Today We Will Discuss Meetings
Photo by psd/Flickr.
Meetings are, in concept, get-togethers for sharing our experiences and thoughts, voiced out loud, informing and inspiring each other. Meetings end up, in practice, as case studies in dysfunctional group psychology, producing the miraculous result of people actually wishing they were back at work.
Why haven’t we solved the problem of meetings? Because the problem of meetings is like the problem of jerks. Meetings, like jerks, will always exist because humans are very human. But we can strive to be less jerk-ish (jerk-esque? jerk-like?) about meetings. That’s all we can really do, but it’s worth trying.
Oh, and let’s just say, right off, that perhaps the major raison d’être for Dispatch is to prevent needless meetings over documents, drafts, versions, what Person X thinks about Detail Y, and so on. You can do that in Dispatch, with team members and outside viewers, with messages, and all our built-in tools. Now, onto some smart meeting tips.
Does your meeting have a follow-up plan? How about an end product?
My friends at productivity blog Lifehacker write about meetings quite a bit. Sometimes the advice doesn’t all fit together nicely. But sometimes they end up hitting a few nails right on the head.
Take this post about meetings, with the blunt headline: “If You’re Not Making a Decision, Sharing Information, or Brainstorming, Don’t Have a Meeting”. It is supposed to point to an article at salary site PayScale, but that link is dead, and all you really needed was that headline, anyways. What decision, information, or new idea do you need to come up with?
Okay, so maybe you’ve got a purpose to your meeting. What are you going to do on the off chance your team is really killing it at 4pm on a Monday? Who makes sure that it gets implemented, and how are they going to assign that work? Or, as Inc. magazine puts it: “No leader + no documentation + no follow up = waste of time. “Documentation” doesn’t mean extensive minutes, just a few lines about what needs to happen after everyone goes back to their desks (or YouTube playlists).
Use the right video meeting software
Need to record a teleconference? Use Skype. Have Google documents, videos, or a screen demonstration to share? Get a Google Hangout going. Got someone borrowing a friend’s laptop? MeetinBurner to the rescue. These and other factors we have weighed, listed, and charted out in our video conferencing shootout post.
Try walking whenever you can
If everyone has the kind of shoes that can go a few blocks, if the weather’s decent, and if you’re not talking about anything that’s too confidential, put the meeting on a path, not in a room. So suggests experienced executive and TED talker Nilofer Merchant. Merchant’s point, well taken, is that we all do a lot of sitting at our actual jobs, so meetings should be something different, something that’s a bit healthier, and something with a built-in time limit.
“But, semi-anonymous blog author,” you argue, “what about taking notes?” Is that really the crucial point of a meeting, to generate a document? As Merchant puts in:
I’m appalled by people’s disingenuity here. Because often, we’re not talking notes on our devices during meetings. We’re doing e-mail. Or we’re surface skimming for the tweetable line. We’re not engaging. Dividing our attention is like living on a diet of cupcakes: bring us short-term happiness but long-term emptiness.
Make meetings occasionally fun
If every meeting is about problems, deadlines, and crucial decisions, nobody wants to go to meetings. It reminds me of how they teach you to train your dog: mix up rewards for doing things with simple praise, and never call the dog to you to punish it, or it will fear its own name.
Not that you should treat your employees like dogs, but, you know, they need to have their expectations changed. Every so often, make meetings about something less drastic. Arielle Patrice Scott, then marketing director for Storenvy, told Fast Company about her firm’s Friday show-and-tell meetings.
Think about it: give everyone a simple task of bringing one cool thing to Friday’s meeting. If your office is in a city, you can bring a restaurant recommendation. If you’re a bunch of computer nerds, bring one neat site or extensions or tool to check out. Coffee nerds can talk about beans, typography wonks can haul in a book, and … well, I don’t know exactly what salespeople do for show and tell, but let’s assume they have cool things, too.
Like the other tips above, adding a show-and-tell or other fun element to a meeting is about getting away from what you have learned to dislike about meetings: sitting, talking aimlessly, traveling somewhere you don’t need to be, feeling a need for artificial seriousness. Try something new, so you don’t just sit there and feel like a jerk.
Using Dispatch as a Collaborative Writing/Reporting Tool
Here is a paradox about writing, specifically writing that involves facts, interviews, research, and that sort of thing.
You, the writer, want as much data and input, from as many sources and experienced editors and coworkers, as you possibly can gather up. Links to obscure eBay auctions? Notes from a lunch conversation someone had about your topic? Images snapped from a cellphone on the sly of the obscure headquarters? Yes, please: you will take all of that.
But you don’t want that material spread across 20 emails, five documents, and three notepads. Nor do you want to invite everybody into your notes. A writer’s notes are usually very sacred. They sometimes contain information that not everybody should see. There might be editor’s notes, which can seem demeaning to those who are not privy to that special kind of sadistic draft-revise-revise relationship. Most of all, you don’t want to let others in on the huge mess of disconnected thoughts and facts and directions your piece has generated, before the final piece is done. Just look at Bob Woodward’s early Watergate notes; that mess eventually gave rise to a Pulitzer Prize.
Okay, so how does Dispatch come into this? Let me walk you through a recent story I wrote that involved lots of sources, notes, and details that could have come together in a system that would have worked better than One Gigantic Google Drive Document. It’s a dramatized reenactment, of sorts. Like Rescue 911.
Bringing editors and coworkers into your work
First, I create the Dispatch for the Pack Club, a secretive social organization I’m writing about. I could invite only coworkers and editors to this initial Dispatch, and call it “Pack Club - Insiders,” and create a separate dispatch for friends and sources. In this case, I’m assuming that everyone I invite is smart enough to keep their mouths shut until publication time.
I entered Jesse and Alex into my initial dispatch. If I want to add more, I can click “Invite new team member” and either type in their email addresses, type their name as listed in my Google Contacts, or simply email them an easy join-up link that pops up.
Those people I’ve invited can now contribute their own bits and pieces to the story: notes about the theme, ZIP files full of images, and documents or spreadsheets or whatever from Dropbox, Drive, Box, and Evernote. And if they’re one of those hard-bitten journalist types who lives entirely through email these days, that’s not a problem; they can mail a message directly into the Dispatch.
What’s nice about Dispatch as the center of your writing project is that it saves you from a lot of work that isn’t writing, researching, and getting the story. Each piece you put up can have discussions around it, and those discussions stay tied to it. Your bits and pieces have read-only previews. You don’t need to explain Google Drive commenting to anybody, or Evernote sharing, or Dropbox file sync. You just show them what you’ve got, and ask if they have anything to say.
Getting one-time, single-item feedback
But let’s say you’ve got one particular item that you want to share with a person or a group, to get their take. But you don’t want to invite that entire group into all the documents you’ve assembled. Easy enough: click the item, then click “Share” in the upper-right corner. As we’ve noted, the people you’re sharing with don’t even see the comments on that item, just the item itself. You can keep them in a separate channel, and avoid setting up your editor and a source/advisor for a fight over a tossed-off statement one of them made.
Non-reporting uses
The above scenario involves a reported piece with sources, facts, documents, and that kind of fedora/shoe-leather stuff. If you’re writing a long blog post, a letter, or a Medium essay, you can still put Dispatch to work, even if the only thing you’re really looking for input on is the text itself.
Share that text through the “Share” link. Make it easy for others to view your Drive document or .txt file in Dropbox. Get feedback, avoid cross-comment fights like you see on Facebook, and give trusted friends and reviewers full access to your piece, so they can post new revisions or notes with big-idea feedback.
That’s how I see Dispatch as a tool for collaborative journalism and writing. But I’m just one writer. What did I miss? What would you like to see available to make Dispatch better for writers? Email us, tweet at us, or reblog this with a comment.
What Your Office Can Learn from Our Coworking Space
Note: This is a post by our writer-in-residence, Kevin Purdy, who teamed up with three other nerds in Buffalo, NY to start CoworkBuffalo. We asked him to tell us about what he learned about teamwork, productivity, and setting up workspaces for this post
CoworkBuffalo is not a masterfully designed workspace with airy and modern aesthetics or ergonomic consultants. Neither is it the product of genius marketing or clever social media campaigns. Hang around the space long enough, and you will hear founders say things like, “Wow, we paid the rent!” or “One day, all of our lights will work.” Yet the space is still open, adding new members, and connecting disparate threads of Buffalo’s disparate creative community.
In other words: our book of knowledge isn’t the prettiest you have seen, but it has many good and hard-earned tips in it for anyone looking to set up a space where people want to work and get work done.
Here is what me and my co-founders—Nick Quaranto, Brian Fending, and Dan Magnuszewski—learned about working spaces, communities, productivity, and teamwork by setting up a boostrapped coworking space.
The Space Itself
Make it easy for people to ask for things: Other than the phone booth, the giant whiteboard Nick took from an RIT dorm, and the ideas we stole from the internet, the best suggestions have come from the people who work at CoworkBuffalo, not the founders who tried to anticipate their needs. So you should make it really easy for workers to suggest the best ways to fix up their work space: email reminders, a “tips box” (online or physical), and rewards and/or praise for those who help out.
The founders discussed, argued, and dreamed up elegant cable management systems for many cumulative hours. Some were expensive, one was a tricky thing involving under-carriage baskets, many didn’t work with IKEA gear. Then one day, about a month ago, one member said: “Hey, they make multi-plug power strips with really long cords. You could get one of those.” Palms met foreheads, Amazon tabs were opened, and now nobody is in rolling their chairs over their cords or testing the magnetic release on their MacBooks with their ankles.
Don’t sweat the bike shed stuff: It’s important to understand Parkinson’s law of triviality, often termed “bikeshedding.” There are big plans and small details in every project, and people with any tangential involvement will feel free to comment on the small things, because they have some form of experience with them. The big stuff, the issues the leaders have to sweat out? Yeah, well, those are important, but—hey, what if you painted the walls this shade of green?
In other words: everybody will have an opinion on coffee mugs, wall art, and staplers. Give those things far less time than you give to the big things: good chairs, inclusiveness, and making work something people want to come and do at your space.
Let workers discover the neighborhood, don’t guide them
We drew up a list of every place to eat we could think of near CoworkBuffalo, arranged by rough proximity. Dozens and dozens of spots. It hardly ever gets a glance. As with office features and amenities, it’s better to let newcomers find little things they like about the space around your space, than give them a corporate-style “directory.”
Have fresh coffee: I’m a coffee snob, but if I really boiled down what I care about, it’s freshness. Having hot, recently made (and maybe recently roasted) coffee on hand for your workers is more than just a base beverage service. Coffee and tea, in any space, in almost any situation, serve as something that brings us together, gives us something to talk about, and often fixes things.
You know who said it pretty well recently? Jerry Seinfeld, semi-ranting to NPR:
It’s legal. It’s not expensive. And they have a whole world for you with all their little words. It’s just something to do. My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time. This is a great way to do it.
… I think the answer is we all need a little help, and the coffee’s a little help with everything — social, energy, don’t know what to do next, don’t know how to start my day, don’t know how to get through this afternoon, don’t know how to stay alert. We want to do a lot of stuff; we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.
Working Etiqutte and Practices
Before they met at CoworkBuffalo, most of our daily and weekly members were total strangers. Now they’re tapping and calling and coding along beside each other. What makes that work:
Respect the headphones: I do this annoying thing to one of our co-founders, where I tap the table near him, or tap the corner of his MacBook, when I really need his attention about something happening right then (lunch, coffee shortage). Otherwise, when his or anyone else’s headphones are on, you do not disturb them. You might have a really funny thing to share, but once you see their face after they remove their headphones and completely shut down their workflow, you won’t think it was that important. You might be able to hear that they don’t even have any music going, but do not disturb them.
(Need good headphones? Here are the ‘phones the Dispatch team use in an open office)
People tend to cluster, and that’s cool: One of our biggest fears with our space was that it would feel too cramped. It’s not huge to begin with, and with laptops, cords, lunches, bags, and more, we thought maybe we just didn’t have enough room. We were wrong.
Turns out that even the most stereotypical anti-social and heads-down of workers like to work together. We have another room that doubles our space, and many days it goes unused, as up to eight people make use of a rectangular set of desks in a single room. This is, after all, the entire reason we set up a coworking space and chose to leave the comfort, dual monitors, and fridge access we have at home. Don’t discount the value of people.
Balance productivity with creativity: My favorite thing about coworking is bumping up against new ideas from people working in different fields, with different friends, and different values. My least favorite thing about coworking is when it’s nearly 4 p.m. and I realize that I’ve invested far more time in conversations than product I can actually turn in and sell. Those conversations have made work better, and maybe inspired some future ideas and projects, but I’m still in deep trouble for the rest of the week.
Some spaces and offices institute “Quiet Hours,” where it’s expected that nobody will blurt or Youtube-blast anything—not even a quick “Unacceptable!” from the Earl of Lemongrab. Most times, our space settles into a natural groove at the spaces furthest away from arrival, lunch, and closing time, but quiet hours is an idea we’ve been considering. Before we implement it, we’ll poll our workers and see what they think.
Be honest about what’s missing: All of the founders have work to do, just like an office manager or boss has work to do. Multiple times per day, somebody asks (hopefully not while headphones are on) if there is more coffee, or more printing paper, or why the printer isn’t connecting, or if we have any stamps, or if there’s a trick to connecting to the Wi-Fi.
Sometimes it’s a two-minute job to help someone out, and sometimes the answer is “No.” But every single time, it’s smarter to be honest about a shortcoming of your space. If you’re out of paper, don’t just say, “Yeah, I’ll pick up some on the way back from lunch.” Admit that you need to get regular supplies of paper, and that you don’t have them because you’re crunched for time at the moment, or maybe the office is running lean. People can relate to other people being in a tight spot; people find it much harder to relate to and empathize with a statement they’ve heard six times before.
Be honest about your successes and failings at making the best possible space for everyone to work. Always.
Again, CoworkBuffalo is far from the leading source of office design inspiration or productivity ideas; you might try reading REWORK by the 37Signals founders as a starting point. But we did learn a lot about what makes people productive,
IFTTT: THE MAGIC CLOUD-MASHING ROBOT
Dispatch makes it easy to discuss and collaborate using great cloud services, like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and Box. Working those little clouds, and staying alert on what’s happening in them, is up to you.
But fear not! There is an amazing, near-magical robot you can quickly build and enlist to help you manage all those little things floating around. That robot’s name is IFTTT, short for If This Then That. It’s not really a robot, but it’s not just a cool website, either.
“If this, then that” is how programmers plan out interactive programs: “If the year entered is in the future, ask that it be re-entered.” But If This Then That, the webapp, doesn’t require any code knowledge, workflow diagrams, or attending conferences with terrible jokes. You think of something that happens in one place, and ask that it cause something else to happen.
The quickest way to get started, and start thinking out recipes, is to check out all the sites and programs IFTTT supports. All of the tools you can use in Dispatch are supported, and many, many more. There’s a lot of social media stuff, many file storage services, and a few intriguingly powerful tools: Date & Time, SMS, Weather, Stocks, Email, and Phone Call. Just with those tools alone, you could create some intriguing combinations, or “Recipes.” Send yourself an SMS whenever the weather condition changes to “Rain,” perhaps. Or email you whenever a stock hits a certain price point.
But there are plenty of services that offer those kind of notifications. Let’s try something a little trickier, and more human. Pretend your uncle just started using Instagram on his new iPhone, and you want to give him some encouragement. At the same time, you just started a new job, and you don’t have the time or tenure to be browsing through phone pictures every hour, looking for his stuff.
You can click the Instagram channel to log into Instagram with your account, and scroll down to see the possibilities. Other users’ recipes can give you an idea of how Instagram can be worked. In this scenario, let’s say you wanted to get a little ping every time your uncle posted to Instagram. Easy enough: click “Create Recipe” at the top of IFTTT, click the “This” link in the primer sentence, choose Instagram, and select “New photo by specific user” as the trigger. Pick out your uncle’s username and enter it when prompted.
Now decide the “That,” or what happens whenever IFTTT sees a new Instagram photo from your uncle (which happens very quickly after it goes up). You could have those photos downloaded and copied into a folder in your Dropbox space. You could send links from all those photos over to an Evernote notebook you created. You could have an email sent to your mother, letting her know that her crazy brother is back at the photo thing again. You get the idea: have one thing cause something to happen in another thing.
But you don’t work with your uncle; your app-to-app needs are more practical. So check out some of the recipes you can copy to move things between the apps that Dispatch supports.
(_Note: Most of these recipes can be reconfigured for any service you like; that is, “upload the attachment to Google Drive” can easily be tweaked to “upload to Dropbox,” to Evernote, or to Box_)
Google Drive
Evernote
Dropbox
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“Dropbox Dictaphone” (record audio notes-to-self to be stored in Dropbox)
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“Convert and send books and documents (PDF, doc…) from Dropbox to your Kindle as ebook”
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“Forward top candidate emails, download resume & cover letter”
Box
I could go on about IFTTT for a long, long time—believe me. If you’ve got the IFTTT itch, or found it useful for working between services (like Dispatch!), let us know about it in the comments, or tweet at us.
Your Butt is Precious. Put a Good Chair Under It
I was sitting in an IKEA in Burlington, Ont., and I mean really sitting: rapidly, in five different chairs every minute, with intent and critical thought. I was with Nick Quaranto, who was also sit-shopping, and we were debating what kind of chairs we needed for the coworking space we were launching in Buffalo, NY.
“Well, we could get more of these chairs for less than the others, and use the remains to buy other stuff,” one of us said.
“Yeah, but our core business is sitting,” the other one said. I honestly do not recall who said which line, because we came back to it about 10 times. When you think about it, a lot of us are sitting for a living. If someone came forward in time from, say, 1885 and saw you working, they’d see you sitting. So many people spend so much time figuring out which shoes are perfect for their 15-minute run, or which headphones fit their ears best for their 20-minute walks. We almost never pay enough attention to an apparatus that supports many of us for more time than we spend sleeping each day.
Give us a little of your attention, then, and we’ll reward you with some tips and upgrades. For your butt. The butt you use quite a lot.
Get up every 20 minutes
The most important thing in sitting is not doing it too often. Sitting all day will kill you. Take every opportunity you can to interrupt your sitting time, especially if that means walking around. In any case, standing up, walking over to get water, or doing anything other than eating is a very good idea.
Get a good chair from someone else
Regular NPR listeners are probably tired of hearing about the Herman Miller Aeron chair, but it is a favorite among geeks and work-from-home types. The Dispatch offices have a Herman Miller Mirra and a Steelcase Leap, both procured from a furniture reseller who specializes in grabbing gear as companies go out of business.
In general, second-hand but high-quality is a good option. Good chairs don’t take much long-term abuse from the simple act of sitting, and companies on a downward slope with lots of expensive office furniture are often eager to unload their solid assets quickly. Craigslist and other community forums are another place to look, as professionals moving to another city often aren’t eager to lug all their gear with them.
Try a standing desk for a bit
As mentioned in our post on office hacks you can get done this week, a standing desk is a trend you can try out without committing to entirely reeducating yourself from what you’ve known your entire life about work and sitting—you can knock out a Standesk 2200 for a bit more than $20, give or take some shipping and availability.
What does this have to do with chairs? As you ramp up from standing for a few minutes at a time, to an hour, to a few hours, a super-nice chair that completely fits the contours of your body and your work schedule become less and less of a dire necessity.
Try a non-chair chair
Not to sound like those folks who were down the hall from you in college, but have you ever thought about, like, a chair that isn’t a chair? Right? There are some intriguing and mostly non-ridiculous options.
Take the ErgoErgo, which looks like something from a playground and, actually, kind of is something from a playground. But it’s more chair-like than the kinds of exercise balls that some folks use as office chairs, but which might not be all that beneficial to posture, at least in measurable studies to date.
Accept that there is no perfect chair
Slate nails it in a fascinating story about chair design, in which you see the makers of chairs veer wildly between “extreme comfort” and “rigid posture correction” roughly every decade. The chair that works best for you is, honestly, the chair you like:
… The word ergonomic has become utterly meaningless. Though there is more—and better—research than ever, there is still no standard way to define whether a chair is ergonomic or not. And there is no widely agreed-upon way to measure how successful a chair is.
That said, you can often get a good idea of what you like in a chair from seeing how much others like their own. What chair are you sitting in every work day?
Now you can share your posts with anyone!
Dispatch helps your team discuss and organize your projects, and the more you use it, the more of your work starts to “live” in Dispatch. We wanted to make it easier to share that work beyond your team. To that end, today we’re introducing the ability to share posts with anyone via a Share Link, whether or not that person is part of your team. They don’t even need a Dispatch account.
The post will stay up to date, just like it does inside Dispatch. To keep your team discussions private, people visiting the post via the Share Link will not see any of the comments made by you and your team, just the post itself. And to give you control, you can easily see which posts have active Share Links, and you can disable them at anytime from within the Dispatch.
We’re grateful to be a part of you and your team doing great work together, and we hope these sharing features make it easier to share that work wherever you need to.
Check it out and please let us know how you like it!
Four Add-ons that Make Your Browser a Better Place to Work
Web browsers were once something that you had to get passed to you on a floppy disk from someone who had the right BBS dial-in numbers, or thrown into something like Microsoft Plus!. Now there’s a web browser that is its own operating system. We spend a lot of time pointed at the web. It’s a smart move, then, to invest in tools that make your viewing window more comfortable and productive.
What follows are some extensions—sometimes called add-ons—for your browser that will make it, for most people, a better place to work and explore. The suggestions come from the Dispatch team, who pretty much live inside little boxes of HTML like this one.
Oh, and Dispatch also has a little add-on that works with any browser: a Post to Dispatch button (actually a bookmarklet!) that you can click on any web page or document to share it with your team. The less time you spend copy/pasting, the more you can actually think.
Passwords: 1Password or LastPass
1Password (Chrome, Firefox, Safari; iPhone, iPad, and Android)
LastPass (Pretty much every browser, device, and system)
Allowing your browser to save your web passwords when it asks is a bad idea. Even if that browser can sync them online and with your mobile devices, browsers are not good at storing passwords securely. More than that, you might be out of luck if your computer goes haywire or a laptop gets stolen. By keeping your passwords online but securely encrypted, and instantly available everywhere, tools like LastPass and 1Password make passwords so much easier.
Me, I like LastPass, in part because of its universal availability (even on Linux) and its deeper features, like two-factor authentication, USB key credentials, and disallowing international log-ins. Jesse prefers 1Password, which started off as a Mac/iPhone password tool (and has the nice looks and integration to show for it), but has since grown to embrace more platforms. Either tool is so much better than browser saving, Post-It notes, and your mental recall that it’s entirely up to you.
Photo editing, light or almost-Photoshop: Pixlr
Working at Lifehacker for a few years, I learned very quickly the value of a tool that fits into a fast-moving flow of work. 90 percent of my posts didn’t require the creation of elaborate multi-layer graphics or beautiful drop-shadows, but simple cropping, resizing, sometimes retouching, and the occasional centering or free-select cut-outs. I don’t have a Mac and don’t really do much creative work, so I don’t have any Adobe products to my name. Web-based graphics editing tools seemed to come and go: Picnik (bought by Google), Aviary (turned app toolkit), or just didn’t fit (Sumo Paint, among others).
Then I discovered Pixlr, which just worked, even in a low-powered Chromebook. With the extension installed in Chrome or Firefox, you can grab a page, a whole scrolled-down page, or just a portion of a page, or simply right-click on an image. Then you can send that captured bit either to the Express or the full Editor, or just share a quick link to the image. Pixlr Express is great as a quick retouching, cropping, resizing tool, but the full Editor is truly remarkable. It has literally most everything people might need from a Photoshop-like tool, including import of Photoshop PSD files. Gaussian blurs, levels and curves, layers and histories—it’s not everything, but it’s more than I can use, and it’s all so very fast. No idea how much longer a great free tool can stick around, but here’s hoping.
Distraction Reduction: OneTab
OneTab (Chrome only)
OneTab is the latest browser add-on to make people wonder, “Hey, why doesn’t the browser just offer this already?” As noted on The Atlantic’s Tech blog, the extension is really just one little funnel-shaped button. But then:
With one click to the funnel, OneTab will swoop up all your tabs and give you just (you guessed it) one tab containing a list of all the links you’ve been keeping open for just way too long. It does so with a nice, relief-bringing animation too.
So OneTab optimizes on two levels: mental mindfulness/distraction, and computer memory/battery. It’s a handy way to stow away everything you’ve got open so you can focus on just one thing. The only caveat is that it doesn’t stash away tabs you’ve “pinned” in Chrome. Then again, you might ask yourself: what is so important that I can’t possibly step away from it, just for a little bit?
Boomerang for Gmail (and Google Apps)
Boomerang for Gmail (Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
You should totally act upon email when you encounter it: do, delegate, defer, or delete. And you should not use your inbox as a to-do list, or a reminder system (or, you know, a productive place to discuss projects and files. But to all earnest rules of productivity, there are exceptions. Like when you know people will lose your email if you don’t send it right before an event. Or something you put on your calendar, but you just know it’s going to slip you by.
Install Boomerang, hook it up with your Gmail/Google Apps credentials the next time you open Gmail on the web, and you’ll now have two neat features. One is “Boomerang,” which lets you send away an email and have it come back to you at a specified time. There is also “Send Later,” which is what I like to call the “Insomnia Camouflage Tool.” That is, you’re writing emails at 2:43 a.m., but you can have them go out at 7:45 a.m., so you look like a go-getter, not an unbalanced soul.
Those are just four browser add-ons that we think most people will find to be truly handy. We are open to suggestions: email us at hello@dispatch.io (no matter what time of day), or tweet at @Dispatch, or hit us up on Facebook.
