies of different sizes established that Knowledge workers spend 29% (about 2.25 hours) of their workday on communication through email and instant messengers.

The Solution

According to Tiago the solution is the One-Touch philosophy. You should only touch each email once, and when you do, you should be doing one of these actions:

1. Replying
2. Archiving
3. Send to a task manager
4. Send to a reference app
5. Send to your calendar
6. Send to a read later app

This method works because you’re plowing through your email faster than ever before. First, you’ll reply and archive all your conversations. Then, you’ll read all your newsletters at once, like your Dad used to read the newspaper at the breakfast table. All your tasks will go into your task manager, and events into your calendar.

Your email inbox, shouldn’t be your do-all productivity software, instead it should be the inbox or in-tray where the process starts. There are other applications that are far better at doing what we try make our email inboxes do.

You can read the full article from Tiago here

Something from me

Once when I was drinking a really bad cup of coffee at Spur I had this idea that I like to call “The Customer Retention Triangle”. The basic idea is that attracting and keeping customers is a triad of principles:

1. Price
2. Convenience
3. Value

If a business masters any two of those principles they’ll attract customers. You can read more here.