Caring equals productive

One thing that people don’t often mention when they’re speaking about productivity is that productivity relies a lot upon someone actually caring about the project on which they’re working. It’s quite obvious when you think about it. People will be better at, try harder at and spend more time doing things which they want to do when compared to tasks they don’t want to do. I think that’s very clear and I doubt anyone would argue against that fact. The problem with this whole concept is that in our daily lives many of us have to do things which we don’t particularly find enjoyable or want to do. There are a couple ways of dealing with this problem.

The first way is to find a way to care about your work. Find things you enjoy about it, take pride in your expertise and your effort and claim ownership of the project. Make it your own and as something that is inseparable from you, it will start to matter more and more to you as a person. This is essentially what I’ve done when dealing with IT. When I did IT in the military, I didn’t particularly find the environment or the job itself very appealing, but I found ways to care about my work. I cared about my reputation and about how people viewed my projects. I cared about the protection, maintenance and development of my assets. I made everything my own and I cared what happened with it. I worked to make myself indispensable and respected and although I didn’t see my ultimate future in IT or the military, there were things about it that I did enjoy. I think I was more productive than most people an I don’t know many people who cared about their work more than I did. This approach can earn you trust, friendship and respect even if you aren’t keen on staying in the field.

The second way to deal with the problem is to stop doing work which doesn’t excite you. This is easier said than done, as most people these days tend to specialize in one field and it is often difficult to find employment in a new field without further education or experience. In 2007, I decided to get out of the military. I wanted to pursue freelance writing. I didn’t have a degree and I wasn’t going to work for anyone. I moved with my wife to rural Scotland and I ended up having to do some IT work to get by. While I have done a few paid writing jobs and I am working on some projects on my own, this didn’t end up being what I had hoped it would be. I don’t really consider myself a failure in this respect. At least I can say I tried. I took a risk and lived a life and challenged myself. Some of it was bad timing, some of it was inexperience and a lack of understanding about how to proceed. I still want to be a writer, and I intend to pursue that goal for the rest of my life, unless something inside of me changes. My methods of attaining this goal may change occasionally, but in my head the end is still the same.

So what I’m saying by this in my own simple way is that you shouldn’t live a half life just getting by, doing what is required but nothing more. You should live to produce and create, whatever method you choose. Whether you choose to learn to care about what you already do or choose to pursue something you already care about and learn what you need to know, do either one with all of your available energy. Either path will bring you good things.

Make Gmail Your Productivity Center – Part 1

When people talk about Google Mail (You may still call it GMail, like I do) they tend to describe it as just another webmail site, albeit a good one. While this is true, there are many tools available which can make GMail into a powerful productivity system, capable of organizing your work or life. While I don’t know everything about every tool available, I’m going to show you some things which I do that tend to make things easier for me. Stick around and take a look. Part 1 is below.

First let’s talk about what you can do by default, without ever adding additional functionality. Aside from sending and receiving mail, you can organize it in some pretty interesting ways. One great way to do this is to use labels and filters. If you head to your settings, you can see what I mean.

Labels are simply that – labels. I can label a message anything I want which makes sense to me. Some people like to label messages by the sender, some people like to do it by content, etc. It’s pretty easy to create a new label. Just head to Settings and go to the Label tab. From there, all you have to do is type in a name which makes sense to you and click the Create button.

One thing I’ve found very necessary is to label messages which are very repetitive. For example, as a Twitter user I get a lot of messages notifying me when someone follows me, when I get messages, etc. This is quite common these days for lots of services, whether it be Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca – well, you get the idea. While this is great and it allows me to see what is going on to some extent on my various social networking accounts without having to log in to the applicable website, it also clutters up my inbox. This is where the coupling of labels and filters comes in. I tend to make individual labels for each service which emails me, so if I get a message from Twitter it will come in and be dropped into the Twitter label. If I get a Facebook message, it is dropped into the Facebook label. It goes on like this for each service I use, each email group to which I’m subscribed, etc. The way you can do this easily is to apply a filter to incoming message which sticks the appropriate label onto the message and archives it so that it doesn’t clutter your inbox. See below for some screen shots which illustrate how you can implement this yourself.

Filter Settings 1
Filter Settings 2

You may have noted above in the second settings screen shot that there are some other interesting ways you can interact with your email using filters. It isn’t hard to think of ways that you could use this functionality. For example, you could use filters to eliminate common junk mail or spam by deleting it or by filtering it for review. You could also forward messages of a certain type to another email address. You can also use something called a canned response, if you enable it in your labs tab. This can be an extremely useful tool, especially if you find yourself often creating the same sort of email over and over again or if you’d like to send a standard response to a common question you receive via email. All you’ve got to do is enable the option, write the email content, and then select the option to save it as a canned response. After that, you can call upon it in new emails or send it as a standard response with filters. I’ll stick some screen shots below for your benefit. Other than those, that’s it for Part 1 of this article. Head over to Part 2 now.

Canned Response Option
Canned Response Save
Canned Response Insert