The madness has to stop. What was once a 30 minute annoyance is now my full-time job.  Here are 5 time saving tips:

5: Add a http://three.sentenc.es/ email signature and keep them short.

“Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.

three.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be three sentences or less. It’s that simple.”

Example signature:
——————————————–
Q: Why is this email three sentences or less?
A: http://three.sentenc.es
——————————————–

4: Type “Sent from iPhone” under your short responses.  People don’t expect long responses when you’re on your phone. Don’t forget to mispell a few words.

This all looks graet +1!!
Sent from iPhone.

3: Create a ‘VIP’ filter. Easy to do on GMail.  Add your boss, investors, and close friends. Flag them red and throw them in a separate folder. This is the first place I check every morning.

2: (Gmail only) Keep the spam out.  If you’re giving your address to a potentially shady website, tack on +spam to the end, example: yourname+spam@gmail.com. You can then filter those emails into a spam folder you check periodically. (ProTip: the +spam is a variable that can be anything you want, eg. yourname+football@gmail.com etc., make as many as you like)

1: Setup an email bankruptcy filter.  This is a little bit of a dick move, but if you’re getting hundreds of new emails a day, it just might work.

Step 1: Create a filter that auto-responds to all unopened emails > 14 days old w/the following message:

Your email (below) is now 14 days old and has not been opened.  To minimize email buildup your email has now been placed in the archive.  Should you still require a response simply respond back and you’ll automatically be added to the priority queue.  Thank you.

Step 2: Setup another filter that looks for the text “Your email (below)”, this will catch the email responses back to you from those still requiring your response.  Filter these into a special folder you check and respond to daily.

Good luck!

Via Kevin Rose

Why Mandarin? I do tech support for a global software company and we are getting lots of customers in China because of the massive investment in infrastructure right now. These guys will eventually need to ask questions or will run into problems (not with the software, because that’s perfect) so they’re going to need to speak to someone. We already have Mandarin-speaking staff in Singapore and indeed in Shanghai, but there’s only so many staff. Most of them are away from the office most of the time doing installations, training, audits and upgrades.

Me, I don’t generally travel. I’ve made my preference to stay at home for my family clear to my supervisors and they have honoured that. I generally don’t travel overseas more than once a year. So, I’m almost always in the office. So I’m going to be the one to learn Chinese to speak to our newest customers when they call.

I get the impression that my supervisrs would be happy if I complete a short conversation along the lings of, “I do not speak Chinese. Do you speak English? I can’t help you right now. Goodbye”, or perhaps, “Please hold while I transfer you to Jackie Chan”. But now that I’ve dipped my toe into the warm ocean of the Mandarin language, I’ve set a higher goal. I want to be able to watch a Jackie Chan movie without the subtitles!

I’ve got a question for anyone out there who does actually speak Mandarin: since, to speak the language properly, you need to have the right ascending or descending tones, how does singing in Mandarin work? I mean, the melody of the lyrics follows a natural rising and falling pitch and tone, so does this clash with what is supposed to happen in the spoken language which needs to follow its own rising and falling pitch and tone?

This is true, but it’s certainly not an awfuly terrible thing. I pointed out that Jett is very happy when spending time at Nanna’s, and that Nanna is more than happy to look after him. She has commented that he is very well behaved, mostly does his own thing unsupervised, eats all the food given to him and is very talkative. So, as a once off (or twice off as this is by no means full time, permanent work) it is working well. If it were to become a problem with either Nanna or Jett, then Suzanne may need to decline work occasionally.