Living in a digital world makes me yearn for more things that are “real”. I am constantly wondering if these things are actually helping me out. Are we trying to streamline something that shouldn’t even be getting our attention? As you know, the internet can be so powerful, but at the same time it can be such a huge freaking noose. Part of the point of this blog is to start having technology work for us instead of the other way around. I am very happy you brought this up.

Going lo-tec as a developer would be nearly impossible, but there are certainly things we can all do to streamline things. I hope to post more about this soon. For example, as a result of checking email less often and sending off less email, I find myself having more conversations with people over the phone or in person. That is real.

That makes perfect sense. My long term plan is to have my “web concierge” deal with all that stuff, so I don’t even need to check my emails or vm unless it has already been filtered for importance.

I’ve been having crazy thoughts lately about significantly reducing the amount of technology that I allow into my life. wondering if I can go without a cell phone and move to checking email once a week. One result is that I would end up spending more time with people face-to-face, instead of posting on blogs, skyping, ect.

Do you guys know of any programmers/developers that have gone “lo-tec”? That would be interesting

I also use them to highlight very important e-mails. By applying a filter which is colored bright red, I can quickly go to that e-mail, deal with it, and get rid of it.

Periodically, one of my servers needs to get ahold of me, and when it does, I’ll get an e-mail with a bright red label applied.

Also, I think there are certain circumstances when you just can’t give an email the time or effort that it deserves. For that I will label it “next action” so that I know at some point in the next day or so I should reply. I also use the “waiting on” label in case the email can’t be completed until whatever it is I’m waiting on is complete. This is from getting things done and the gmail firefox extension gtd inbox

The only problem I have with the follow-up labels is that now I must check my inbox as well as the labels.

I remember Tim Ferris suggesting in his book (4 hour work week) that the elaborate filtering/labeling of emails typically enables an addiction to email or information.

In response to Tim’s idea I have eliminated all my email folders and either archive or respond that day to it. I figure that if it isn’t important enough to respond to immediately, maybe it doesn’t deserve my time. It has made my one-time-a-day email sessions much more brief. Any other thoughts?

Through my own processing, I can eliminate the need to check Google Reader all together if I so desire. However, even though I am greatly reducing the number of posts I actually need to contend with, the posts I do care about go to e-mail. And this, as you’ve discovered, is another problem.

However, I do utilize many features of Gmail to filter and label my e-mails and make optimal use of it.

My use of Google Reader is for casual reading when I am bored. :) Or, perhaps, I want to discover new keywords that I’d like to read more about in the future. These keywords, through this discovery session, would then be added to a MySQL table, and then I would receive relevant posts automatically in the future via e-mail.

My server side processing also has the capability to send me an SMS when certain keywords are matched. Which, depending on the importance of the RSS post, I could have it alert me via SMS and avoid me having to watch for it in Gmail.

I tend to live in my e-mail a little more than is ideal, but my use of e-mail is a little more complicated than casual e-mail use. In a sense, it is the collecting point from a variety of processes and sources which have already reduced greatly.

In my previous example, I reduced the number of items I received, to less than 1/3 of a percent (0.280314 %).

However, I used to click around on my different feeds to read here and there. For me I found this way completely useless. What would happen is I’d never really process what I was reading. I was instead focused on what I can knock off of reader. Rather than clicking around I just go to “all items” hide the left sidebar, and just read. It is way more relaxing for me to read this way. The focus now is simply on skimming / reading.

Another thing I found that helps me is I only go into reader when I know I have the time. I don’t want to be going there 500 times a day when I can do it once. If you read the book by Tim Ferriss, the 4 hour work week, he discusses batching jobs to save time. He doesn’t discuss feed readers, but rather applies it to email and other areas of a typical office day.

Generally I will skim through my “Must Reads” categories which consists of a few blogs run by friends. Depending on how much time I have, I’ll either do the “Mark all as read” at the top level, or I’ll go through some of my folders and mark them as read.

I have invested some time developing some server-side processing of my own which regularly scrapes RSS feeds and then parses those posts for keywords from a MySQL database. If there is a match, that post is forwarded to me via e-mail. If not, I never see the post.

For example, in about the last week, I’ve processed over 65,500 RSS posts from various sources. Of these, I’ve received only 178 posts, via e-mail, which have matched keywords that I care about. For the other 65,300 or so posts, I never saw, or had to deal with them.

Also, did you notice that GR finally implemented a commenting system so that when your friends share an item, you can comment on it? I’ve been using it a lot with you guys but haven’t seen the reciprocal. That was probably the #1 feature I’ve been waiting for them to do.