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OK, in the previous article I wrote about why audio books are a great alternative to the radio.  This time, I’m going to make some specific recommendations about how to get yourself started.

1. Get an MP3 Player

First order of business…you need an MP3 player.  If you’ve joined the iPod generation already, no problem, you’re set.  Personally, I favor the convergent approach to gadgets…I’ve got a pocket in the back for my wallet, a pocket for keys, and a pocket for one more item…which means a smartphone.  So I use a Secure Digital flash card in conjunction with the excellent Pocket Tunes on my Treo 650 smartphone.  1GB of storage is enough to hold a few complete audio books (although by now there are larger sizes available), and Pocket Tunes is simply the definitive MP3 player for Palm PDA’s, hands down.

What this means is that you can get by with a really cheap 60 to 100 dollar MP3 player if you want to, or simply add some cheap flash memory to most phones.  To really optimize the experience, though, you’re going to want to pay attention to some of the extra details.

Try to pick a player that will remember your position in the book so you can pick up right where you left off when you get back in the car.  For example, Windows Media Player doesn’t remember where you leave off in audio tracks…and so we’ve found that audio books are a bit harder to manage on my friend’s Windows smartphone than my Treo with Pocket Tunes.

2. Choose a source for audio books.

Second, you need the books themselves.  Audible.com is the go to place on the Internet for audio books.  You can also try the ever popular iTunes if you own an Apple branded MP3 player.  In general, I recommend picking topics which you are unfamiliar with but would like to learn more about.  You’re getting some free time here, so why not branch out a little bit?  That’s my philosophy, but if you’ve been dying to read the latest Harry Potter book and haven’t had the time, go ahead and listen to that too!  There’s no wrong answer here.

Podcasts are also a burgeoning category of audio programming.  You can go to places like Odeo or iTunes for these as well.  Podcasts do solve the selection issues associated with radio programming.  On the other hand, they still suffer from the same information density problems.  If a podcast is very narrowly targeted to a particular area of interest, you’re more likely to extract some value out of it..which, I believe, is similar to what makes a successful blog.  But given the choice between a book or a podcast, I’ll usually choose the book.

Finally, friends and family often have books they aren’t using any more.  You can borrow them and return them when you’re done.  Simple and inexpensive!

One interesting thing to note about about audio books is that they can often take much less space than equivalent music.  I won’t get into the whole theory of audio compression here, but suffice it to say that you can squeeze a guy talking down much more than you can a guy singing with a bunch of instruments playing in the background.  In many cases, you can fit more hours of audio book programming onto an MP3 player than you can of music.

3. Find a way to patch your MP3 player into your car

While we have all had images of dancing black silhouettes of people with white headphones hammered into our subconscious, for safety reasons, you should not listen using headphones while driving.  Playing the books back through your car’s audio system will be more comfortable and probably sound better too.

Try one of the following options.

1. A line-in or cassette adapter.  Both of these are easy to pick up at a Radio Shack, but most cars don’t have either of these input options nowadays.
2. An FM transmitter.  This is the option I chose.  You plug the transmitter into your MP3 player, and it broadcasts on an FM frequency of your choice.  Tune your radio to that frequency, and you are good to go.  Nearly all cars have an FM radio, so this approach is almost guaranteed to work.  The downside to this approach is that you have to find a clear frequency to transmit on, and occasionally you’ll get bleed-through interference from other stations if you’re unlucky.  I chose the iRiver AFT-100 because it got good reviews and is cigarette lighter powered to boot.  Changing batteries?  No thanks!  Car powered is the way to go.
3. A Bluetooth audio kit.  If you know what this is, you probably don’t need me to explain it to you.  A few cars support this option, and you’d probably need a smartphone MP3 player to even get started.
4. iPod car kits.  The dominance of Apple’s MP3 player has led to a well stocked ecosystem of accessories.  Too many options here to count, go Google for them.

Once you have all three parts taken care of…the MP3 player, the audio books, and the connection to your car stereo system…you’re ready to dive in to the last part of this guide, which is how and when to listen.

The philosophy of listening to books while driving

It’s wise to remember that when listing to books and driving, your primary focus is still driving.  For the sake of being illustrative, let’s replace the word “driving” with the phrase “careening around town in a two ton block of metal at 70 miles an hour”.  Safety must be priority #1.

1. Don’t be stupid.  People cause accidents every day because they fumble with cellphones, try to eat, put on makeup, or do any other number of silly things while trying to stay in control of a speeding car.  Messing around with your MP3 player while driving is pretty high on the list of dumb ways to go.  So keep your eyes on the road, jack.
2. Build up a playlist beforehand.  You can avoid messing around with your MP3 player while driving by building up a nice long playlist of the files comprising your audio book.  And if you’ve followed some of the above tips, you also have an MP3 player that retains your position in the playlist.  Combine the two, and the only time you’ll have to touch your MP3 player is when you get in the car and when you get out.
3. Listen when you have time and when you are driving “routine” routes.  If I’m traveling to a less familiar place where I’m not familiar with all of the turns and lane changes, I prefer to keep the books off and my attention on driving.  By the same token, I also don’t dive into my audio books if I’m just taking a 5 minute trip to the grocery store.  That’s too much context switching and not enough flow time.  I
   generally listen to audio books on my commute, where I know every inch of the road.  Interestingly enough, for me this creates a pretty good balance where I still get to listen to the radio without being saturated to the point where I’m completely bored by it.

Well folks, that’s all I’ve got.  Audio books are a great way to expand your horizons, and I hope this article has lent some clarity to the steps involved in making audio books a daily part of your commute.  Thanks for reading!

In my last article, I talked about what kind of tasks we can successfully combine together to save time.  This article discusses one specific way to multitask that I find useful, which is listening to audio books while driving to work.

Best use of time – drive less

First things first.  The top thing to figure out about your commute is how you can shorten it.  Who wants to spend time trying to get to where you’re going instead of actually BEING there?  It is my sincere hope that one day someone invents the transporter from Star Trek and we all start blinking to and from work in no time flat.

With that said, plenty of people, including myself, need to drive to work due to wacky real estate prices and other life priorities.  That isn’t going to go away any time soon.  In fact, plenty of people just take the commute for granted…they’ve become used to it as part of their daily grind.  Well, this article is all about NOT taking that time for granted.  Let’s take a considered approach to how we can get the most out of that fixed time allotment.

How we drive

When we drive in a car, we’re somewhat of a captive audience.  Obviously, our main priority is to get wherever we are going, and, beyond that, our options are limited.  After all, we’re stuck in a car and most of our attention is on the road.  What are we going to do?  The only real options we have are listening to something and taking occasional glances at the environment passing by.

This is why one of the most frequent driving activities happens to be listening to the radio.  Unfortunately, there is very little inherent value to radio programming.  In fact, in most cases, the radio is only turned on because it’s better than the next best alternative, which is being bored outright while you drive.

Radio talk shows, for example, are by their very nature incredibly light on information.  They have to be, because most of it is formulated on the spur of the moment.  Plus, the shows you might be interested in listening to aren’t necessarily on when you are driving.

And let’s talk about music stations.  Music stations are fine as a source of entertainment.  After all, watching television doesn’t necessarily make you a better person, but it’s fun, and often social.  Entertainment is a good thing.  But let’s be serious here.  Do you really need to hear the same song 100 times?Are you getting anything out of that song, or are you just using it to fill dead air?  For example, I certainly wouldn’t watch the same TV shows over and over again.  But maybe if I had nothing better to do…which is exactly the category that the radio falls into. I would argue that the radio, past a rather low bar, is less about truly entertaining oneself than it is about filling up sunk time.

And that’s where audio books come in.

Audio books vs the radio

Make no mistake…listening to an audio book is slower than reading that same book.  When you’re driving, however, listening is the only reasonable way to take in information.  Listening to audio books during your commute is all about getting everything you can out of all that you’ve got.

Here’s why audio books are a better alternative to radio programming.

1. You can choose what you want to listen to.  Oh, how important this is!  Let’s say you don’t know anything about managing your money, but you’d like to learn.  What do think the odds are that this topic is going to come up during your daily commute?  Just about zero.  On the other hand, finding an audio book on that topic is incredibly easy.  You can target your own specific needs and address them proactively.
2. You can progress on your own schedule.  Even if you found out about a money management radio show, it’s probably not going to be on when you can listen to it or as often as you would like.  On the other hand, if you have the audio book, you can just cruise through the book at your own pace, consuming as much or as little as you like.
3. You generally get much richer, denser, and higher quality content from an audio book than any radio program will provide.  A large quantity of books are not written to be fluffy or created on the fly.  Most books are edited with some degree of care and are intended to communicate serious concepts.   Radio programs, on the other hand, are produced with different objectives in mind.  You’ll simply learn more from audio books in less time.  Who can argue with that?

Obviously, there are some pretty good reasons why listening to audio books has advantages over daily radio programming.  I’ve listed them here, so it’s up to you as to whether or not you decide to take the plunge after reading them.  Next time, I’ll get to the nitty gritty details and make some concrete recommendations about equipment and best practices that will help anyone interested in getting rolling.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s difficult for us, as mere human beings, to maintain our effectiveness when we try to switch rapidly between multiple tasks.  It’s nothing to be ashamed of…it’s just how the species is wired.  We’re not computers, after all.

Still, it would be a mistake to say that people should never multitask.  Situations exist where multitasking actually makes sense.

For example, take the following combinations of activities.

1. Eating and talking to friends or colleagues
2. Exercising and watching TV
3. Driving and listening to audio books

All of the above combinations work relatively well together.  If multitasking is bad, then why does exercising and watching TV seem OK on an instinctual level?

Successful multitasking has a simple general pattern.  To multitask effectively, you simply combine an activity which requires minimal mental involvement with another activity that requires minimal to moderate involvement.

Luckily or unluckily, people often have to perform a lot of activities that don’t take a lot of brainpower.  It is precisely during these types of activities where we have the opportunity to take back the most time.  The big benefit of multitasking is that if you combine two activities into the same period of time, you’re basically getting an extra life-enhancing activity in for free.  Multitasking may not be the best idea when you’re trying to compose an artfully thought out e-mail, but there’s no such thing watching TV badly.

One last note…it’s also possible to multitask when you’ve trained enough in a particular situation to the point where doing the right thing is like being on autopilot.  The best analogy I can use is the act of learning to ride a bicycle or play a video game.  Many activities that require some thinking up front eventually require little to no conscious mental involvement once we’ve familiarized ourselves with the activity.  A beginner at chess is just thinking about which pieces are allowed to move where.  An expert, on the other hand, has those details on autopilot.  He’s able to think about a whole range of other things like what the opponent is going to do next, the relative strength of his current position, past similar situations and how they turned out, etc.

Of course, training to the level of an expert can take a lot of effort and time, and in any situation that requires a little creativity, you have to bring your full attention back to the situation at hand.

Anyway, hopefully you now understand that multitasking definitely has its merits when done correctly.  We’ll talk in the next article about one of my favorite ways to multitask…listening to audio books and driving to work.

This post is the second post in a series on how to manage your e-mail.  The first post is here.

Tip #3 – Use a “Getting Things Done” workflow for managing e-mail.

I’m a huge fan of the “Getting Things Done” system for managing commitments, and managing e-mail using GTD’s workflow definitely works.  Here are some specific guidelines for setting up your e-mail according to GTD.

1. Set up GTD folders.

Create a folder called “Action Required” under your Inbox. Then create a folder called “Reference” under your Inbox.  Organize and create any extra subfolders under Reference as necessary…this is like your filing system for e-mails and depends mostly on personal preference.

2. Move all your existing e-mail out of your Inbox and into the Action Required or Reference folders.

One of the big principles of this system is keeping your Inbox empty.  So, if you have stuff already sitting in your Inbox, you need to move it out.  Decide whether each e-mail needs to be acted on, and either move it to Action Required or Reference as necessary.

3. Moving forward, keep the Inbox empty by filing incoming e-mails.

Always move new e-mails to the Action Required folder or Reference folder after you’ve read them and figured out whether action needs to be taken.

The analogy David Allen uses for an empty Inbox is the blinking answering machine light.  When there’s an e-mail in your Inbox, the light is blinking.  The way to stop the blinking is to grab the e-mail and file it correctly.  If your answering machine light was blinking all the time, it wouldn’t be much use…and so it is with an Inbox that you leave items in.  Your Inbox has to be emptied, or why do you have it in the first place?

Now, you might be asking…what does doing this buy me?  Allow me to explain further.

The “normal” e-mail workflow…why it doesn’t work

Let’s take a look at a typical inbox.
The problem with an inbox where every e-mail stays in the inbox by default is that your commitments (aka the
stuff you need to be taking care of to avoid irritating other people) are
completely intermingled with e-mails that you’ve already taken care of
and other e-mails that you never ever need to look at again.

What happens all too often with an inbox lacking in GTD organization is the following.

1. User receives e-mail, reads e-mail, decides he needs to do something with it but can’t get to it right this instant.
2. User checks inbox several times over the next few days. The important e-mail in question continues to drift further down the list. Meanwhile, every time the user scans his e-mail, the important e-mail is visually drowned out by the white noise of the surrounding crap, AND the user wastes time scanning through e-mails that have already been taken care of trying to remember what still needs doing.
3. Several days later, the user eventually forgets about the e-mail becuase he’s busy dealing with some other e-mail that he got an hour ago. Oh well, hope nobody really needed that information!

Now, does that sound familiar to you?  I’m betting it does.  I’ve seen it happen with many folks, and, honestly, it used to happen to me too.  It’s not the best way of handling e-mail.

There’s usually a person on the other end that was waiting for you to reply. When you don’t, it slowly, but surely, lowers your capital with them.  Conversely, when you know how to deal with every e-mail responsibly, people begin to exhibit trust in you.  They know you’ll move the ball forward…and that’s equally good for building your reputation with co-workers and friends.

Here’s a better way to deal with e-mails.

The Getting Things Done e-mail workflow…why it works

Let’s look at the advantages afforded by using the Action Required and Reference folders.

The workflow I described before essentially forces you to decide which e-mails are commitments and which ones aren’t. Any commitment you have needs to be in a single place where you know you won’t forget about it.  Hence the Action Required folder.

The benefits of organizing this way are:

1. You cannot forget to take action on something, since everything you need to take action on is all in one place. Instead of having to remember where each individual e-mail is that you needed to do something with, the only thing you need to remember is to look at your Action Required folder once in a while.

If you want to get work done, you just go to the “Action Required” folder and start hacking away. Suddenly, your co-workers are calling you Mister Reliable because you don’t miss anything.

2. There is now a clear visual warning sign whenever you are overcommitting yourself.

The amount of e-mail you get doesn’t necessarily correlate well with your workload, so having e-mails scrolling down your window doesn’t raise any red flags. Heck, everyone’s e-mail boxes are overflowing…it’s normal! The amount of stuff in your “Action Required” list, on the other hand, is directly correlated. If you have a scrollbar showing up in your action required folder, you’ve definitely got some work to do, buddy.

For me, if I have over 15-20 e-mails in the “Action Required” list, I know I either need to buckle down or start warning people off when they ask me to do more stuff. Usually it’s a combination of both.

3. You don’t have to keep wasting mental effort looking at e-mails you’ve already dealt with. Wasting a few seconds here and there glancing through old e-mails isn’t the biggest problem…the real danger is that legitimate e-mails that need action from you get drowned out by the sea of other e-mails.

Hopefully, I’ve done a good job of explaining why organizing e-mail in this fashion works so damn well.  Trust me, this really helps.

Tip #4 – Use filters to help sort automated e-mails from actual people e-mails.

Most automated e-mails and mailing lists require no response from you whatsoever and have much lower priority compared to e-mails from people.  Therefore, having to sort through them all the time is usually more distracting than beneficial.  My suggestion to you is to use rules or filters to route those e-mails directly to your Reference folder.  That way, you can read them at your leisure without mixing them in with your potential commitments.

In Outlook, you can accomplish this by going to “Tools/Rules and Alerts…”

And then setting up the appropriate filters in this dialog.

Tip #5 – Know when to use e-mail

E-mail, in the grand scheme of things, is a relatively new medium of communication.  It is not the best, any more than you would call a plane better than a car.  And it’s not the worst…any more than you would call a bike worse than a car.  It is important to remember that e-mail took hold because it filled some gaps in the way that people communicate. When you move away from those strengths, you start losing what made e-mail good for communicating in the first place.

It’s actually fairly important for everyone to understand when e-mail adds value to communication vs when it doesn’t.  Let’s dig into that statement.

Most of the time, using e-mail is just fine…you send a document around and ask people to take a look, or you check in with friends and ask them to get back to you at their convenience.

But have you ever heard jokes/horror stories about employees getting berated or even fired over e-mail?  The manager who sends those e-mails is a classic example of someone who doesn’t understand the rules of communication. Although criticism is sometimes warranted, you can at least communicate some level of maturity, respect and constructiveness face to face as you offer feedback.  That sort of dual meaning is nearly impossible to communicate over e-mail…it’s just outright criticism.  And, of course, firing someone over e-mail is simply a cop-out of egregious proportions.  Not only can you not show maturity or respect in such a situation, but any manager who does such a thing brings real risk on himself and the company.  A recent HBR article shows that employees tend to file complaints not based on the actual merits, but on whether or not they felt they were treated respectfully and fairly.  Misusing e-mail can literally be an expensive mistake!

When you misuse e-mail, at best, you simply waste someone’s time.  At worst, you irritate, offend, and escalate situations inappropriately.  That’s why understanding the strengths and weaknesses of e-mail is important.

Here’s a simple list of the pros and cons of e-mail as a medium of communication.

• Good because you can fire and forget.  Before e-mail, you had to send letters to people or call them.  Thankfully, there’s virtually no reason to send a letter now as opposed to sending an e-mail.  E-mails are easier to send, cost virtually nothing, and get there nearly instantaneously.  As for the phone, calling people often costs money and requires you to be prepared for a potentially lengthy discussion…and you have to try repeatedly to get a hold of the person in question if they aren’t available.  If the situation isn’t urgent, the fire and forget style of e-mail is much easier on the sender and the receiver.
• Good for detailed communication or attaching documents.  You can send a whole lot of detailed electronic information over e-mail as easily as you can a few sentences, and that’s important.  For example, if I’ve written a detailed product spec or taken notes at a meeting, I’m not going to try to read the thing to someone over the phone.  Score one for e-mail!
• Good for one-to-many communications.  Need to tell a whole bunch of people something? E-mail is a great way to do it. Calling a meeting takes a lot of steps and is often too much effort relative to what you need to say.  Using the phone? You’d have to call each and every person and hope you got a hold of them.
• Bad for urgent communication.  Most people don’t live on e-mail.  Even if some people do, most of the time you probably don’t know who they are.  As I stated previously, in a proper organizational culture, the majority of people will not be checking their e-mail constantly…they’ll be figuring out and implementing your next big thing.  That’s a good thing…let them do it!  My point is, if you need a response quickly, use the phone, IM, or just walk up and say hi.  That’s the most effective thing you can do, and it’s respectful to boot!
• Bad for figuring out or hashing out problems.  Brainstorming, dialogue, and understanding are facilitated heavily by rich communication channels.  That’s why complicated or vague matters should be handled face to face or over the phone.  First, because in unclear situations you run a very high risk of parties misunderstanding other parties and confusing the problem solving process.  Second, because complex discussions change direction so rapidly, the cycle of feedback that normally takes place very quickly in a face to face situation will often take place incredibly slowly over e-mail.

My opinion?  If most of your communication with team members is over e-mail, it usually means something is wrong.  Teams need to communicate face to face to build momentum and  gel with each other.  In many teams…and especially in software development, difficult problem solving is a daily fact of life.  Trying to get that done over e-mail only slows that process down.

It’s usually OK to handle more communication with external parties over e-mail, as long as you keep in mind that there are appropriate times to transition to phone calls and meetings.

Conclusion

I think that about wraps up my little series here on e-mail.  The bottom line is that e-mail is a wonderful tool for communicating with other people, and I wouldn’t want to live without it.  But, as with many things, there are good ways to use it, and bad ways to use it as well.  I hope that by reading these articles, you’ve gained some understanding of how to avoid the distractions and pitfalls of e-mail.  Once you understand those, you can focus
on taking advantage of e-mail in ways that enhance your productivity and respect the time of others.

Thanks for reading!