Black Belt Productivity

Having dealt with a couple of situations at the office in the last day or two, and having had to address an issue with one of my own children at school, I have had the difference between hearing and listening fresh on my mind.

Unfortunately, it is becoming more difficult to communicate today. Part of the reason is that we are being pulled in so many directions that we do not take time to listen. Some of us also spend a significant part of out time formulating our answer or rebuttal instead of processing the information we are being given.

After reading Leo of Zen Habit’s article last Friday at Web Worker Daily, I decided to post about how I am keeping my Gmail clean and slim.

Since I got my Macbook Pro in March ‘07, I have been POPing [1] my Gmail off of the server and using Gmail itself as my online mail archive. I have setup a LOT of filters and tweaked settings so that I can keep a clean inbox and an archive structure that makes it relatively easy to purge unwanted mails.