Blog of the Gate 3 WorkClub

How to avoid spam instead of stopping it

Nobody likes email spam. Spam messages cost us time and money when they are downloaded, they clog our mailboxes, and some present a security risk. No wonder that a zillion programs offer you their services in removing spam messages. These applications mostly work this way: they still let spam be downloaded to your computer, they will still let spam clog your mailbox, and downloaded spam viruses will still reach your PC. However, by using a spam “filter” application, you will presumably get a big satisfaction knowing that those evil spam messages are killed on your own PC. Hmmm - must be a better way, right? Well, there is.

Beyond Google

Google's marketing and financial success crowns it as the current king of the search hill, but that does not mean there are no contenders for the crown. Here are a couple a couple of search engines that are not really new, but have became more popular, judging by their traffic and the references they pick up in blogs. I would give these guys a run, just out of appreciation for the sheer determination they display in getting into an arena crowded by giants. Well, on a closer inspection, one of them is actually backed by a giant. In any case, these two believe that they have something new to offer in a realm where most of us are quite happy with what we already have.

The Seven Palm Applications of Highly Effective People (2)

Life Balance for Palm was developed by a computer professional who grew tired of having the borders between her life and work become blurry. So she coded a time management application. Right? Not exactly. Well, Life Balance can be seen as a time and task management program. It does handle tasks and appointments. However, unlike most such applications, it has left the paradigm of the scheduled date book altogether. In Life Balance, there is no ledger book – instead, it boldly moved towards a non-linear model, and proposes using a complex tree of tasks starting from life goals and ending in minute tasks. The too-complex-to-comprehend tree is dynamically sorted, and the important tasks for a certain time and place bubble up to the surface. “Life Balance helps you focus on what is important to you and actively balance the often-conflicting demands of career and personal life”, the creators of the software program say. We are dealing here with a new breed of application, and I agree to its creators definition: it is coaching software.

The Seven Palm Applications of Highly Effective People (1)

With over 10 million copies sold since it was published in 1990, Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People" became a time management classic. Few professionals and managers interested in time management have not heard of Covey's "four quadrants" system for time allocation. Covey's basic suggestion: divide all activities to Important and Urgent, Important and Not Urgent, Not Important and Urgent, and Not Important and Not Urgent. Learning how to place tasks into the quadrants, and how to then allocate time to quadrants, is the key to effective time management. Successful people often excel in handling Important and Not Urgent tasks, so that they have less in the Urgency department.

Now, if you have Palm (or Palm OS device, or a Treo smart phone), you probably use some of its time management utilities - namely, its built-in Date Book and To Do List. These two applications are prepackaged with Palm devices since 1998. However, Palm’s scheduling utilities - just like most other time management tools - do not make use of Covey's time management ideas. In my workshops and in my private consulting, I teach about tools that try to make our scheduling smarter. I found seven utilities to do a great job.

Free legal and business documents

Sooner or later, conducting any sort of business requires legal contracts and forms - be they a business lease, a business plan, market survey, a personal financial statement, a confidentiality agreement or a partnership agreement. A quick search for these documents online yields several companies who would sell you the required documents, and many more. However, before actually paying for a template - why not check one free depository of such documents?

Vonage: Landline To Go

Vonage, “the broadband phone company”, is all over the web these days. All over the news, too, when last week it had suffered its first outage (in 18 months of operation). I, however, felt confident enough about the Internet broadband thingy - and perhaps I just wanted to get even with the big telcos. So I walked out of in Radio Shack with my Vonage box (US$ 30, awaiting a rebate). After some head scratching - the manual was written for novices, and my system is anything but - the box hooked up nicely between my DSL modem and my PC. Now I have a dirt-cheap, ultra-flexible telephone line. The monthly rates are very competitive, the tech breakthrough is interesting, the quality is not bad (and adjustable), the warm fuzzy feeling of evading telco overcharge is there - but let’s look at the bottom line and what it offers to freelancers.

The Secret Agendus of Palm OS

Agendus is a Palm/Windows personal information manager. It has been published for the past decade by French company Iambic, and its version 8 was just released. Agendus is one of the best date book / scheduler applications you can find, and one of the best-kept secrets in palm OS computing. It did receive a couple of awards a couple of years ago, but considering its capabilities, it is somewhat underexposed. Well, maybe this is a little step towards correcting that.

Send Registered Email

ReadNotify.com

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of disappearing mail – or at least of being told that my email never arrived. I know emails can be acknowledged, but that acknowledgement feature that exists in some email programs can be turned off by users. I want something more robust! What I really wish we had, I told a friend, is registered email, just like we have registered snail mail. When my friend offered an investment in my startup idea, I realized there must be something wrong with that picture - with my luck, it must be out there already.

And right I was. One amongst a number of firms offering a sort of registered email service is ReadNotify.com. It costs $3.99 a month, and works very ingeniously. All you have to do, after subscribing for their free trial, is add ".readnotify.com" to the end of your emails to make them registered. For example, instead of sending email to [email protected], I need to send mail to [email protected]. The new suffix is deleted by ReadNotify and is not seen by the mail addressee.

What happens next is interesting, and perhaps a little chilling. Once the mail is received by the addressee, you get an email from ReadNotify informing you of just that. But unlike real life registered mail, the tracking doesn’t stop there. If you keep watching your ReadNotify online management center, you can track for how long your email was viewed, by how many users, and on what computers.

This is a little Big Brother - so I don’t know if I want to use that regularly on my friends, co-workers and clients. However, I do see how this would come in very handy when, for example, I send a proposal or a contract quote. Wouldn’t it be good to see if my proposal has been glanced at, really read, or, when I'm lucky - even transferred to another machine? Yes, but I wonder about the ethics involved. What do you think?

In any case, if you do decide to use the premium, paid version of the ReadNotify service, use the promotion code “workclub” when prompted to get somewhat better terms.