Email, Still A Sonofabitch!

Just about two years ago, I went off the deep end. I had come home early from an event in an effort to do something responsible: email. I was on the road and knew the situation would be dire (since I had not been checking my email all day). I was wrong. IT was a  disaster . It may as well have been Inbox Trillion. There was  NO way I could get with All My Sanity intact through IT. So I did The only  logical  Thing.  I Quit email .

It was both an experiment and a statement. I decided that I wasn't going to respond to email for an entire month. And while I did cheat a little (I would still check it from time-to-time in case of emergencies and to delegate some work-related items that couldn't wait), it was without question one of the best months I've ever had.

I was decidedly less stressed out. I found myself enjoying the internet more. I no longer dreaded opening up my laptop or looking at the push notifications on my phone. And guess what? If someone really needed to talk with me about something, they figured out a way. Funny how that works.

And yet, the good times couldn't last. The month came to a close and  I was back on email . While I don't think I actually missed anything in my time away, the sheer ubiquity of the medium and the realities of life brought email back into my life full time.

And I hate it more than ever.

In the months and now years following the experiment, a number of people have asked for an update on my epic battle with email. The good news is that a few things have gotten much better. The bad new is that everything else has gotten much worse.

After my experiment, I tried a bunch of different things to make my email situation more tenable. What I ended up coming to was a system where I would be checking email constantly throughout a day, responding to what I could quickly from my phone, archiving anything that didn't need a response, and keeping the rest in my inbox until late at night, when the incoming volume would drop to near zero. Anything that wasn't timely would then sit in my inbox until the weekend when the incoming volume is uniformly lower.

It was a bit like letting pressure build up (quite literally, you might say) and releasing a bit of it at night so my inbox wouldn't explode. And then releasing the rest of it every weekend. And then starting over on Monday. Every Monday. Forever.

This was my life. And while it was manageable, you know what? It still sucked. Because I would find myself getting gradually more and more stressed out throughout the week as I saw my inbox grow and grow leading up to the weekend release. It made me more stressed out on Friday than on Monday. I now somewhat dreaded the weekend. Email time.

Then one day a  CrunchFund  portfolio An idea by Company asked ME to run. That Company, Orchestra , had they learned from What Army was planning to take to-do and make a new Kind of Switch app email client. That, of course, became  Mailbox .

The moment I First Heard The idea from,  I knew  IT was a winner. It was essentially taking a lot of what I was manually doing with email and streamlining the process. And they were doing it in an extremely smart and even sort of fun way, using the native niceties of modern smartphones.

Mailbox quickly became my most-used app. It still is. It basically alleviates the pressure build-up in my inbox by allowing me to release it constantly throughout a day. Brilliant.

But also sort of an illusion.

I'm not alleviating the pressure by responding to emails right away. Instead, I'm pushing them off to deal with at a later time. My system of Responding to The Weekend is on or largely Emails at The Same Night, I NO longer have to Simply  Watch  Up Until I am Ready to build those Emails take Action.

Now, don't underestimate how wonderful such a system is. IT's a system that will continue to improve and with that automations and The Mailbox now has like The Resources of  them behind Dropbox . But don't be fooled into thinking that the problems of email have been solved. The underlying issues very much remain.

Simply Mailbox perfected The Game of  Whac-A-Mole-  All We play that.

One major issue that remains with email is the notion that every message should get a response. And a big reason why I hate responding to email during the day is that too many people are too quick to respond to my reponses. For every email I send in the day, I seem to get two in return - often immediately. (As a result, this caged animal has been learning not to touch the electric fence - hence, night and weekend emailing.) And a large number of those responses are "K" or "Cool" or "Great" or "Thx" or some other banality best left unemailed.

The problem with these responses, even the short ones, is that they all take time to consume. If I read them in Gmail, it takes a couple seconds to load the response. And then another couple seconds to archive it. If I read them on my phone, I have to wait a few more seconds to download the messages from the server. Not to mention the push notifications that come in alerting you to the new message, taking up yet more precious seconds.

Seconds make up minutes, which make up hours, which make up days, which make up months, which make up years. One day we'll all be laying on our death beds wishing we hadn't wasted all that time reading a million "K" email responses in our lives.

Email needs some sort of quick response or maybe even a no-response reply system. Maybe it's read / unread states that all recipients can see. But that's been tried before and understandably, some people don't like others to know when they've read a message. So maybe a simple checkmark BE IT needs to, like in Path Recently introduced its  new messaging system .

Or maybe the answer is something like emoji / smilies / stickers. Believe me, I know how lame this must sound. I mean,  stickers  for Chrissakes?! But ignore the immense cuteness and joy of stickers for a second and focus on what they signify: an ultra-quick way to express a reaction. This could work for email too.

Neither of these things would work if they simply came in the form of yet another email response - thus, defeating the purpose. Rather, these should be in the form of some sort of quick-loading visual cue that resides * on top * of an email system. That would likely require everyone using the same email service (unless this somehow became a new standard that every email service provider adopted - not gonna happen). But perhaps a fall-back system could be put in place to deliver these quick messages in email form if the recipient isn't using the correct email service (giving them an incentive to sign up).

My Point is I guess while statement we're seeing that come out with a Lot of services to new and interesting ways Overload Combat email - beyond Mailbox, see:  Handle ,  Triage ,  Evomail ,  Mail Pilot , and many Others - The only way EVER email truly gets "fixed" is to be completely re-imagined. It doesn't need a paint job, it needs a demolition job.

My fear is that this will never happen. We'll keep getting better tools to handle email on various devices (on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your iWatch, on Google Glass, etc) but eventually the moles will become too quick and plentiful for any of us to whack.

At that point, email will become something we only use for work while we use some other quick messaging system for everything else. This is already happening to some extent - when was the last time you sent an email for "fun"? - But the messaging world is increasingly fragmented and not universal.

By, MG SIEGLER

In Defense Of Email!

"Nobody uses email anymore - you get too much of it" - Yogi Berra

In Last Sunday's New York Times, We were treated to Another  rant  about HOW BECOME email has dysfunctional and burdensome. This particular piler-on lays the blame at "how stagnant the format of email has remained, while the rest of communication and social networking has surged light years ahead."

Really? If you ask me, I think the problem exists largely between keyboard and chair (see illustration).

I don't mean to say that email providers can't do a better job of serving their users (raise your hand if you don't want Gmail to be faster), but innovation in email is anything but stagnant. In my view, the 30-year old "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" (aka SMTP) has served us remarkably well, and continues to do so.

I've always felt that the "overwhelmed by my inbox" meme was a combination of humblebrag and mismanagement. Those Twitter posts bemoaning too much email often sound like somebody complaining about too many invitations to the prom - an "everybody wants me" or "I'm in such demand" kind of boast. In reality, a lot of people do have too many messages in their inboxes, but it's hardly the fault of email itself. They're just doing it wrong.

Another popular bromide suggests email is an evil time suck that prevents us from getting work done. For many - particularly engineers, designers, artists, or writers who need extended periods of concentration - this is undoubtedly true. Email can be a distraction that breaks our concentration if we allow it to do so. But for many of us, email actually is our work - or at least a vital part of it.

I'm bemused by the CEOs who declare their companies are giving up email ... We tried that. It was called the '80s.

The popular if I followed guidelines suggesting should only check one email a day Once or twice, I would virtually Guarantee Slow Down at our IT CAN PROGRESS  Upstart . To a large extent, email is how we communicate and get things done. At Google, my prior employer, I can state confidently that the company would (and did) grind to a halt if email weren't available.

I'm bemused by the CEOs who declare their companies are giving up email. Why? So they can go back to those oh-so-productive in-person meetings and phone calls? We tried that. It was called the '80s. For what it's worth, I'm a big believer that there are many conversations that are better had on the phone, or in person, but that in no way minimizes the monstrous productivity improvements that email has wrought. What company has lasted even a month without email?

The ultimate obituary for email is that it's for, well ... old people. Millennials will tell you that email is where they go when they want to write a formal letter (how us GenXers thought about actual letter writing) or to get my Amazon receipts. There is some truth to this. Without question, text messaging has taken its rightful place as a superior and universal tool when the message is short, and the timing is now. And we should be glad to get that stuff out of our inbox. Yet somehow it hasn't left our inboxes barren.

And what of Facebook and Twitter? Or those myriad enterprise social apps that spell doomsday for email? There's a reason why the newsfeed of your favorite social app can't and won't replace email. Using a social stream to contact somebody is akin to driving past your friend's house in order to visit them. Yes that's right - just smile, wave out the window, and keep on going, rather than pulling into their driveway. That's the newsfeed. The more these social products attempt to implement more directed forms of messaging, the more they create half-baked (or even lesser) versions of email. I should admit that there's one area where Facebook has left email in the dust: you never need to remember or update another email address. But the price you pay, in terms of reliance on a single and proprietary platform, is steep. This is an obvious shortcoming of email that should be fixed.

By the way, if email is dead, why is it that every social / local / mobile app in the world is intent on notifying you via email every time a butterfly flaps its wings? Because that's the only place you'll reliably receive the notification and re-engage with their app.

Listen here, email haters. That protocol from 1982 called SMTP, and the ecosystem of applications and services based on it, are blessed with certain virtues that we've all taken for granted. First, it's not controlled by any one company. Like SMS, SMTP is a very basic communication protocol that allows for virtually unlimited innovation around it. Threaded conversations? Check. Priority inbox? Check. Forgotten attachment detector? Check. And as  Mailbox  has SHOWN, by building a simple Feature that pushes them off receiving Emails Until a Time Feel like you, you CAN build a Company that will countless Receive term sheets from venture capitalists (presumably in Your INBOX).

To the piler-on at the New York Times, I have a few suggestions to relieve the dread you apparently feel each time you come face to face with your inbox:

• Use a modern email service that has features that put you in control. I'm naturally partial to Gmail, as almost half a billion people on the planet seem to be.
  
• Turn off social network notifications. They seem to be such a huge source of your angst, yet they don't need to be. Just turn them off.
• Don't sign up for mail lists unless you really need to. Nobody can force you. Ok, maybe your boss can. But this is mostly in your control.
• Filter stuff out of your inbox that isn't urgent. The glory of virtually unlimited email storage (an innovation of the last eight or so years) is that you don't have to keep everything in your inbox, yet you can find it when you need it or browse through it when you have time.
• If, after carefully considering and adhering to the advice above, you're still inundated with a tidal wave of unwanted email, you might consider being grateful that people actually take the time to write you.

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by Dave Girouard

It’s Not Email That’s Broken, It’s You!

I know this is going to foment controversy, but screw it. I'm tired of reading about how email is fundamentally flawed and about all the clever new ways to "fix" or "reinvent" it. Email isn't broken! Email is great. I love email; it's my favorite way to communicate. Some email apps, servers, and protocols are better than others, but honestly, it would be OK with me if email stayed as is forever. If your relationship with email is unsatisfactory, email isn't the problem. It's you.

Now, I assume that by this point, many people have already stopped reading and started commenting about how wrong I am. That's great; those of us who are sticking around for the rest of the article can safely ignore all those comments and have a polite and friendly (if one-sided) conversation.

The whole alleged email problem I've been in Thinking about Recent weeks Due largely to The HYPE surrounding The new  Mailbox  app for iPhone (see " Mailbox for Email Triage iPhone Eases but Lacks Key Features , "22 February 2013), purports to mikä finally "put email in its place." In The Mailbox The midst of frenzy, Maria Popova, The highly regarded of  Brain Pickings  Blog,  Twitter on Stated  She was that declaring  email bankruptcy  - summarily Deleting email messages from 7.487 Unread She knew She avoided her INBOX could never get to them all. All this, in Turn, My friend reminded ME of An Influential Blog post by Tantek Çelik, who declared in 2008 that  is Efail Email .

I could give lots more examples, but it's clear that a great many people are completely overwhelmed by email. That's a problem, for sure, and it needs to be solved. What bothers me is when people blame the medium. The world's obesity problem isn't the fault of food, and the world's debt problem isn't the fault of money. Your email problems aren't the fault of email as a communications system, and they're probably not even the fault of the tools you're using. It's easy to pick on email because it won't fight back. But the real problem for most people who feel email is out of control is that they haven't taken responsibility for figuring out why the problem exists for them and how to change their habits to address it.

Email is not unique in this regard; the same could be said of Twitter overload or Facebook overload, for example. But at least in the case of social networking services, you get to decide who you receive messages from, and there's no technological barrier (even if there is a psychological one) to unfollowing someone on Twitter or unfriending someone on Facebook. With email, the solutions are less obvious while the stakes are higher.

Don't misunderstand; I wouldn't presume to say, "Why don't you just grow up and deal with your problem?" As though you're merely being too lazy to implement some obvious and foolproof fix. Changing email habits is hard, like changing eating habits. How many people do you know who have tried one diet after another - with the very best intentions and perhaps even encouraging results - only to find that after months or years, they slip back into their old ways? Email overload is not a trivial thing to deal with. But people have successfully and definitively dealt with it, and you can too. Before you can do that, however, you have to accept that you alone have the responsibility to make email work for you. If you're waiting for the right app or service to come along and magically fix it for you, you're going to have a long wait.

Let's go back to the Mailbox app I mentioned earlier. I tried it, and I hated it. It is, for me, utterly unusable. I could write many paragraphs about how awful I think its overall approach is and how ineffective its particular implementations are. But - and again, I'm assuming we just lost a bunch more people who have already headed for the comments - none of that matters. If you like Mailbox and it makes your email experience better, more power to you. What works for one person may not work for everyone. We all have to find our own paths to email sanity.

The system I've used for years works perfectly - for me. My inbox rarely has more than a handful of messages in it, and it's usually empty when I go to bed. I don't feel anxious or overwhelmed by my email, even though I receive a vast number of messages every day. Several years ago, I sat down and thought about the kinds of messages I receive and what I need to do in order to dispose of them quickly and efficiently. Based on that, I came up with a method I'm comfortable with. (You CAN Read about My system in a somewhat Generic version of My Macworld Series  Your Inbox Empty .)

Adam Engst developed his own way of interacting with email, mikä he documented in The Four-part Series " Zen and The Art of Gmail . "His approach (for details see The Second article in The Series) is as different from mine as CAN BE - I'm certain that neither one of us could follow the other's system for a day without driving ourselves utterly batty. As tempted as I may be to say his way is "wrong" and mine is "right," they're actually both right, because they suit our respective personalities. We've each identified what causes us stress, what we're willing to pay attention to, and what we tend to ignore - and we've adopted systems that work with, rather than against, our proclivities. There are other approaches, Too, including legendary Merlin Mann's  Inbox Zero  and innumerable VARIATIONS thereof, such as  Keith Rarick's Gmail version , mikä Maria Popova is now trying to follow.

So, even though I'm extremely fond of my own system, and even though I have strong feelings about some common habits (I truly can't bear the idea of ​​using one's inbox as a to do list), I'm not trying to prescribe a particular approach to email. What I am trying to say is that you probably don't receive more email than Adam Engst, Merlin Mann, or I do, and if we can get to the point where we feel email is under control, so can you. If you find that one of our systems works "out of the box," that's fantastic; go for it! If you need to adapt a system to your own needs or invent something entirely new, that's also fine. But it's going to require effort. You have to take a few hours of your life to analyze the ways you use email and determine what parts of your approach aren't working, and then adjust some of your behaviors.

You may find it helpful to think about the metaphors we use when talking about email as if they were literal. Would you ever consider declaring postal mail bankruptcy - tossing out all the thousands of envelopes that appeared in your physical mailbox over a period of months without even a glance? Would you allow envelopes to accumulate in a physical inbox on your desk until the pile reached the ceiling? I'm guessing no to both; somehow, nearly everyone finds some way to cope with mail when it arrives in physical form, even though there may be a lot of it, because some of it is important and there could be dire consequences to ignoring it. But "coping" might include taking your name off of mailing lists, hiring an assistant, or taking other more drastic measures. Do the ways you've dealt with paper mail suggest ideas for dealing with email?

Learning to cope with email may involve things that feel painful, such as:

• Unsubscribing from mailing lists you enjoy, particularly those that distract you into reading more (but hopefully not TidBITS!)
• Switching to a different email provider that filters spam more effectively
• Telling your family that you'd prefer not to receive pictures of adorable kittens and endlessly forwarded jokes
• Forcing yourself to respond to difficult messages immediately
• Deleting or filing certain messages without taking action on them

Perhaps you'll have to do all these things, or none of them. That's not for me to say. You even get to decide what your actual goal is. Maybe having an empty inbox is irrelevant to you and it's not a good measure of whether you're in control of your email. But in any case, if your current approach isn't working for you, the one thing you mustn't do is shift the blame to email as a medium or to an imperfect email app.

If email is the problem, you alone are the solution.

BY, Joe Kissell

What Needs To Change Before You Can Give Up Email Completely?

Few people love email, but it’s a necessity for most. Productivity specialist Claire Burge decided she had enough and ousted it from her life entirely. For many of us, however, that’s easier said than done. What would it take for you to remove email from your life entirely?

Claire was able to accomplish the task by using other methods of communication and the help of an autoresponder:

I started letting people know about my decision and thought it would be the easiest part of the process. It proved to be the hardest. I put a note on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to announce my decision. I put an auto-responder on my email[.]

While communicating through speed-appropriate channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites can reduce email volume, we’ve yet to see anyone eliminate it entirely before.

If you don’t like email and would like to have it out of your life, what’s stopping you? Is it your job? Do you like that everything is in one place and would like that with social media sites instead? Let us know in the comments below.

By Adam Dachis

How Email Is Swallowing Our Lives!

One day several zillion years from now, when aliens from a faraway planet try to make sense of our long-defunct civilization, they’re going to be convinced that e-mail came before the telephone. How else to explain our reliance on something so time-consuming, enervating, and maddeningly inefficient when we could all dispense with our most basic tasks — and coordinate them, for that matter — with a brief phone call?

But that’s not how it happened, of course, and that’s not what we do. Last week, lawyers for Steve Cohen, the CEO of SAC Capital, which was indicted last week,* said their client had failed to notice insider trading within his company because he received 1,000 e-mails per day — and therefore missed a crucial warning missive alerting him that something shady was afoot. How plausible it is that he didn’t know about these shenanigans is highly debatable (okay, it’s implausible), but in the abstract, the idea that Cohen couldn’t keep pace with the furious activity in his in-box doesn’t feel like a stretch. Even those of us without a Hamptons estate and an estimated net worth of $9.3 billion regard our e-mail in the same way Mickey Mouse viewed that army of brooms and buckets in Fantasia’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice“: an unstoppable force that will soon drown us.

And we’re not imagining it. According to a 2012 study from McKinsey Global Institute, the average worker in the knowledge economy spends 28 percent of his or her time reading and answering e-mail. Doing the math, that comes to 11.2 hours per week, if one assumes a 40-hour workweek. This figure is nothing compared to the time we feel like we’re spending on e-mail, either; Mimecast, an e-mail management company, surveyed roughly 2,500 of its clients that same year and asked them how much of their workday was devoted to contending with their e-mail, and the average answer was 50 percent. (“One thousand e-mails per day wouldn’t strike me as uncommon,” adds Barry Gill, Mimecast’s senior product marketing manager, when I asked him about Steve Cohen. “I’m middle management working for a relatively small start-up, and until recently, I got roughly 500 messages per day. Mainly from customers.”)

The conventional wisdom may be that our e-mail use is going down. And among younger people, that’s true, as instant messaging and communication through social networks replaces it. But not at the office. According to the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, Americans received 75 business e-mails per day in 2012 — only a small fraction of which were spam, by the way — and sent 35. Those numbers are expected to increase, respectively, to 87 and 42 by 2016.

Yet only 42 percent of those messages are considered important, according to Dmitri Leonov, one of the founders of SaneBox, a service that helps filter e-mails. And if efficiency is what we care about, here’s an especially depressing finding from his company’s research: It takes 67 seconds to recover from each e-mail we receive.

E-mails, after all, are disruptive. It takes start-up energy to read them; it takes energy to reorient and reboot once we’re returned to the task we’ve left. Over the course of a week, the price can be measured in hours. If, as the Radicati group says, we receive 75 messages per day (and SaneBox’s is similar, putting the number at 70), we spend nearly an hour and a half each day simply clearing our heads from all the correspondence we receive. “At some point,” says Leonov, “we have to understand this process is hurting us.”

The spooky part is, this irrepressible need we feel to monitor our e-mail accounts may be harder to control than we think. Nancy Darling, an Oberlin psychologist, points out in a 2011 blog post that the ever-refreshing content in our in-boxes caters to our “orienting response,” or human bias toward novelty (a survival instinct, no doubt — leopard over there!). In general, the human brain finds text irresistible: She mentions the Stroop effect, a psychology chestnut in which the word for one color is printed in another — for instance, the word red written in blue ink. If test-takers are asked to identify what color the word’s printed in, they hesitate. But they have no trouble identifying what the word says. Reading words onscreen is almost always easier and more alluring than a task requiring deeper analysis.

So we’re hooked. Last year, an online study by Harris Interactive found that 30 percent of us check our phones while we’re at dinner, and 54 percent of us look at them while lying in bed. (Nine percent even look at them during religious services, a fact I simply adore.) The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story in 2010 by an academic who declared e-mail her “third shift” (a wink to Arlie Hochschild, the sociologist who famously dubbed the child-care portion of a working woman’s day “the second shift” in her groundbreaking 1989 work by the same name). Spelunking through academic databases, I’ve since seen doctoral theses of the same name, examining the same idea.

And Leonov is right: We should consider how this is affecting us. In fact, some researchers already have. In 2008, the consultant Linda Stone coined the term “email apnea” to describe our physiological response to reading e-mails (namely, shallow breathing or holding our breath), postulating we unconsciously enter fight-or-fight mode while doing it. Last year, Gloria Mark, a professor in UC Irvine’s department of informatics, showed that people who took “email vacations” were much likely to have variable heart rates than a sustained heart rate on high alert. (Guess which state is better for you.)

We seem to be paying an economic penalty for this extra work, as well as a physiological one. In 2012, the number of lawsuits filed against companies for forcing overtime work without pay was up 32 percent from 2008, according toUSA Today, and much of the reason, the story concluded, was that workers were now forced to spend untold hours responding to e-mails. (A typical example, from a sergeant in the Chicago PD who filed a class-action lawsuit: “Allen … says he got a near-constant barrage of e-mails, text messages and calls on his department-issued BlackBerry until around 10 p.m. every weeknight. Each required a response lasting from a minute to an hour or two.”)

Indeed, the only person who seems not to be a hostage to his e-mail is Steve Cohen.

It perhaps stands to reason: Barry Gill, of Mimecast, says the real problem with e-mail overload isn’t for overlords like Cohen, but “someone who’s further down the management chain. Because they don’t have the resources or political and managerial clout to call for help.” In January, Bill Gates told theToday show that he only has to look at 40 to 50 messages per week.

But you’d be surprised. On Quora, the immensely popular community-based question-and-answer website, someone once posted the question, How do bigwigs like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page handle their huge volumes of e-mail traffic? Here, by far, was the most intriguing response, from a fellow claiming to be a high-frequency trader, by the name of David Shin:

When I worked at Google in 2006/2007, Larry and Sergey held a Q&A session, and this exact question was asked of them. One of them answered (I don’t remember which) … “When I open up my email, I start at the top and work my way down, and go as far as I feel like. Anything I don’t get to will never be read. Some people end up amazed that they get an email response from a founder of Google in just 5 minutes. Others simply get what they expected (no reply).”

Maybe Cohen followed a similar practice.

• By Jennifer Senior

The Benefits Of Good Time Management

You might not realize all of the benefits of time management. It really can make your life more enjoyable in every area.

Do you ever feel like you don’t have enough waking hours in the day? That’s a fairly typical feeling for almost everyone and it can cause a lot of stress. Most working adults have a lot to juggle. Combining a full time job with a busy family life can result in any person feeling overwhelmed.

There are ways to make life easier,and one is finding a way to utilize your time better. When you consider all the benefits of time management programs, it seems clear that having one can make a significant difference in your life.

It’s interesting when you stop and consider that most of us really aren’t in control of our own lives. We work for someone else, during the hours they insist on.

We’re involved with our children’s lives and their extracurricular activities. It’s easy to see how we end up with no time left for ourselves. One of the benefits of time management is finding time for you so you can enjoy your own pastimes.

An effective approach that has worked for many people is to set goals. Most of us have vague goals of things we want in our lives. These may include where we want our career to go and also how we envision our personal life in a few years. Without clearly defined goals, it can be hard to keep them in sight.

Therefore one idea that can be very helpful is to write down your goals as well as a time period for achieving them. This gives you a deadline and will likely keep you much more focused and driven. The benefits of time management can certainly include charting your own destiny.

Writing things down can be effective in other areas as well. You may be surprised to see how much time you are actually spending on non-productive activities each week.

Things like watching television or playing video games is relaxing but it can impact how you perform in other areas. Jotting down your daily routine for a week will help you determine what you are spending unnecessary time on.

We often don’t realize all the little things that we waste our valuable time on – and they really add up. This time can then be redirected towards something meaningful, perhaps taking a walk with your spouse, or enrolling in a class. You’ll quickly find that one of the benefits of time management is having more time to improve your life.

Whatever changes you make in your personal life to improve your position, you can do the same in your professional life. If you aren’t progressing up the corporate ladder as quickly as you’d like to, look at what you can do to change that.

Perhaps this might mean taking a few courses during the weekend or evenings. The benefits of time management for you might include rearranging your time so you can get a degree that will help your career take off.

Being in control of your own time is essential for success and sanity. You can start changing your life and your future today by looking at how you spend your time now and how you need to be spending it to get exactly what you want. Once you make those changes, the sky is the limit in terms of what you’ll accomplish. You really have more time than you realize – when you use it properly.

By Tele management

30 Years Ago: How Email Rose to Become the No. 1 Killer App

The first email was sent in 1965. Since then, more than 3 billion email accounts exist and about 294 billion emails are sent per day.

When the first personal computers started being sold by Apple and IBM in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was common for people to ask: “Why do you really need to buy a PC?”

The truth was, if you had a typewriter, that’s pretty much all you needed to create documents. If you wanted to play video games, you’d go down to the mall. If you needed to do math problems, you got a calculator.

Back then, everybody existed in what we now call data silos. People did home finances on PCs, wrote documents and printed them out, and played a few simple games. Few computers were connected, and those that were invariably belonged to high-security government agencies such as the military or corporate enterprises doing business with government that had access to central mainframe computers.

Ethernet networking was invented in the 1970, and IBM introduced Token Ring networking in the 1980s. But few enterprises had good business reasons to install Local Area Networks (LANs) before the mid-1980s, when personal computers became common in corporate offices.

In 1982, IBM introduced PROFS, for Professional Office SystemVM, which ran on IBM mainframes and some of its midrange computer systems and included an email application. For Digital Equipment Corp. minicomputer systems, email service was provided through the company’s All-In-1 office productivity package.

In the early days, before the development of PCs, there were no readily available desktop software applications that could be used to send messages from one person’s desktop computer to another outside of those internal wired networks. But that situation would soon change in the mid-1980s when many enterprises started to rapidly install and expand LANs.

 Popular LAN email packages that emerged in this period included Microsoft Mail, which would eventually become part of the Microsoft Office suite, along with Word Perfect Office, cc:Mail, Banyan Vines and eventually Lotus Notes.

Email Was Simple, and It WorkedSo how did electronic mail, which two generations after it first appeared is still considered the No. 1 killer app in the computer business, get started? Easy: It was simple, and it worked—well, most of the time. Email still has hiccups today, but not very often. NetHistory.info explains it this way:

 “Email is much older than ARPANet or the Internet. It was never invented; it evolved from very simple beginnings. Early email was just a small advance on what we know these days as a file directory; it just put a message in another user’s directory in a spot where they could see it when they logged in. Simple as that. Just like leaving a note on someone’s desk.”

 In 2012, it was estimated there were more than 3 billion email accounts in the world, and that about 294 billion emails were sent per day. Roughly 78 percent of those were spam.

Messaging from smartphones and other computers is replacing email among many younger users, but email is still by far the No. 1 “killer app” for businesses. And it probably will remain No. 1 for a long time to come.

 But how did we get to this point in a scant two generations? As with many of the computer technologies we take for granted, email began with a few early experiments at research centers during the -960s.

First Email Was Sent in 1965Most likely the first email system of this type was sent from Mailbox, an application used internally at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1965. Another early program to send messages on the same computer was called SNDMSG.

From those first in-house messages, electronic mail evolved with these key milestones, as researched by Outlook.com and published by Mashable in 2012:

1971: U.S. programmer Raymond Tomlinson allegedly sent “QWERTYUIOP” as the first network email, and he was the first to connect his computer to his mailbox by using an “@” symbol.

1977: Tomlinson’s emailing method worked for networked computers using the same software, but many people began using the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPA) to connect outside networks.

1981: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange adopted a process of letters, punctuation and symbols to digitally store information.

1985: Government and military employees, students and academic professionals were common email users by the mid-1980s.

1991: ISPs allow widespread Internet access, but there were limited options for use until Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1991.

In 1998, more people signed up for free email accounts on sites such as email.com, Yahoo.com, Excite.com, Hotmail.com and others than all other years previous. Now most people have multiple email accounts. They may have one hosted by a Web service, such as Google (Gmail), Yahoo, AOL or Microsoft; another at their home network, hosted by a telecom or cable television provider; and another on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet.

By the way, “spam” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1998 after its growth in the mid-1990s—not to be confused with the 3.8 cans of spam consumed every second in the United States.

Key Moment in IT History: Email Sent Over the InternetA key moment in email history came on Nov. 22, 1977, when the first email sent through the then-unnamed “Internet” took place in the foothills near Stanford University, in Portola Valley, Calif.

The museum is housed in a historic building of sorts; it used to serve as the executive business center for Silicon Graphics Inc., which in the 1980s and 1990s was one of the most powerful IT companies in the world.

A side note: SGI was so influential, in fact, that when newly elected President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore visited Silicon Valley soon after their inauguration in February 1993, the first media conference they held was at—you guessed it—SGI.

 The 2007 CHM event was a true reunion of Internet and email superstars. On hand were about 50 of the original pioneers of the Internet, including seven of the eight project leaders. The event was at capacity—about 400 people.

 The project leaders on hand were: Dr. Vint Cerf, then of DARPA and now an evangelist for Google; Don Nielson, retired from SRI International; Bob Kahn, retired from DARPA; Jim Garrett, retired from Collins Radio; Irwin Jacobs, then of Linkabit, now of Qualcomm; Pal Spilling of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment; and the lone woman on the team, Ginny Strazisar Travers, formerly of BBN.

Each had major input into enabling three computer networks to send data freely to and from each other for the first time.

The transcendent event occurred on Nov. 22, 1977, when email data flowed seamlessly from a refurbished bread truck (which had been rebuilt into a mobile data relay station) on the street in the foothills to a gateway at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, then to a host at the University of Southern California (400 miles away) via London—across three types of networks: packet radio, satellite and the military’s ARPANET.

“We figured the data traveled a total of 8,800 miles as it bounced around two continents,” Cerf said.

It seemed a small event at the time, the Net pioneers recalled. No way could they know that this one seemingly insignificant test would lead to the Internet we all know and can’t live without now.

Email Started the Internet RollingAnd it was a simple email that started the whole thing rolling. Now email is everywhere. Most major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter and many more) use email as either a main or secondary feature.

A final factoid regarding email of which users ought to be aware: In 2011, a study found that the worst email passwords are “password” and “123456.” Others lame passwords worthy of note include “QWERTY,” “monkey” and “letmein