blackrimglasses

The past few days have been pretty crazy, so this is going up a little later than I thought it would. However, this I feel is the most important entry, as it outlines how I deal with communication. That is communication using any form of media as well, from cell phone/VOIP to IM and e-mail. Merlin hinted in his nice link-back that I get a herculian amount of e-mail — which is true — but I also get an astronomical amount of IM’s, private messages on discussion boards, phone calls and other inquiries.

So here it is: how I deal with my communication issues, ordered by method of communication.

E-mail

My dependency on e-mail goes all the way back to when I got my first e-mail address. I was 12 years old, on a SLIP account to Cal State University Fullerton. Later, I was ethankap@aol.com (ah, the memories). And still later: ethankap@gte.net, ethank@pacbell.net, ethankap@interramp.com (remember them?). In 1996, I got my @murmurs.com address and that is what I’ve used since then. I remember when the voice saying “You’ve Got Mail!” made me happy. Now, the noise that I’ve got mail gives me a mixture of morbid fascination and dread.

On an average day, I get 150 to 300 e-mails. About 90% of them need my attention and are critical to getting my job done. My e-mails start very early in the morning, as some are from international people, and extend into the late evening (as we WBR people are kind of nuts). I have my e-mail set to check once a minute, and rarely do more than five minutes pass before I get something.

I have two main e-mail accounts in use. My @warnerbrosrecords.com one is my main work address, and my @murmurs.com one is my home address. The @murmurs.com one has had a traffic die-down as I’ve started working, and thus is reserved exclusively for things that I don’t necessarily want going to my work account (like purchases, etc). @murmurs.com accounts for about 10-20% of daily e-mail intake, but is lesser priority.

Apple mail at home is setup with both e-mail accounts, as well as all my offline mail archives (going back to 1996 actually). All told, Apple Mail has about 1 million e-mails sitting in it. I can’t say it handles it well, but since a majority are offline and local to the disk, it does OK. Spotlight certainly comes in handy, but out of all of Apple’s apps, they need to make Mail more robust in order for it to be a truely business tool. Anyhow, at work, on the laptop and on any other computer where I have an account (like my parent’s iMac), I only have the @warnerbrosrecords.com and @murmurs.com accounts setup.

@warnerbrosrecords.com is my most critical account, and the account that I most desperately need access to at any given point, in any given place. As such, it was important for this box to integrate with whatever mobile device I have. Mobile e-mail therefore is as important to me as e-mail on my Mac’s, and thus has been one of the most problematic areas for me to get right.

I have, in the last year, used four different cell phones. The first three used a similar system for mail acquisition, and the last (the PPC-6700) uses one that finally works. My first two phones were Treo 650 and MPX-220 from Motorola. The first was a PalmOS phone, and the latter a Microsoft Smartphone OS phone. Both used a system from Seven software that was branded as Business Connect on both Cingular and Sprint.

Seven’s software uses a desktop application (on the PC) that monitors an IMAP, POP or Exchange box for changes. Upon finding a change, it does an SMS type request to the phone which triggers the phone to sync e-mail with the desktop client, which acts as a passive relay to the account for the handheld device. It all sounds well and good, and when it worked properly, it was exactly like a Blackberry. However, it never, ever worked properly. I’d call support (both Sprint and Cingular) and both would give me the runaround how they never guarantee immediate delivery, the problem was with Seven, etc. It sucked. And worse, I missed e-mail.

When Sprint replaced my broken PPC-6600 with a new PPC-6700 (thank you Sprint!) I decided enough was enough: it was time to do what Microsoft wanted and get an Exchange account. Why is this what Microsoft wanted? Because Exchange accounts on Microsoft Smartphones can do something called Over the Air (OTA) syncing. Better yet, an Exchange server can trigger the device to do the sync immdiately on a change, and thus you have Blackberry like functionality. According to the fine folks at PDAPhoneHome, it worked perfectly.

To set this up, I got an account at 4SmartPhone. 4smartphone is a hosted Exchange provider specializing in working with PDA phones and other devices that support OTA syncing. You can setup your account to either pull from IMAP, or have your mail relayed over to it. I chose to do the relay model, and thus when I setup my account, it gave me a dummy address to have all my mail relayed to for remote access. I setup the relay on the @warnerbrosrecords.com e-mail server, and the 4smartphone account immediately got the messages.

To setup the phone, 4smartphone does a device configuration profile, then sends it to the phone through a link in an SMS request. After downloading the link, the device was setup properly for syncing. In the “Scheduling Options,” I set it up to sync as mail arrives. In order for this to work, I had to put in my devices e-mail address (PHONE#@messaging.sprintpcs.com), so the Exchange server could trigger syncs.

After doing these steps, the device started working perfecly as an always-on e-mail device. At times, the PPC-6700 gets e-mail before any of my other devices do. This sometimes gets annoying, as new mail is announced while I’m working by my phone beeping, as well as my computer doing it a moment later.

Apple Mail on all computers is set to sync up to the 4smartphone server, and thus the read-state of all my mail is congruent between all devices. This also includes Flagged e-mail state, which is important as that is how I tag important e-mails. I have a Smart Folder on all computers just for Flagged mail in order to keep track of things that need constant attention.

As well, keeping all mail programs (including the phone) using the same e-mail server means that I have seamless productivity between devices. I can leave my computer and pick up my PPC-6700 and know that its at the exact same state as the computer. As I go places, read and respond to mail, all of my sent items, read-states, etc sync back to the server and when I pick up working on a computer again (at work, home or on the Powerbook), all my mail is in the same state as on the last device used. Being able to focus on the content rather than the medium is important in terms of productivity, and I found that this is the single best reason to use a hosted Exchange account with a Windows based PocketPC. I hate Windows as much as the next person, but sometimes “It Just Works” trumps “I am an Elite Software God.” Sorry.

Contacts

Being that I now was using an Exchange server, and that this server pushed not only e-mail, but contacts, calendars and tasks to my device, I could use the device as a total PDA. The problem with this is: Outlook. I hate PC’s, so this wasn’t an option. Entourage is an option, but it has to be the lamest excuse for an application in the world. It doesn’t sync most of anything to the Exchange server. No categories, no tasks, etc. Fortunately, tucked away in Address Book is a sync feature to Exchange. Apple did a half-assed, half-working installation (it doesn’t sync automatically even with the option set), but it works. I put in the Exchange server and username/password combination, did a manual sync (you have to enable iSync’s icon in the top menu bar first, and this isn’t documented) and boom: my contacts were on the Exchange server. The PPC-6700 started syncing automatically and all was well… I thought.

It wasn’t quite wine and cheese though. I disabled .mac syncing (so things wouldn’t get all confused) and found out that the AIM names that I stored with every contact (and thus populated iChat with real names) didn’t sync through Exchange, so now I’m stuck remembering everyon’es AIM ID’s, instead of using their real names. Annoying, and hopefully it is fixed at some point. Also, category syncing is sketchy at best, so even though I have groups setup, they don’t sync some of the times. It seems that Apple put the Exchange syncing in, but didn’t really think much about it, which is a shame as it comes in handy.

Calendar

My week starts booking itself up quickly on Monday’s, and my calendar thus is my savior in terms of keeping my time organized. I don’t like Entourage for the obvious reasons, but through all its quirks, I’ve found iCal to be pretty good. The only issue is, for some reason Apple didn’t think that while its great to sync contacts to Exchange, people might want to sync their calendars to it as well. Enter GroupCal, a kind of half-assed, half working application that syncs iCal to Exchange and back again. Some caveats I’ve found:

1) Only have one calendar. It doesn’t work very well with multiple.
2) Do not use TimeZones, this results in corrupted calendars
3) Make sure every event has a location, or it won’t sync properly and you can get a corrupted calendar file
4) Make sure, in Advanced in Grouopcal, you have “Ignore items from other iCal calendars” set.
5) In GroupCal, set “Synchronize calendar events,” “Synchronize takss” and “Automatically refresh” set.

Also, its a pain that it shuts down iCal to do the sync. Why not just use the iCal file?

Besides these caveats, it actually works pretty well. I have it running at work and at home, and leave them running through the day. When I put an event in iCal on one computer, Groupcal will pick it up within 15 minutes and put it on Exchange. Exchange notifies the phone of the change, the phone syncs up and its on the phone at that point. The same applies to tasks.

It is not an ideal solution, just because it shuts iCal down, and that proves disruptive, but it works and keeps me off of Windows. Task management however isn’t as nice as I’d like, and I would still like to find something that enables GTD type workflow on the PocketPC with syncing. I shall keep hunting.

In summation…

That is my communication architecture. It helps me deal with up to 300 e-mails per day even when I’m travelling (which I do frequently), and it also helps make sure that I’m in the places I need to be on time.

[tags]lifehacks, productivity, exchange, e-mail[/tags]