Day: April 27, 2005

Doing the right thing: Rogers Cadenhead

Congrats to Rogers Cadenhead, briefly notorious for his successful domain name speculation exercise resulting in his acquisition of www.benedictxvi.com, for doing the right thing and pointing the domain to ModestNeeds.org, a local charity. He could have made a bunch of profit from the domain, but this is clearly the net positive choice for everybody. I hope the television crews don’t stop calling. I think he should at least get a free trip to Vatican City and an audience, if not one of those hats.

Regarding Dave Winer’s suggestion: I think there will be a healthy amount of blogging about the Pope’s actions and that it should have some central location. But I don’t think anyone going to benedictxvi.com for faith reasons is going to be persuaded by a bunch of critical articles. Setting up popeblog.com or ratzinger.org will accomplish the same thing.

Email productivity tips

Now that I’m back in the real world (that is, not blogging all day long), I am definitely feeling the need to revisit some of the recommendations for time management at 43 Folders. Fortunately Merlin posted a roundup of email and task management recommendations today, including the following (drawn from the three individual posts):

  • Shut off auto-check, or set it to something reasonable like every 20 minutes.
  • Pick off the easy mails—if you can reply to something with a 1-2 line response, do it.
  • Write less.
  • Be honest—delete or archive the mails you’ll never do anything about.
  • Process each piece of incoming email as: delete, archive, defer for later response, generate an action, or respond immediately. Then go back to the response and action items and do them in batches.
  • Outlook and Entourage allow you to categorize task items. Use categories to provide the context around task items. Merlin suggests using functional categories (“chores,” “errand,” “write,” “calls”), computer-related categories, and categories like “agenda” to prevent items from falling off the plate.