If you follow any web nerds online you’re bound to hear some noise about Inbox Zero now and then. A lot of it is misleading however. When I first heard of it I thought it was the title you rewarded yourself with for battling your way through the clutter, but it’s so much more. Inbox Zero is an approach to email, not a mandate or mandatory goal.

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders (the author of the upcoming book by the same title) spoke on Inbox Zero to Google several years ago after some blogs on the subject got a lot of attention.  The video is nearly an hour long (half of which is a question and answer period, which bears watching), but is a pretty eye opening dose of email rethought.

Essentially it breaks down to the fact that we check our emails too often. If your mail client auto-checks once an hour it quickly adds up to over 20,000 interruptions a year.  To get things done simply close the inbox and work. He goes on to suggest checking the inbox once an hour and blitzing through the messages doing on of five things by way of ‘processing to zero’ and creating actions:

1. Delete / Archive
2. Delegate
3. Respond
4. Defer
5. Do

It’s a great message (he goes into more detail in the presentation, and I’m sure he’ll go into even more detail in the book). It’s been a help to me. I have always taken pride in my email netiquette, and have always strove to keep my Gmail inbox with a white space between the oldest message and the repeated nav bar; but in doing so I was spending too much time on email and taking time from more important things; namely doing actual work.

Watch the Video

Or view here.

Today I work primarily on two machines: A robust PC desktop and an Apple MacBook Pro. I use the desktop by default as I love having three monitors for multitasking; but I rely on the laptop frequently for when I need  a change of environment or to work on the road.

I am refusing to take part in the Mac vs. PC debates anymore. These are just tools. Apple has some amazingly well marketed and well built machines (complete with hardware to drool over). PCs come with greater freedom, are cheaper and the wider base can mean more help from the nerds who write about this sort of stuff. Linux is a frontier I haven’t jumped into yet (it’s only a matter of time), but again it will be a User Interface accompanied by text, image and code editors.  I am confident that I could do my job on any machine.

Websites themselves are content (usually images and text) arranged in some kind of a logical layout. While the layouts are generally developed in XHTML, CSS or HTML, the content can be delivered in a number of ways including PHP, ASP, .Net, or XML. Whatever. I do have more experience with PHP, but the principles are the same across these platforms as well. Without code to recycle I might not develop as quickly as I would on a platform that I have resources handy for; but I can build a site in any language.

I have some confessions. I had Windows ME, and I thought it was fine. I thought Vista was a great improvement over XP, and I can’t wait to try Windows 7. If I woke up tomorrow with a deadline and only a Windows 95 box to do it with – no problem.

The platform doesn’t make the site. I do. :)

1. RAID – My first line of defence is a SATA Raid for my data drive on my computer (the OS is on a third hdd). This mirroring makes sure that my data is safe even if a hard drive dies.

2. Sync Back Pro Daily – Every day my system does a backup sync of emails and work files to an external drive using a program called Sync Back Pro. I highly recommend this product that easily allows scheduled backups and syncs of files to HDD, DVD or even FTP. There is a very nice free version as well with a couple less features. http://www.2brightsparks.com/

3. Closed Jobs drive – Since I do a lot of freelance work for a marketing agency a lot of jobs pass through my computer. To prevent redundancy I keep a drive of closed jobs as my only repository for files if the job suddenly re-opens.

4. Off Site Storage - Should the unthinkable happen I do have an external at a friend’s house with a collection of files I update a couple times a year.

5. Google Docs – For those important lists and billing / client information I have started to use Google’s services. I will never have hardware as reliable as this giant.

6. Fire Proof – What paranoid backup system would be complete without considering fire proofness? I recently got a safe for storing data on DVD and external HDDs. Can you really put a price on your data? The answer is yes. http://www.sentrysafe.com/

Your work is safe with me!

When I started brainstorming ideas to save bandwidth I thought I would have like two or three points, but I guess I’m a lot nerdier than even I could have known.

1) Set auto Disconnects Control Panel > Internet Options > Connections > the settings for that connection > advanced > Check “Disconnect if Idle for more than” maybe 5 min or so.

2) Turn off superfluous media – Think about it, if someone’s home page is msn.com (which I think is default on IE installs), then they have to download all those images for every inane article about Tom Cruise and weight loss… Control Panel > Internet Options > Advanced > Multimedia > turn off animations, images and sounds… this sounds harsh, but you will see where image boxes are and I think you can right click > Show image. I would show your users how to do this, sometimes they may want the images on auto (or maybe there’s some way to toggle it per page, I dunno I’ve never used it). Multimedia is the biggest source of bandwidth on most pages. I hope that animation bit includes flash…

3) Avoid Unnecessary or Large downloads - No bit torrents / downloading of media / online gaming, discourage file sharing on IM

4) Avoid Streams - discourage media streaming, skype, youtube, imeem and other audio or webcam transmissions. If users have to upload some video / audio it might be a good idea to set up a schedule. Ie. AJ can be a media uploader from 6 – 7, Johnny from 7 – 8, etc. This is another huge source of bandwidth.

5) Send Smart Emails - there are other ways to make emailing more efficient. Maybe instead of emailing people one at a time to tell them the same stuff, group email (it means less responses though). As an email alternative set up twitter accounts and blogs and tell all your people they can track you from these. These can even be updated by SMS on your cell phones.

5.5) Receive Smart Emails - Tell people to stop sending attachments and forwards. Also, if you get them, don’t open them. If you don’t bring the email to browser that bandwidth isn’t eaten. Maybe create a new folder to check when there is more bandwidth. The video of the cat jumping into the wall will be just as funny and applicable when the internet rationing summer is over.

6) Clean Home page - set home pages to Google.ca – this is about the cleanest smallest page ever. Compare that to something like yahoo and you download a lot less stuff for the browser to read. Your home page is your most visited, it should be light (in your browser Tools > Internet options)

7) Amalgamate your web 2.0 pages - are you checking all of your online accounts ie. Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, twitter etc? Setting up something like Netvibes might help you combine these all in one place like this http://www.netvibes.com/axiomaudio

8) Better yet, start an RSS Reader - Most modern sites now have RSS feeds. You can follow your facebook news feed, digg news, weather, and blogs with RSS. For example, AJ has a blog at http://albertaaj.blogspot.com/- rather than view that and load all the images and page elements you can visit his RSS http://albertaaj.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default – but rather than read it here you can subscribe to it in an RSS reader. Do you have a Gmail account? If so then you already have Google Reader at your service (linked at the top left) Click the Add Subscrition and paste that feed into the feild. Presto. With RSS readers like this (and there are more, I think in-browser and Outlook are two other common examples) you can read your web content all in one place – and without unnecessary page elements taking up bandwidth.

9) Turn off System internet use where possible - Check out what processes are running in your taskbar and task manager (ctrl + alt + delete > processes). Turn off ones that search the internet for updates, turn off Windows auto update, close any widgets or sidebar items that are also getting web information. This also includes closing programs like email clients that automatically access the internet periodically. Just check it when you need it. If you’re not getting email attachments or downloads this means you can also update spyware and antivirus less often as you’re less vulnerable. (but I take no responsibility if your system bites it!)

10) Make sure you’re caching – make sure your system isn’t re-downloading content every time you visit pages. Control Panel > Internet Options > Browsing History > settings > I would set it to automatically, but if you’re being a hero you could say never. I think you should increase your disk space for cache to the maximum recommended (250MB for me) and beef up your history say to 50 days.

These ten tips make good general sense, but sometimes you need to be able to go online and enjoy the things you miss most from home. I think this is where planning a schedule will help. Maybe each of you has a night of the week to do some of the bandwidth-heavy things that aren’t the best on shared and limited resources!

Have any ideas of your own? I’d love to hear more on this topic!