Here’s something I learned this morning – how to quickly set up a Gmail filter to delete multiple annoying messages. This may not be news to most of you but as it was a new discovery for me, I thought I’d share it.

Find Annoying Messages – you know those ones that you find yourself deleting day after day after day from the same people? Some of them will be from mailing lists you signed up for when you decided you really were doing to take your diet seriously – this time, I mean it, I really, really mean it – until you re-discovered the delights of the Timus Tamus.

Check Annoying Messages – Of course you can open up the emails and click on the link to unsubscribe yourself from the mailing list, but this is much quicker. Until today I didn’t realize I could filter multiple messages at once.

The you tell Gmail you want to “Filter Messages Like These”:

Gmail creates an “OR” boolean filter which you can then tell it to delete.

So from then on, I hope, Gmail will automatically delete (or you could tell it to mark them as read and archive them, just in case you might want to read them later) all future emails from any of those addresses.

Okay… only 549 more messages to deal with this morning before I deserve an espresso….

After a week of mucking about, I seem to have finally found a semi-friendly way to synchronize my Google Calendar with my Dopod 810 Windows Mobile 6 device.

First – the background.

As regular readers will know, I have been trying to transfer my “productivity” applications (which seem to take up more time fixing stuff than actually making me more productive, but that’s another story) from a Microsoft-desktop-hellishly-expensive-hard-to-backup-full-of-bugs world to a Google-stored-in-the-cloud-nothing-to-install-free-and-open world.

And it ain’t easy. But it can be done. Almost.

On the desktop, I’m currently running a Windows Vista PC with Office 2007.

My phone is a Dopod 810 running Windows Mobile 6.

My preferred email service is Gmail and my preferred Calendar is Google Calendar for the reasons hinted at above: you don’t need to install anything (except a browser), and they are backed up in the cloud, so you don’t have to worry about losing important data when your hard drive crashes. Oh and did I mention they are free?

Now – email is pretty easy. On the desktop I’m running Gmail through the Thunderbird client for reasons explained here.

The bigger challenge is the calendar. When Google came out with Google Calendar I was very excited and wanted to use it straight away. The big challenge is how I access it on my mobile device. I live in my PDA and want to always have my appointments ready to access while I’m out. I also want to be able to schedule meetings straight into the device. When Google came out with the mobile version of GCal, I switched my appointments over from my previous system which involved synchronizing Microsoft Outlook on the desktop with Pocket Outlook on the PDA.

The only problem, however, with the mobile version of GCal is that…. it sucks. When you open it up in the browser on your PDA, you can see today’s appointments and it’s even easy to tab to tomorrow’s appointments. But you can’t move stuff around. You can’t see what you are doing a week from now without tabbing through a bunch of screens. It’s VERY limited.

The other major problem I have with Gcal is that when I set up my calendar I imported a bunch of recurring appointments from Outlook. When they import into Gcal they are no longer linked as recurring appointments but instead show up as individual daily appointments. If you want to delete them, you have to delete them individually…. and when they appear every day for a YEAR, that’s a pain in the ass.

So recently I decided that I needed to synch Pocket Outlook with Gcal, allowing me to take advantage of Pocket Outlook’s superior client-side functionality until Gcal improves (which I’m sure will happen).

I’ve spent the last couple of days testing apps which are supposed to synch your mobile device with Gcal:

OggSync
SyncMyCal

Unfortunately, despite several hours of playing around with each app, I couldn’t get either of them to work as advertised. After I sent an error message to the SyncMyCal people, they informed me that the mobile version of their app doesn’t currently work on Windows Mobile 6 (my bad – I obviously didn’t read the fine print).

The OggSync app just looks like it’s working… but doesn’t seem to pull anything down from Gcal to my device.

So what I’ve gone with, which seems to work but unfortunately adds a nasty step, is to use the SyncMyCal Desktop version to synch Gcal with Microsoft Outlook on the desktop and then using Windows Mobile Device Center to synch Outlook on the desktop with Pocket Outlook on the PDA.

SyncMyCal is available as a free trial which will only synchronize 3 days of future appointments. The full version costs US$25.00.

When the SyncMyCal mobile version is ready for WM6, they say they will let me know and I”ll pass the news along folks.

About a week ago I installed Thunderbird again and I think I’ve cooked up the ultimate combination of tools for handling email. I was previously (for three years) working just in the Gmail client and while it’s been okay, I have needed a platform and process that allows me a chance to adapt my working process to a higher degree than Gmail does in the browser. I think the TB/GM combination has everything I am going to need.

Here’s what the process I’m currently using.

1. Make sure before you install Thunderbird, you go into your Gmail settings and set the POP forwarding to “new mail only”. Otherwise, if you’re like me, you sit there for hours waiting for Thunderbird to download 2Gb worth of old mail. And, as you’ll find out shortly, you aren’t going to use TB to store email anyway.

2. Once you have TB configured to receive your Gmail (and the latest version of TB makes that very easy), you might want to set up some folders under your Inbox. For example, I’ve got these folders currently set up.

The reason for the folders is that I’m going to be creating some filters.

3. The reason for the filters is that I get a couple of hundred emails each day and I need a good way to prioritise them. So whenever an email comes into my inbox, I try to assign a filter to it so the next time I get an email from that person it ends up bypassing my inbox and ending up in one of the folders. That way I can scan my folders a few times a day and attack the most important emails first.

Why not just use Gmail filters? One reason – right click. I found the whole process of setting up filters in Gmail very slow and frustrating. With TB, you open the email, right click the sender’s email address, and select “Create Filter From Message”. It’s a far smoother process. It’s also easier to colour-code your messages, tag them, etc. And you can drag-and-drop them into folders or into the Trash.

4. Here’s the best tip – once I’ve processed an email, I *delete* it. Yup. Why? Because this is Gmail – access to an old email is a click away by opening up a browser window. No point storing them locally when Google does it for you. So when you re-build your PC you don’t need to worry about backing up old emails. It’s all in the cloud, baby.

So… that’s my current email process. If you have any additional tips to handling large quantities of email per day, let me know.

UPDATE: Something Jodie Miners reminded me of. This solution probably ISN’T going to work for those of you who operate regularly across several machines. These days I don’t travel as much as I used to, so my desktop machine is where I am handling email 95% of the time. When I am away from home, I check Gmail from my phone or my laptop. I can still use the Gmail web interface for these out-of-context situations. However I’m never going to be trying to deal with 200+ emails in these situations, only emergency stuff. The Thunderbird interface is for handling bulk email on a daily basis.

UPDATE 12 July, 2007:
In case you don’t read David’s comments from below, I’ve added these to my TB install! Brilliant!

Another component I’ve added to the TB mix is hooking in Google Calendars using two plugins: Lightning + Provider for Google Calendars, which let me view and update my (multiple) Google Calendars from a sidebar within Thunderbird.

Get it!

Lightning 0.5

Provider for Google Calendar 0.21

I came across this terrific site this morning from a link off of Ryan Rasmussen’s blog. Ryan works for Levenger, a company that sells beautiful writing and paper products. Scott Sherman put me onto them recently.

Anyway, back to DIY Planner. This site has a range of PDF templates that you can print off to create your own daily planner instead of buying the endless refills for your Franklin Day Planner or that you can use to insert into your Moleskine (which is how I think I’m going to use it). What a terrific open source project. I have suggested to Tony Goodson that he invites the guy behind the site onto the Productivity Show.

Tony has uploaded the first episode of the All New Productivity Show! He invited me on as the first guest. We talked about my productivity over the last six months and some of his tips and tricks. Good fun. Glad the show is back.

Ahhh… I cracked open a cleanskin Moleskine last night and have spent some time today wondering how I might hack it.

I tell ya, I don’t know what I did without Moleskines for so long. There is something mystical, magical, intoxicating about them. I swear I get almost as much joy out of cracking open a cleanskin Moleskine as I do turning on a new PC for the first time. There is a sense of exploration, of new beginnings, of promises, boy’s own adventure about it, that I find myself putting the moment off, not sure that I’m truly ready for the responsibility…

This new one is purely for me to write down my thoughts, ideas, inspirations, revelations – no tasks, no productivity stuff, no goals – just to contemplate, ponder, poke at the hidden meanings of my internal monologue.

Via PigPog I discovered my latest hack from moleskinerie - using Excel to create a page index which gets pasted into the first four pages of the new book.

Here’s the one I have put together:

(click on the image to download my Excel template for free!)

It’s set up for 200 pages which accommodates the 192-page ruled notebooks with the pocket, not the tiny form factor (I’ve got a couple of those but struggle to write small enough in them to make them useful).

I simply print it out, slice it up into four separate pages that get glued (using 3M Repositionable Spray Adhesive) into pages 2 – 5 of the new book. I actually like to leave page one completely blank. In the index I can keep a note of the topics I’m writing about in the book for fast future reference.

I also recently learned to keep a page-sized piece of blotter paper in between the current page I’m up to, to stop ink blots appearing on pages from when I shut the page before the ink from my uni-ball eye pen has completely dried. I’m using paper from an art book which I find does a good job and has a nice rough feel to it. I used just a cut-down piece of printer paper before that though, which worked just as well but didn’t have the same tactile texture to it. I’m a very tactile kind of guy. I like to touch.

Anybody else want to share with me their current favourite Moleskine hacks?

Did you ever meet someone so positive, so UP!!!, that just talking to them makes you want to lie down and rest? Jason Womack is one of those guys. Jason is a keynote speaker, professional educator and executive coach. After working for The David Allen Company (Getting Things Done) for seven years as a senior trainer, not to mention running the occasional triathlon, he’s recently started his own company The Jason Womack Company which he describes as “a personal development education company”. I asked him why? “Because I wanted to be a beginner again.”

We chatted today about how he stays so up, what he plans to contribute to the betterment of the human race, how he manages his daily schedule, his tips and tricks for getting things done, and what kind of questions he asks himself.

Read Jason’s blog here. Okay… I need a lie down.

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Whew. I’ve finally reduced my inbox to EMPTY. That took a consistent effort over the last week. At the beginning of the week I was answering emails that were 3 – 4 weeks old. Bad. Very bad. Apologies to anyone I hadn’t responded to in a timely manner. I seriously get something like 100 emails a day which expect an answer or require an action and I need a better system. I wish Gmail had better auto-responding tools. Perhaps it might even be time to go back to combining Gmail with Outlook’s rules?

Ugh. Did I just suggest that? I must be losing it.

Michael Specht is my Productivity Buddy ™. If you don’t have a Productivity Buddy yet, I highly recommend it. It’s one of my better ideas.

Basically Michael and I have a regular 10am Monday morning telephone call where we make sure the other person has completed their GTD weekly review, then we talk over our productivity challenges, tips and tricks.

The topic of today’s call was around self-motivation. Each of us said we had a nice list of tasks to get through this week but the trick is actually DOING THEM and not letting other things get in the way. I’m always getting sucked into replying to email, handling tech support issues, responding to comments, accepting Skype calls, etc. All good stuff, fun stuff, all stuff which needs to happen to keep the business running, but all stuff which stops me from getting the “important not urgent” things on my list done.

So I’m wondering what tips and tricks you folks have for forcing yourself to get the hard, smelly jobs done. Do you have a particular carrot or stick approach? Do you reward yourself or deny yourself with something until the job is done? Got any good blogs or podcasts on the subject you recommend?

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