Posts tagged Cleaning
Cleaning Up SEJ Author Bio Links by @lorenbaker
May 21st
Dear SEJ Contributors & Readers, Thank you for everything you have contributed to SEJ and your participation in our community, comments & social media. We’ve noticed a major trend in our writer bios. About 90% of our bios include exact match links, extra links and other links to multiple companies. In an effort to clean [...]
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30 Days With Inbox Zero: Cleaning Out Messages – And Stress
Apr 15th
I get email. A lot of email. Between my teaching and contract work, notifications from social media services, messages from friends and family, and all of the pitches I get from public relations and marketing people from around the planet, I average 5,500 incoming emails per month: which is something like 183 per day.
My goal, to clear out every one of those emails from my Inbox. That’s right, Inbox Zero: an empty-and-stays-empty folder of incoming email.
Some 95% of my email is handled with Gmail. I know I have expressed concerns about Google‘s commitment to its free services, but the fact is that I have not found another universal, multi-platform email service that gives me all the features and level of access I need on my phone, tablet and computers. The addition of two-factor authorization pretty much sealed the deal for me.
Like many people, I have multiple email accounts. I have a ReadWrite address, a school address, my old Linux.com email, the user ID address from my Internet provider, my personal Google Apps account and my very first Gmail account, which I use to access the various new services that Google for some reason doesn’t let Google Apps users access.
All of those accounts are shunted into one Gmail interface, which makes things pretty simple. I can reply from any one of these accounts, archive into helpful folders and (my favorite) use canned responses to politely inform PR people that no, I am not interested in following up on their pitch at this time. (This is important, as I learned from former ReadWrite colleague Jon Mitchell, because if you don’t answer, they’ll keep pinging you, thus increasing your inbox traffic.)
For a long time I’ve had every intention of keeping my Inbox clear as possible, and have gone on massive delete and archive sprees to cull my Inbox down to 50 or so messages that must be dealt with. But then, invariably, things get away from me, and suddenly I have hundreds of emails – read and unread – sitting in my Inbox, demanding attention. Then, when they don’t get any, I’m forced to stare at their mocking reminders of my failures as a productive member of society.
The Inbox Zero Theory
About a month ago, though, I stumbled on Kevin Rarick’s Inbox Zero for Life approach. It didn’t seem like that much extra work, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
It should be noted that Rarick did not coin the term Inbox Zero – that honor apparently goes to Merlin Mann, creator of the 43 Folders productivity blog. In 2007, Mann gave an hour-long video presentation on Inbox Zero for a Google TechTalk.
Mann’s basic idea is to go into your email system fewer times per day and once in there, to touch each message as few times as possible. Kill it, answer it right away or shunt it into a to-do system where it’s filed as a task. What Rarick added is a nuts-and-bolts guide to applying these ideas to Gmail.
The overlap between Mann’s concepts and the Getting Things Done productivity system that I already like to use - plus the fact that Rarick has fashioned this system focused on Gmail – made it very attractive to me. So off I went.
The Inbox Zero Plan
The first thing that you should know is that you don’t have to use Gmail. Any mail client will do, but it helps to be as familiar with it as possible. The less time you spend futzing around with menus and mouse gestures, the sooner you can clean out your Inbox.
For Gmail, Rarick recommends turning on keyboard shortcuts for the user interface, which I initially thought was nuts. Not that I have a problem with keyboard shortcuts; I cut my teeth on emacs, so the keyboard is my friend. But using shortcuts on a Web-based service? Weird. But it’s actually a good idea, and if your email client has similar tools, use them.
Another thing to try before you start the process: implement weapons of mass deletion. You can easily search for all email older than a certain date and archive it, but there could leave a lot of cruft taking up space in your Inbox file. Better to go in and kill it.
Some friends recommended using the free beta service Mailstrom.co. Once you grant it access, Mailstrom will process your Inbox by sender, date, subject… nearly any way you can think of. Even though it took a week for my turn on Mailstrom’s waiting list to come up, it was well worth it.
Using Mailstrom’s nicely laid out interface, I quickly highlighted messages from shopping or social media sites. With two clicks, I highlighted them all and archived or deleted them as needed. It was, frankly, beautiful. (The only issue is with Mailstrom is that once you move to Inbox Zero, you almost don’t need it anymore. At that point, Mailstrom’s daily reminder messages become a thing of irony, indeed.)
Once I finished the mass culling, I followed Rarick’s system to mute messages (press m), read and archive (press e), answer or take action in less than 30 seconds and archive (e) or star and archive (se) any messages that need more than half a minute’s work.
Actually, I varied that a bit. Rarick suggests turning off the Priority Inbox in Gmail (which I recommend) and using the Starred list as a functional to-do list. Since I already use Omnifocus as a task manager, I decided to change this up a bit. Instead of starring and archiving, I press (option-l) to select the URL of the Gmail message, then open the New Action dialog in Omnifocus to start a new task and drop the URL for the message in the task’s Notes field. It’s a little extra work, but it keeps my tasks in Omnifocus and still gets my Inbox clear.
You could also use programs like Evernote or Remember the Milk in the same way.
Otherwise, I followed Rarick’s system as recommended.
The Inbox Zero Results
After a solid month of using this system, I have to say I was impressed. I almost achieve Inbox Zero on a daily basis. Typically, there’s five or six messages sitting there at the end of each day that I would rather not make a task for – I’ll get to them in the morning.
The process did not take a huge amount of discipline, which was nice, and I did find that I was compelled to check my Inbox less and less, because I knew there wouldn’t be 100+ messages waiting to haunt me. That was even better, because it noticably lowered my stress levels.
There were some bumps. Occasionally I got a little overzealous with the (e) key and archived something on which I should have taken action. Eventually I learned to slow down a bit, and those hiccups soon faded.
Traveling – or any disruption in my routine – seemed to throw me off a bit. Every time my daily schedule was interrupted, my Inbox would fill up and it would me a little more time to clear it out.
Overall, I am very happy I achieved Inbox Zero, and it still seems to be working. I am even content with the occasional Inbox Five or Inbox Six, which are both a lot better than Inbox 10,534.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
View full post on ReadWrite
Long Island Chimney Cleaning, Alliance Chimney Launches New Website … – PR Leap (press release)
Apr 14th
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Long Island Chimney Cleaning, Alliance Chimney Launches New Website …
PR Leap (press release) Long Island Chimney Cleaning, Alliance Chimney Launches New Website & SEO Marketing Plan. Embed Code: <a href='http://www.prleap.com/pr/201849'>Long Island Chimney Cleaning, Alliance Chimney Launches New Website & SEO Marketing Plan … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google’s Spring Cleaning, Or, Why You Can’t Trust The Cloud
Mar 21st
Google has gotten to be pretty good at introducing cross-platform services that bring productivity and efficiency into our daily lives. But increasingly one has to wonder: why the hell should we care about services that, like every other in the cloud, could disappear at any given moment?
This week alone, rumors were out about Google Babble, a new effort to combine the different communication services (like Talk, Hangout and Chat) into one client/platform.
Then there were the confirmed efforts to hook third-party apps into using Google Drive, which would enable Google to act as the repository for application generated data.
Finally, just yesterday, the new Google Keep app for Android debuted, a service that, if it gets more features and maturity, could give Evernote a run for its money. But I have to ask myself, why in the world would I want to use a service like this from Google when they could, with two magic words, arbitrarily decide to drop the service if it doesn’t work out for them?
Those words? “Spring Cleaning.” (Or, “Fall Cleaning,” depending on the date.)
Now, in full disclosure, I am very unlikely to use Google Keep anyway, since I still – still! – can’t seem to integrate Evernote into my life.
But even if I were inclined to use Keep, “spring cleaning” comes back to remind me that putting my trust in Google services is becoming a bad idea.
It’s Always About The Money
Let me be blunt: spring (or fall) cleaning for Google is really a breezy little marketing term for “we can’t figure out how to monetize this, so it’s gone.” Looking at the most recent spring cleaning blog from Google, which lists the closures of APIs and services that Google will no longer support, that certainly seems to be the case. That, or they’re changing things up in order to get increased revenue from existing services.
Google Reader, of course, was the service that got the most attention in this latest round of spring cleaning, with good reason: a service that’s been around since 2005, has tens if not hundreds of thousands of users, and Google just up and decides to ax it. It is particularly irksome for me, since I use Reader as the main service provider for my Reeder app on iOS and OS X. I’ll do the manual extract and import using Google Takeout, so in the long run, I’m only out an hour of work time.
But here’s the thing: what other services does Google have that could get spring cleaning treatment someday?
I notice, for instance, Google News doesn’t have ads, nor will it in the near future, because the only thing that keeps most publishers from suing Google is that Google doesn’t generate direct revenue from Google News. (And even that doesn’t stop some publishers.) At what point does Google look at the amount of effort they put into News and see they’re not getting the expected returns?
Google Voice, which provides voice-over-IP, voice mail and transcription services users, does have a Skype-like freemium model, where the voicemail and Google-provided phone number is free, but making outbound international calls from the U.S. costs something. With a little revenue coming in – and, possibly, integration into Babble on the horizon – maybe Voice won’t be on the chopping block.
More Ways To Revenue
There are other ways to get revenue than ads, of course. Google + doesn’t have ads (now), but Google has been pushing +1 functionality on ads in their Display Network for quite some time, so there’s revenue being generated in there.
My fixation on ads is unfortunate, since an ad-free world would be nice. But nothing in life is free, and without some way to generate money for a given service, eventually that service will have to be shuttered or changed into something that can pull in the revenue – something I might not like.
Google has gotten to the point where, try as they might, they can no longer afford to keep services sans revenue going indefinitely. As a publicly traded company, they can’t. Google has to demonstrate to shareholders at the end of the day that they are doing everything possible to generate more revenue.
Am I saying that it is never okay to trust Google? That’s going to depend on your level of trust. As a consumer, my personal comfort zone is becoming seriously encroached. I look around at all of the Google-based services I use (Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Voice, News) for work and personal use and wonder if this road I have traveled with good intentions isn’t leading me to a very troublesome spot.
Beyond Google
The fault lies not with Google alone, either. This is a whole cloud services concern. I won’t use Keep, but I am trying to use Evernote and I do use Omnifocus. Comixology stores the comics that won’t fit on my iPad. Trello manages my workflow. Amazon holds movies and TV shows that my family have purchased.
So what happens when one of these companies goes belly up? Or their servers go down? Or there’s a payment mix up and they decide to kill my account? These are problems that would range from pain in the ass to outright catastrophes, depending on the circumstances.
There is a mythos in the U.S. psyche that we must own things. Own a car, not lease it. Buy a house, not rent. But cloud services increasingly put us in the position of renting, or putting up with unwanted features (ads) to get something for free.
And, even if we do “own” something on the cloud, it’s far more ephemeral than storing it in the physical world. I can own a movie on a DVD, and, sure, it can get lost, stolen, damaged or destroyed here in my house. Nothing in life is permanent. But in the cloud, things we buy are even more out of our direct control, and subject to the technical, legal and financial whims of the vendor holding our stuff.
If anything, Google’s spring cleaning is a great reminder of those whims, and a wake-up call to anyone thinking about any cloud service. Go ahead and use what you want, but always make sure you have an exit strategy in place for when you want to leave, or the cloud vendor decides to close the store.
Image courtesy of Google.
View full post on ReadWrite
Carpet Cleaning Company in Falls Church Partners with SEO Marketers to … – PR.com (press release)
Dec 29th
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Carpet Cleaning Company in Falls Church Partners with SEO Marketers to …
PR.com (press release) Locally renowned carpet cleaning company "Tony Carpet Cleaning" partners up with SEO experts "Prospect Genius" to bring superior cleaning services to the greater Falls Church VA area. Falls Church, VA, December 29, 2012 –(PR.com)– A recent … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Atlanta Cleaning Service Partners with SEO Company to Connect with Local … – Virtual-Strategy Magazine
Jul 5th
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Atlanta Cleaning Service Partners with SEO Company to Connect with Local …
Virtual-Strategy Magazine G.I. Cleaning Solutions, LLC, a local residential and commercial cleaning service in Atlanta, has recently partnered with Prospect Genius, a local leader in online advertising. | Virtual Strategy Magazine is an online publication devoted entirely to … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Cleaning Service in Gaithersburg Signs with SEO Marketing Team to Entice More … – Exec Digital (press release)
May 16th
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Cleaning Service in Gaithersburg Signs with SEO Marketing Team to Entice More …
Exec Digital (press release) As part of its new Web campaign from leading SEO marketer Prospect Genius, Ana's House Cleaning Services, Inc., is more accessible than ever through local Internet searches. As a result, homeowners and business proprietors throughout the greater … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Cleaning Service in Gaithersburg Signs with SEO Marketing Team to Entice More … – PR.com (press release)
May 16th
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Cleaning Service in Gaithersburg Signs with SEO Marketing Team to Entice More …
PR.com (press release) As part of its new Web campaign from leading SEO marketer Prospect Genius, Ana's House Cleaning Services, Inc., is more accessible than ever through local Internet searches. As a result, homeowners and business proprietors throughout the greater … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Shuts Down One Pass, Related & More in “Spring Cleaning”
Apr 20th
Google has announced a “spring cleaning” round of product closures, continuing its drive toward a “simpler, more beautiful user experience across Google.” CEO Larry Page has demanded that the company slim down to focus on its “big bets,” unifying its offerings under the identity service of Google+. What got the axe this time?
Google will shut down One Pass, a micropayment service for Web publishers. It offered publishers different options, including subscriptions, metered access, freemium models, coupon discounts and single article sales. Google only charged the normal 2% fee for Google Checkout payments.
It was a neat idea, but Google has recently rolled out a different scheme to pay for online content: Google Consumer Surveys. Rather than asking users to pay with real money, Google allows publishers to monetize their opinions instead. It allows marketers to create surveys that pop up for users, paying for the content they visit. It costs survey creators $0.10 and up per response. The user just pays with his or her time.
Google Related is going away. It was an extension of Google’s browser toolbar that showed related content alongside the pages one browsed. “The product isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like,” Google’s announcement says, and the team will be moving on to apply the same skills to other Google products.
The Google Talk mobile Web app is going away. Google recommends the native Android app or third-party chat clients available on other systems.
Google Sync for BlackBerry devices will be shut down on June 1. Google recommends other services that will let BlackBerry users sync email, calendars and contacts.
The Google Flu Vaccine Finder was built for a specific need during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. It’s being passed on to HealthMap.
Google has decided to redirect the Google Patent Search page to Google.com. The team has improved patent search functionality on the main search engine, so it surfaces the same information faster than the dedicated Patents page did.
Google is deprecating Picasa for Linux, launching a version for the WINE Windows emulator, which Linux machines can run. It’s also disabling downloads of the Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac and the Plugin for iPhoto, suggesting the dedicated Picasa Mac app instead.
Finally, for developers, Google is deprecating some old APIs, and it has also adopted a new deprecation policy with a one-year timeframe and clear explanations of the process.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Spring Cleaning Your Website
Apr 11th
While it’s great to focus on new and exciting projects to expand your marketing reach, every now and again it’s important to take a fresh look at your website. Is your site buried with junk? Evaluate what junk you’ve accumulated and clean house now!
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
