One of the mysteries of managing my email has been trying to figure out how to manage follow-up email.
The scenario is well-know to users of Outlook or any other email program.
You send an email to someone who you need a response from.  To compound matters, the response is needed by a certain time so that […]

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Bit Literacy has some sound advice when it comes to reading and processing  electronic newsletters (or zines.)
The first recommendation is to scan newsletters once before deleting them.
I began this practice about a year ago, and have found that it works much better then trying to shove all my newsletters into a single folder in Outlook.  […]

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One of the key recommendations of Bit Literacy is that one should take todos and schedule them onto lists that belong to particular days. It argues that a single todo list quickly becomes overwhelming, and that the items should instead be allocated to lists that belong to separate days in the future.
It’s not a […]

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In Bit Literacy, the author makes a brilliant insight, which confirms for me that the book is probably 3-5 years ahead of its time.
He quotes a book by Richard Saul Wurman from 1989 titled Information Anxiety: “One of the most anxiety-inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know […]

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This is an interesting article the reflects the opinion on this blog that time management systems require active ownership, and that a user must take control of their habits in a very conscious way in order to be effective:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/why-you-should-learn-a-productivity-system.html

 
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One confusing aspect of Bit Literacy is a contradiction  that I found in the discussion around ToDo’s:  the book calls for scalable solutions, while in the same chapter it describes 2 solutions that seem to ignore that sound advice, because they scale well.
The author makes the point that many emails create the need to engage […]

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I recently wrote an article for the Stepcase Lifehack website entitled “Impressing Your Boss with Time Management 2.0″
I got the idea when I remembered some performance reviews I had received in the past in which I could not figure out what I should do differently, if anything.
I imagined that employees who were told that they […]

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Another one of the key ideas in Bit Literacy is that “letting bits go” is a critical frame of mind to maintain.
Letting bits go simply means that a user of an email system is better off deleting freely, early and often, rather than keeping stuff around just in case it’s needed later.  Mark Hurst, the […]

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As I mentioned in a prior post, there is a great deal that I enjoyed from the book “Bit Literacy” by Mark Hurst.  In particular, the idea of returning to “empty” struck a chord with me.
If you are a frequent reader of this website you might imagine why, because I have described “Emptying” as one […]

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There is a major point from the book Bit Literacy that I found some disagreement with.  The idea that “bits are heavy” is fundamental to Mark Hurst’s theory that when they accumulate, the create a burden a user’s life.
He’s right about that, but he’s missing the point that bits by themselves are meaningless.
This can be […]

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