Blog•
on December 13th, 2011•
I just did an email transfer for one of my clients and we were having trouble organizing the emails within Google Apps / Gmail based upon the original date the emails were received. The emails were all showing as having been received yesterday since the transfer happened yesterday. That created a problem when trying to view emails by the date received.
Here is what I did from the beginning:
- Using Outlook 2011 and IMAP, I backed up the client’s email into a brand new Gmail account
- I then moved the emails from Gmail to the client’s new email account
- In doing so, the emails show up in Gmail as the date they were uploaded instead of the original date the email was received.
The Solution
Get Thunderbird.
http://www.getthunderbird.com/
Thunderbird is an free email client created by Mozilla (creators of Firefox). I installed Thunderbird, added the IMAP instructions for my client’s new email, and they all came in ordered by the date the email was sent rather than the date the email was uploaded to the server. I also found that Outlook 2011 for Mac orders the emails in this fashion, but if you don’t have Outlook 2011, it costs a bit of money to get that.
Blog•
on September 18th, 2011•
I’ve been told that I am very productive in my work. Over the years, I’ve learned different techniques that have helped in accomplishing tasks faster. I’ve also wasted a lot of time. So I approach this topic as one still learning daily on who to better utilize my time to get major projects as well as simple tasks completed.
Luckily, there are so many new tools now that make time management even easier. I’d like to highlight a few of these tools below:
Evernote
Evernote is a free note-taking tool. I use it for everything from shopping lists, clipping online news articles, and collecting notes about particular projects. I will create a folder for a project and then place all notes and relevant information in that folder. With Evernote, I can also share these folders with other collaborators on the project.
For time management purposes, I use Evernote to create a weekly to do list. My boss in my first job strongly encouraged the use of daily to do lists, so I have carried this over from my first job experience. Evernote makes this easy. You can create check box lists. There is something truly divine about putting a check in that box once the task is complete.
With Evernote, I create a weekly table for days Monday – Saturday. I list any meetings or phone calls set up for the day. Then I create a check-box list of tasks to fulfill each day. Under the 6-day table, I write in goals for the week and other big-picture items. This helps me focus the to do tasks around those goals to make sure the given projects are completed by the end of that week. Oftentimes, I will need to move certain tasks from one day to another. That is easy with Evernote as well.
And with Evernote, you can keep up with and edit your to do lists on any other computer, phone or tablet. If you have an idea of something that needs to be completed while you are outside of the office, just add it using your phone.
Email
If you use more than one email account, use Gmail to combine these emails into one location. Gmail allows you to gather all of your emails together into one Inbox and then send from all of those different addresses. This will save a lot of time so that you are not looking at multiple email locations during the day.
Also, there are two main formats in which you can receive your email. One is POP and the other is IMAP. You want to be using IMAP. IMAP allows you to make a change on one device and have it affect all of your other devices. Therefore, if you are accessing your email on your phone and delete a message, it will be deleted when you look at your email again on your computer or tablet. It’s a waste of time to use POP and have to delete messages separately on all of your devices.
On a project time management basis, it is best to set specific times to check your email. If you are working on a big project and are interrupted every few minutes with a new email notification, you won’t make it very far on that project. It’s better to set times during the day where those are the designated email times. I know that is harder for some than for others as some emails do require an immediate response. However, if you can check email in the morning, around lunch, and then towards the end of the work day, you will have more uninterrupted time to work on your projects.
Another time saver for email is setting up filters for different messages. For instance, if you receive emails that you need to keep on file, but don’t need to read, filter those to go directly to the email folder where they should be stored. This saves you time having to move the email to that folder every time it comes into your inbox.
Dropbox
Dropbox is another free tool (at least to 2GB of space) where you can begin saving your files in the cloud. The benefit is that your files are saved in one location that is not tied to any of your work stations. Therefore, if you have an office and also have a different computer at home, and you do work at both of these locations, Dropbox will save you a lot of time emailing files back and forth or saving them to an external drive.
Connect both computers to your Dropbox account and whenever you save an updated version on one computer, you will be able to access it on your other device.
I just ran into the issue of not being able to access the Google Analytics data to which a client provided to me. I have numerous other Analytics accounts showing in my Google Account, but for some reason this one would not show up.
The solution actually ended up being frustratingly easy. Here it is:
- Even if your Gmail account email address is all lowercase (your.email@gmail.com), your analytics account may be set up as both upper & lowercase (Your.Email@gmail.com).
- If your Google Analytics account is a mix of both upper and lowercase, and you try to receive access to someone’s account, it will not work, it must match exactly.
- The way to check this is to sign into your Google Analytics profile – www.google.com/analytics
- Click on Settings in the upper right-hand corner of the page.
- On the next page, you will see the email address as Google Analytics sees it.
- This is the email address to provide someone who is attempting to give you access to view their website analytics.
If you have any trouble, let me know in the comment box below.
Blog•
on April 21st, 2010•
These numbers were just released showing the percentage of overall traffic per social media site:
- Facebook – 41%
- MySpace – 24%
- Gmail – 15%
- Twitter – 8%
My guess is that Facebook, Gmail, & Twitter’s share is rising while MySpace’s share is falling.
Another interesting trend is that Facebook is used as an email client. I was talking to my wife about Facebook the other day and she does most of her emailing with friends through Facebook. Think about it, you choose who can send you messages, so you automatically cut down on a lot of unwanted emails and wasted time by using Facebook as an email client.
Keep this in mind as you consider marketing initiatives for your company. The trend may be moving away from email and towards email clients where the user can control who can & can’t email you. They must trust you.
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