austinpreneur

My new business card... is an email

I recently ran out of business cards and decided not to purchase any more. 

I'm sick of carrying cards around. I'm sick of running out. I'm sick of getting home from a conference with a stack of cards that I have to sort through and somehow digitize.

I actually had a pretty good system. I would take notes on the card about when and where I met someone. I'd also add any specific followup items. I would send all of my business cards to Shoeboxed and they scan them for me. After that I throw them into a 1 gallon plastic bag that currently holds every card I've ever received (just barely).

I wanted something better. Something that didn't cost money or create clutter. And of course I'm anti-paper so anything that eliminates the paper trail is a bonus for me.

I considered the various digital business card apps. But in the end, I just settled on a simple email template that I set up in Tout (one of my recent investments). 

Why email? Everyone has it. It's the default way I want to communicate with someone that I meet. Nobody has to install anything and there is nothing to explain. I just tap the Tout app on my phone, select the template, and hand them the phone to ask them to type in their email address. If I'm at my computer it is a similar process, but I can also customize the email before I send it.

Tout sends them a template email with my background and contact info. It even has a vcard attached so they can easily add me to their address book.

Here is my default template.

Howdy {first_name},

It was a pleasure meeting you at {x}. I am the Founder of OtherInbox – the cure for email overload. With almost a million signups we are one of the most successful email applications. Without you doing anything differently, our Automatic Organizer will scan your email and file shopping and social networking emails into folders so they don't clutter up your Inbox. We also make it easy to stop unwanted emails by simply placing them in the Unsubscribe folder.
http://www.otherinbox.com

I've been involved with email my entire career. I founded SKYLIST in 1996 in his college dormitory as a one of the first email marketing companies. In 2004, I created UnsubCentral to help email marketing companies comply with regulatory requirements. With customers like Disney, Microsoft and Nascar, both companies became top ranked solutions in their respective categories before they were purchased by Datran Media. I studied Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and live in Austin, TX with my wife Amy and two children (number three due in August).

I also am an active angel investor and advisor to early stage startups. I brought together 20 others like me to form the Capital Factory early stage accelerator in Austin to mentor and invest in tech startups. Each summer we select 5 companies and work with them to accelerate their business towards profitability or their first round of funding.
http://www.capitalfactory.com 

This fall, I'll be joining with Bob Metcalfe and John Butler to teach a startup class at the University of Texas at Austin. We will be selecting teams of entrepreneurial undergraduate students from all departments to help them start their own company while still in school. 
http://www.1semesterstartup.com 

I've attached a vCard file with all of my contact information. You should be able to double click it to import into your address book.

Here is the most important stuff:
Email: josh@xxxxxx.com
Phone: (512) XXX-XXXX
Twitter: joshuabaer

I look forward to getting to know you better. Please reply with your phone number and any other information you would like to provide.

~Josh

What would you include in your intro email? 

What other digital business card solutions do you use? 

Let me know in the comments!

How I use iPhoto to publish to Facebook

I have a pretty good routine down now for uploading and sharing my photos and videos on my Mac and in the cloud. Good because I'm able to do it frequently (a few times a week) and don't spend too much time on it (usually about 15 minutes). This system is actually based on a similar method for managing music songs and playlists that I use for iTunes.

I manage them in iPhoto, edit them in iMovie, and share them online via Facebook, Flickr and YouTube and also through devices such as my iPhone, screensavers and digital picture frames. I'm able to upload a lot of content with minimal time.

Here is what I do after returning from a trip or event where I took pictures and video.

First, I organize the photos:

1. Connect USB cable to camera, videocamera, and iPhone. iPhoto automatically launches and goes directly to the Import screen.
2. Click Import in iPhoto to copy photos from camera to computer
3. Hygiene - delete bad photos and duplicate photos in iPhoto
4. Tagging - Add tags to photos in iPhoto
5. Ratings - Rate all photos 3 stars in iPhoto
6. Ratings - Upgrade individual photos to 4 or 5 stars in iPhoto
7. Events - Break into Events if needed and name events in iPhoto
8. Smart Albums - Update MobileMe galleries by dragging and dropping new photos from Smart Albums in iPhoto

Next, I publish them to various physical devices and online:

1. Screensaver on my computer
2. iPhone Photo Albums
3. Digital Picture Frames
4. Facebook Photos - Publish new photos to Facebook from iPhoto, then update permissions from Facebook website
5. Flickr Photos - Publish new photos to Flickr if appropriate
6. iMovie Editing - Edit videos in iMovie if necessary (usually not)
7. Facebook Video - Drag videos to the desktop and then upload individually to Facebook and YouTube

Usually this entire process takes about 15 minutes. If its after a big trip with 1000 photos and a bunch of video then maybe an hour or two.

Do I have to use a Mac?

This is one of those places where the Mac really shines. No one has made it so simple to manage your photos, videos and music and the software is all completely free with every Mac. Everything is integrated and mostly automatic. You plug in the camera and it launches iPhoto and goes right to the Import screen. My screensaver automatically gets the latest pictures and so does my iPhone when it syncs. Everything is automatic. Everything is easy.

Tagging

I'm pretty religious about tagging my photos and videos. I have about 20 tags that I use to keep things straight. Most photos get 2 or 3 tags.

A few tags may eventually be replaced by iPhoto facial recognition - I've played with it a bunch but I haven't integrated it into my process yet. I also need to work geolocation tagging into this process.

The most common tags that I use now are:

• Family Members *
• Josh *
• Baer **
• Family **
• Friends **
• Business
• OtherInbox
• Capital Factory
• Ignite Austin
• Home 
• Holiday
• Travel
• Cars
• Dogs
• Documents (pictures of awards, certificates, etc.)

* could be replaced by facial recognition
** could be replaced by facial recognition if it had groups

I can use the same criteria to do one-off searches and I have found it to be very easy to find specific pictures I'm looking for. Usually I can just narrow it down to 2 or 3 tags and then scan chronologically to find it.

Ratings

iPhoto has a five star rating system. My default rating is 3 stars. After deleting bad photos that are out of focus and duplicate shots, I "select all" and set the ratings to 3 stars. Then I look through them for any that I want to upgrade to 4 stars or 5 stars.

• 5 stars - the very best pictures
• 4 stars - better than average, but not the very best
• 3 stars - default rating for pictures that are worth keeping
• 2 stars - below average, but kept for completeness (usually pictures from an event)
• 1 star - never show in albums, probably some special case, not usually normal pictures

By rating every photo, I can create Smart Albums (below) that contain my "best" pictures from the past few months. Or I can combine with Tags to search for the "best pictures of Cars".

 

 
 

Smart Albums

Smart Albums are like "saved searches." I combine Tagging and Ratings to create Smart Albums that update their content automatically. I then connect these Smart Albums to screensavers, my iPhone, and the albums that I publish to Facebook.

My most frequently used Smart Albums are:

• Kids Best - tagged Kids and rated 5 stars
• Kids Recent - taken in the past 3 months, tagged Kids and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
• 3 Months Best - taken in the past 3 months and rated 4 or 5 stars
• 3 Months Recent - taken in the past 3 months and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
• Family Best - tagged Family and rated 4 or 5 stars
• Travel Best - tagged Travel and rated 5 stars
• Amy & Josh - tagged Amy and Josh and rated 5 stars

How do I decide how many stars? Mostly be trial an error. I start with 4 and 5 stars and if that is too many then I just go with 5 stars. If its not enough then I go to 3, 4 and 5 stars.

 

 

iMovie Editing

iMovie is a simple video editing application that comes pre-installed on most Macs. It's really easy to make professional looking videos with it. You can easily cut and paste clips together, overlay slides from a presentation, add titles and effects, and more.

It is integrated with iPhoto - so as long as I upload my photos and movies into iPhoto (which is what happens by default when I plug a camera into my Mac) then iMovie can automatically see all of those media assets and I can drag and drop them into movies I'm editing.

Facebook

For photos, I usually let iPhoto organize them into Events and end up wanting to publish Events as Albums on Facebook. After all of the hygiene, tagging, and rating, I'm usually left with exactly the group of photos I might want to share. So I just name the Event the same name I would want the Album to be named in Facebook and then click the Facebook icon in the bottom right of the iPhoto window.

 

 

If you want to share your photos with Everyone or with Just Friends, its easy. You just click go and you're done. I think that somehow it even matches up the facial recognition and will automatically tag photos with your friends.

If you want to share the album privately on Facebook with only certain people, it gets a little tricky. iPhoto only gives you the option to share your album with Everyone, Friends of Friends, or Just Friends. Most of the photos that I share are only shared with certain Facebook Friend Lists and not with Everyone. So I have to publish from iPhoto to Just Friends and then immediately go to the web page and reset the privacy controls from the web after the first photo is uploaded. Even still, I've had a few times where some friends on Facebook have seen pictures (I know because they commented on them) that they weren't supposed to see (fortunately nothing embarrassing, just cute family pictures).

 

 

This only works for uploading photos to your own personal account. Once they are in your account, you can easily post them to a Facebook event. However, if you want to post pictures to a Facebook Page for your company, you need to export the photos to a folder and then use the Facebook photo upload process from the web page.

For videos, it's similar to Facebook pages. You have to upload the video files directly using the Facebook web page. I usually end up dragging and dropping the video from iPhoto onto the desktop so that its easy to find when I'm uploading it to Facebook.

Flickr

I don't really publish many photos to Flickr but it works with iPhoto a lot like Facebook.

YouTube

Publishing movies isn't quite as simple with YouTube. The maximum time is 10 minutes, so long movies require extra editing to chop them up into 10 minute chunks and upload them each separately. This is a big pain in the ass and is making me seriously consider switching the bulk of my video to Vimeo because it has fewer limitations.

iPhone

My iPhone automatically syncs the Smart Albums to my iPhone, so it always has the best and most recent pictures on it. You configure that from within iTunes.

Screensavers

You can choose a Smart Album as a screensaver on a Mac, so I usually have the "3 Months Best" album with the Ken Burns effect on my screen. Its counter-intuitive to me at first, but I find that I prefer seeing the most recent pictures all the time, not the best old ones over and over.

Just go to the Screen Saver in the System Preferences and your iPhoto Albums and Events will appear in the list. Sometimes it takes a minute for them to appear.

 

 

Digital Picture Frames

I have a Philips digital picture frame on my desk. Unfortunately the only way to transfer pictures is by connecting it to a computer via USB or using SD memory cards. This means manually dragging and dropping images from iPhoto to the SD card and physically moving around the cards or cables every time you want to sync them. I'd really like to find a good digital picture frame that would stream the photos off of iPhoto (the problem with Facebook is that the pictures are so low quality).

What about you?

How do you manage your photos? Any tips on how to make my process smoother or more automated? Have you worked facial recognition and geo-location into your process? Please comment.

My Backup Strategy for Macs

I use Macs at home and at work. Here is my backup strategy:

Level 1 - Hardware RAID

I use a redundant RAID configuration for the hard drives that store the primary copy of the data so that if there is a hardware failure it can continue to operate without any interruption. This doesn't protect you from accidentally deleting something, but it does protect from hard drive failure and ALL HARD DRIVES FAIL.

Level 2 - Time Machine

I use the built in Time Machine backup program from Apple. It's easy and seems to work well. I haven't had to restore much yet so I can't say from personal experience but I've heard that the restore is easy an reliable. I do find that it slows down my computer when its backing up a lot of data and sometimes I use the menu bar icon to cancel the backup if I'm in the middle of something. 

Time Machine is brain dead simple. It literally is like plug in your hard drive and press one button and forget about it.

In addition to being easy and automatic, Time Machine stores many 'snapshots' of your data at different times and makes it easy to browse these snapshots and restore. This does protect you against accidentally deleting something because you can go "back in time" and get the file you deleted.

Time Machine backs up to an external hard drive attached to an iMac at my house. That disk is shared so that all other Macs in the house (and my laptop when its home at night) can backup to the same disk using Time Machine. I'm currently using a 2 TB drive for my Time Machine but I really should upgrade it soon.

Level 3 - JungleDisk

But what if my house burns down? I use JungleDisk from Rackspace to backup all of my local data (and I mean EVERYTHING) up to Amazon's S3 file storage service or Rackspace CloudFiles. This way all of my data is stored securely in the cloud. 

I have over 500GB of data, so it took many months to complete the initial upload. Once that completed, I don't seem to have any problem keeping up with the new data that I bring (mostly through photos and video).

You have to be a geek to set up Jungle Disk because you need a separate account at Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloudfiles. I would expect that its going to get easier now that Rackspace owns JungleDisk but I haven't tried setting up a new account in years.

Level 4 - Safe Deposit Box

What if my house burns down AND Amazon loses my data? Every six months or so I swap out the hard drives at home with a duplicate set in my safe deposit box. Every year or two I buy new, bigger hard drives, copy the data to the new drives, and put the old drives in the safe deposit box. This is pretty fast and easy. Each year my storage needs grow and hard drives get bigger and cheaper.

How do you backup your computer data? Leave a comment below or talk to me on Twitter here http://twitter.com/joshuabaer

Great presentation on Agile programming by Alan Cooper

Thanks to Jason Stoddard for sharing this link with me. Alan gave the closing keynote at the Agile 2008 conference and this is a link to his presentation deck and the notes that accompany them. It's worth reading and sharing with your non-Agile believers!

Speed tip if you use Gmail over IMAP

If you use Gmail over IMAP, then you want to know about a new feature Google just released as part of Gmail Labs. It lets you make the "All Mail" folder invisible to IMAP so that your email client doesn't try to download every message twice.

Gmail is different from other IMAP implementations in that each "folder" corresponds to a Gmail "label". Because each message can have more than label in Gmail, each message can appear in more than one folder in IMAP. Gmail also has an "All Mail" view that shows all of the messages at once - the Inbox, Sent, Archived, Labels, etc. This is handy when you're in Gmail and want to search across everything, but its not really needed in an IMAP client because most IMAP clients do their own indexing of messages and make it easy to search across all of them without having them in a folder.

The problem with the All Mail folder over IMAP is that it means you're downloading every message twice. And because your IMAP client thinks that a message that appears in 2 different folders is actually 2 different messages, any local searches that you do will return 2 results for every message - once in the folder you expect and once in the All Mail folder.

I have a lot of email - its measured in gigabytes - and so keeping around 2 copies of every messages is a pretty big deal. It takes up a lot of disk space, slows down my Internet because its downloading 2x as much, slows down my computer because my email program needs more memory to run. I highly recommend you turn off your All Mail folder!

To do this, go to Settings -> Labs and then turn on the Advanced IMAP feature. Next go to Settings -> Labels and uncheck All Mail. It's that simple!

p.s. hat tip to Ian Ragsdale for pointing this out to me after I complained about it screwing up my IMAP client!

Keep your head in the clouds

I'm a big fan of cloud computing, in particular Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com. Anywhere that I can outsource the actual hosting and management of computer systems I usually do.

With OtherInbox, we've been pretty religious about it. The only computers we own are the laptops and desktops that people work on.

• We host our email and shared calendars on Google Apps
  
• We use Google Docs as our wiki and for shared word processing and spreadsheets
  
• We host our website and blog at TypePad
  
• We host our version control software at CVSDude
  
• We send our outbound email through DNSExit
  
• We host our DNS with DynDNS
  
• We send out customer surveys with SurveyMonkey
  
• We test our software on many different platforms using CrossBrowserTesting.com
  

But probably most critical to our cloud strategy is hosting our production web servers and database servers on Amazon EC2 platform and using their S3 platform for backups and serving up static web files. We also use the SQS service to coordinate all our servers.

So what is all this talk about cloud computing? How can you take advantage of it in your current web application? What's the same and what's different?

From what I've seen, there are three major steps in moving from a traditional dedicated server architecture to one that takes full advantage of the unique benefits of the cloud.

1. Replace dedicated servers with cloud-based virtual servers
   
2. Move bottleneck code into modular work queues
   
3. Move database or persistent storage to an incremental solution

In upcoming posts I'll discuss each of those three steps in more detail.

Once you get to step three, you have a highly redundant architecture that scales incrementally. You only pay for what you use, so if you are busy in the afternoons but slow at night you can turn on twice as many servers at peak time without having to pay for keeping them standing by idle the rest of the day. If you suddenly get a lot of publicity and see rapid growth, extra capacity is sitting there waiting for you to use it and the architecture is ready to scale automatically. An the whole thing is probably CHEAPER than having dedicated servers!

Necessity is the mother of Invention (and winning Chinese battles)

I'm reading Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely, and came across a story that reminded me of bootstrapping a company.

In 210 BC, a Chinese commander named Xiang Yu led his troops across the Yangtze River to attack the army of the Qin (Ch'in) dynasty. Pausing on the banks of the river for the night, his troops awakened in the morning to find, to their horror, that their ships were burning. They hurried to their feet to fight off the attackers, but soon discovered that it was Xiang Yu himself who had set their ships on fire, and that he had also ordered all the cooking pots crushed.

With their ships gone, the soldiers had no route of retreat. Winning was the only option. And win they did. 9 battles in a row before defeating the Qin forces.

This is similar to when a bootstrapper enters the Valley of Death and commits to their venture, but before they are making money and cash flow positive. They are forced to figure out how to make it work with what they've got. The timeline is not completely in their control.

We're always tempted to leave ourselves an escape route or path of retreat. And usually that's a good idea. But sometimes there aren't enough resources to mount the attack and cover the retreat. In order to be successful sometimes you have to commit the resources to what you believe in because the retreat option isn't acceptable. Sometimes once you head down a path there is just no turning back, so you might as well commit all of your resources to getting to the end.

When I was CEO of SKYLIST, this happened twice. We were growing and needed to shift focus based on customer demand and a rapidly changing market. Both of those times it was focused on eliminating unprofitable customers and focusing sales on specific types of opportunities. Each resulted in a temporary drop in revenue but strengthened the long term sustainability and profitability of the company.

When Datran Media bought SKYLIST, we went through the same exercise again. Each time the SKYLIST business came out stronger than before and had replaced the revenue with better customers within a year.

Each time it was the right thing to do and left us stronger than before, but each time we went into it kicking and screaming. Change is hard. When something works, we often get the urge to just do that over and over - well past the point where it stops working. It felt bad to move away from lines of business we had traditionally dominated.

But it was turning point for the company. Had we not burned the ships behind us, I'm not sure we would have survived and succeeded.

We need Twitter and IRC integration for PowerPoint

A recent story on CNN talks about the real-time backchatter that is often happening at conferences and presentations. While the panelists are up on stage talking, the audience is having their own conversation on Twitter, Meebo and in chat rooms. I was in the crowd at Mark Zuckerberg's notorious SXSW interview this year which was probably one of the highest profile examples so far.

I was impressed to read how Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester was able to use this to his advantage and change the course of his presentation mid-stream based on feedback over Twitter. Smart presenters are going to pay attention and smart entrepreneurs will find ways to turn this into an advantage.

At some of the geekiest conferences that I attend, they have put up an IRC chat window on a projector so that participants inside the room and outside the room could interact.

We're now starting to see a new generation of web 2.0 presentation software from companies like SlideRocket and Google - where the slides can incorporate real-time data from the web, video, flash and other interactive components. But this is all focused outward on what the viewers see.

PowerPoint or Keynote show a presenter view if you have 2 monitors in use that includes the current slide, next slide, time elapsed, time remaining, current time and your slide notes. A great opportunity for this new generation is to provide a real-time presenter view that brings in this other real-time information. So in addition to the slide notes and timers, there would a twitter feed, Meebo client and IRC client so that each presenter can monitor the online audience in addition to the one sitting in front of them.

Why stand when you can walk?

I've been working at a standing desk for close to 10 years. When I talk on the phone I'm constantly pacing. At my house I end up walking in circles around the island in my kitchen. At work, I stand on a balance board to keep my body occupied. In a strange way, it seems to help me focus.

I've thought about trying to turn a treadmill or exercise bike into a workstation but never got the energy to make it happen. After seeing this treadmill desk, I may have to finally give it a try!

Hat tip: Mike Subelsky

Is this website down or is it just my Internet connection?

Ever wonder if the reason you can't get to a website is a problem on your end or a problem at the website? Here is a handy tool you can use to test!

Cloud solution for cross-browser testing - crossbrowsertesting.com

Jeff Hotz just sent me a link to CrossBrowserTesting.com that allows you to easily test your web application on any combination of operating system and web browser. We are developing OtherInbox on Macs, and although I have a PC laptop sitting around for testing I don't have every different combination of XP, Vista, IE, Firefox, etc.

This lets me log in for 5 minutes and try something out to reproduce a bug or just do proactive testing. It's actually free to try out for 5 minutes at a time and you can pay for priority access.

Total Leadership

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting Stewart Friedman, professor at Wharton and author of the new book Total Leadership. Much thanks to Brett Hurt for introducing me!

Stew has an interesting perspective on how to maximize your success and happiness by integrating work, community, family and self in a holistic way. He provides specific exercises to help you discover what works best for you and to empower your employees to do the same. After a few hours with Stew, I'm re-evaluating some of my choices and priorities. I'm looking forward to reading the book!

Tonight he'll be speaking at a Leadership Austin and Bootstrap Austin event hosted by BazaarVoice and I highly encourage you to attend if you can make time!

Keyboard envy

It looks like there may finally be a keyboard to replace my Microsoft Natural Keyboard that I love so dearly (when I found out they stopped producing them, I bought as many as I could find on eBay).

They finally released the keyboard with organic LEDs on each key - allowing you to have full color icons on each key that change depending on what application you're in. For me, this is great because I type in Dvorak and so the keys would actually have the right letters on them. But it's also great for creating custom keys that launch applications or perform common tasks. Depending on what application you are using, the picture on the keys can change and the function associated with the key changes appropriately.

I need one of these!
(actually I need 2)

Available at ThinkGeek

"Get out of my way you stupid programmers!" says the CFO

I'm playing around with Google Spreadsheets as a platform for backend application reporting and its quite promising so far. They key to it are special functions that you can use in a spreadsheet cell to import data from XML, CSV, RSS or even a well formatted web page with HTML tables or lists.


=importXML("URL","query")
=importData("URL")
=ImportHtml(URL, "list" | "table", index)
=ImportFeed(URL, [feedQuery | itemQuery], [headers], [numItems])


Full documentation is here.

From what I can tell, every time you open the spreadsheet it reloads all the files. It does not seem to update the spreadsheet real-time with new data as you are editing it - but I think that's probably for the best.

Lets face it, most of the important data from our website activity and logs ends up in a spreadsheet at some point. The data is needed by the CFO for reconciling expenses, recording business metrics and generating future projections. Operations needs to monitor the health of the system.

In many companies, however, these requests are fulfilled by separate database admins and programmers because the CFO is not empowered to get the data himself. There is lots of, "I'm waiting to get that data back from the Reporting department." Not only does this slow things down, but causes the CFO and other decision makers to ask fewer questions. Asking fewer questions is bad! Being able to easily ask lots of questions is very good!

When something is fast and easy, you can try 10 different combinations and see what's best. When something is slow and painful, you try your best to get it right the first time. The first method seems to produce better results in my experience. It's usually better to iterate rapidly and allow for failures in the process than to try and get it perfect.

This is very similar to how email marketing tools evolved. In the beginning, the programmers for your application or website also wrote the content for the email messages it would send. Over time, the marketers took over control of the content. But then every time they wanted to change the content, they needed to go ask the programmers. While there are many other reasons to use an Email Service Provider (ESP), I believe this was actually one of the most compelling reasons at first.

So what I'm doing to start is creating a data feed of user activity. It's a daily snapshot that shows the total number of users, number of pageviews, advertising inventory generated, etc. This automatically becomes a spreadsheet in Google with a row for each day. Now the CFO can do whatever he wants with it from within the spreadsheet. Every once in a while he may have to ask the programmers to add a new column or data point to the data feed, but he doesn't have to go through someone else to get at the data and manipulate it.

Ideally, you would just dump all the raw data and logs into the spreadsheet. I haven't tested this to see how much data they will take, but I just assumed that wouldn't work. But the more granular you can get, the more the CFO can work independently without depending on others to program new reports. Rather than using a PHP or ROR charting package, you just use the spreadsheet. It's much faster and easier. You can make 2 different spreadsheets with the same data feeding into them to compare different theories.

I'm still just getting started with this and will post more examples and real-world usage data soon. If you try this out, I'd like to hear about your experiences.

Getting Things Done (GTD) with Apple iCal

I don't claim to be an expert at GTD, but I am trying to integrate it more into my routine. I was already using MacOS Mail and iCal for managing my todos, and am trying to map a simple GTD like system on top of it.

First I use the iCal To Dos to keep track of my next action items. High Priority items are things that I expect to get done today. Every morning, I review the Medium Priority items and promote a few to High Priority that I want to get done today. If I want to remember something for later but its not a top priority, I make it Low Priority. When I'm waiting on someone else to complete one of my todos, I move it to No Priority.

In Mail, I created a folder called To Dos. Anytime I create a To Do for an email, I move the email to that folder so its out of my way (I don't need the email reminder because I now have a To Do reminder). When I start working on that item, I know where to find the email if I need it. Periodically, I review the To Do email folder to clear out old items.

Each morning, I read through my new emails and either delete it, delegate it to someone else, deal with it immediately, or create a To Do in iCal. Then I review my schedule for the day and my To Dos and mark the ones as High that I plan on accomplishing today.

High Priority - Deal with it today
Medium Priority - Next on the plate
Low Priority - Backburner
No Priority - Waiting on someone else

If you're currently using iCal to do GTD, I'd love to hear about your experiences!

Startup on Google

I've helped a number of startups and non-profits to get up and running on Google for their email, calendar and document collaboration and have been pleased with the results. And so far, I haven't found any need to upgrade from the free Standard Edition to the Premier Edition with a yearly fee (although I'm sure that there are many situations where it is appropriate).

Because everything is "open", it's safe to try out Google without having to worry about being "locked in". You can switch to another solution at any time without losing any data.

What do you get?

POP/IMAP/Webmail email accounts with plenty of storage space

A full-featured calendar that works over the web or syncs with Windows Outlook and Mac iCal

Web-based equivalents of Word, Excel and Powerpoint

Secure instant messaging, internet phone and videoconference

Simple website tools and hosting

Everything is secure and encrypted

It's all a-la-carte so you can pick which pieces you want to use. I recommend most organizations start by moving over their email accounts first and then start using the shared calendar and documents. The rest of the services can be added as/if needed.

What does it cost?
Nothing!

That's right, it's free! It is one of the most reliable email services and also has more features than just about anyone else. All things considered, it is clearly the best value and arguably the best at any cost.

I really find it hard to imagine why anyone would pay for a slow, unreliable email service from their ISP when they could have a best-of-breed solution for free. If you really want to have someone to call for support (even though you'll probably never need it), you can pay $50 per user per year for the Premier Edition.

To start using Google, you first go to their site and create an account for your domain. You probably have an existing domain name that you want to use. Creating the account at Google doesn't do anything to change your current domain, so you can go ahead and sign up without worrying about screwing anything up.

You can also switch over your email for just a few accounts without doing everything at once - a great way to test it out and get comfortable with it.