They made the following points:

• Email is driving people crazy. Email is beginning to swallow people’s lives and they don’t quite know what to do about it. Malcolm Gladwell
• If you are not awake at 2:00 a.m. in the morning when a discussion is going on among your colleagues, you lose. Joseph Finder on the use of Blackberry’s

I make an outrageous claim in this blog – that every issue of Time Management can be resolved by improving the practice of one or more of the 11 fundamentals.

Of course I could be very wrong, but I am willing to be proven wrong, and perhaps in the process discover a new fundamental!

Anyone have any problems that are just plain intractable? I’d love to test out my theory in this regard.

It’s very simple – for every important piece of email, send a reply, even a short one, to say one of the following messages:

1. Thanks
2. It’s received and will be acted on and here’s the promised due date
3. To ask a question

I think that this is a great suggestion, and the idea is to delete the email once a reply has been sent. I’m experimenting with this approach to see what comes of it, once again with the goal of achieving a Zero Inbox.

http://go-jamaica.com/jobsmart/view_article_details.php?id=233

http://www.genuinecuriosity.com/genuinecuriosity/2007/
10/productivity-an.html

Well, I found a website that might be serious.

Check out this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/default.aspx

I also found the following mesage board, again for serious discussions on Outlook:

http://www.office-outlook.com/outlook-forum/

In any case, it’s a good list made up of the absolute best thinking to be found anywhere on the planet.

The Top 100 Productivity and Life Hack blogs:

http://www.collegedegree.com/library/college-life/top-100-
productivity-and-lifehack-blogs

So, I present this interesting list of tools with a caveat – employ them in your habits cautiously, with an understanding of how they impact the fundamentals.

Having said that, have fun!

Here is the link – http://urlcut.com/tips4-2time

Here is an excerpt:

Time Out of Mind

In 1784, Benjamin Franklin composed a satire, “Essay on Daylight Saving,” proposing a law that would oblige Parisians to get up an hour earlier in summer. By putting the daylight to better use, he reasoned, they’d save a good deal of money — 96 million livres tournois — that might otherwise go to buying candles. Now this switch to daylight saving time (which occurs early Sunday in the United States) is an annual ritual in Western countries.

Even more influential has been something else Franklin said about time in the same year: time is money. He meant this only as a gentle reminder not to “sit idle” for half the day. He might be dismayed if he could see how literally, and self-destructively, we take his metaphor today. Our society is obsessed as never before with making every single minute count. People even apply the language of banking: We speak of “having” and “saving” and “investing” and “wasting” it.

In a way, that’ s a good thing. After all, who wants to take a trip to a foreign country for the purposes of relaxing only to discover that the environment you are visiting is more stressful than the one you are leaving behind? If productivity is correlated with stress, then certainly one would want neither when visiting a Caribbean destination in order to take a break from the rat-race.

On the other hand, doing business in the region can be a problem.

From my experience, there are simply many more professionals at all positions who exhibit many of the behaviors of people who are swamped. Their email in-boxes are full. They forget appointments. Their cell phones can accept no new messages. They miss deadlines. Phone calls go unreturned. In short, they cannot deal with the volume of time demands that life throws at them.

This is considered quaint when the guy selling you a coconut forgets that you ordered from him 15 minutes ago and you have to wait. He grins and says “No Problem Man!”

It is a problem when he happens to be the driver of the bike who is supposed to deliver the critical engine part to the fire station that evening. He forgets, rendering the engine inoperable, causing the truck to be unavailable when you call 119 (not 911) in a panic that night and the truck takes an hour to arrive. As you lose the roof of your dream-house, it’s not so quaint.

One thing that I have gained from living here in Jamaica after a 20 year hiatus in New York, New Jersey and Florida is that productivity can easily be taken for granted, and no-one has figured out how to pass on this gift when it’s missing on a large scale.

In other words, it’s the difference in productivity between the life in the U.S. and my life in Jamaica that inspired me to create the 2Time system.