Commonplace Pages

… companies are increasingly realizing that employees need to be disconnected from time to time and that “giving workers time to chill helps ultimate long-term productivity.”

Productivity…. and creativity, I would argue.

If you need to make sure there’s nothing urgent, then quickly look at your e-mail but don’t get bogged down in all the nonemergency stuff. And if you’re like most people, there will rarely be anything you need to respond to immediately.

A colleague once recommended that you really only have two emails in your in-box: one that you can file to “follow-up” when you have more time or one that you can respond to quickly (or urgently). Everything else can be ignored. It’s been a huge time saver.

You can choose how many messages to recent messages to show (from 25 to 1000), how many lines are shown in the preview, and toggles to show your avatars in your accounts screen and the ability to use Priority Inbox (if you are using Gmail).

Priority Inbox sounds like an excellent reason to start using Sparrow.

I agree with Khoi. Email isn’t perfect but it works better than any other medium. I placed a note on Facebook not to message me there. FB messaging a huge step backwards. And frankly, Gmail makes email just that much better. 

Khoi’s post reminds me of a statement a colleague said the other day… @huang_apiaries said (paraphrasing here) he was looking forward to the day when FB messaging, Twitter DMs and other “messaging intermediaries” just simply consolidate and call it email.

My inbox has become my primary source of guilt.

I’m in the same boat. What is the best way to get a hold of you, Tina?

And a brilliant list and excellent charter from TEDChris.

… the priceless knowledge that email is now yourbitch, not the other way around.

I’ve been using this for a week, thanks to @amyoleary, and have to say that it’s pretty effective… when I actually sit down and prepare to “play.”

“The future of messaging is more real time, more conversational and more casual,” said Andrew Bosworth, director of engineering at Facebook, where he oversees communications tools.

I think this whole paradigm of feeling connected but not connecting is going to be a huge issue in the future.

I have found myself messaging my nieces and nephews on Facebook rather than email cause I sense they’ll actually read it there.