Email and One Note
Today I accomplished two things that have been a nusiance: cleaning up my email and getting One Note to sync.
These tasks fall under the “not real work” category for me. I generally consider them time sucks, that are necessary only in that they are tools that have to be used because of the systems that we have created around ourselves.
Email has been a particular challenge. Pervious jobs have not been so communicaton heavy. Even when it has brief moments of activity, I can usually defer some of it by simply walking down the hall and asking in person. That can’t be accomplished easily here. Not only that, but we are a list-serv heavy institution and several of our web forms funnel through them. So two months of emails is easily 150 messages, well over half of which were just hanging around in my inbox, waiting for me to make a decision about them.
So I triaged the whole mess. Most of them just needed a little attention–note a new resource, move to the archive. By the end I had less than ten still there. I will need to develop the skil to attend to these in an efficient manner. I keep hearing of others who reoutinely battle with this as well. I can’t imagine that this is productive in the long haul. Mostly I need to create a habit and not use the inbox as a dumping ground.
Which brought me to dealing with One Note. I have this program at home. I liked it and used it for a few things. Recently, I cleaned it up because it can suffer from the same problem as email: become a dumping ground. But part of the usefullness it has for work is the ability to sync online. I just couldn’t get it to work and didn’t make the time to sit and figure it out.
Today I did. I almost stopped because I have so many devices and accounts and the only way I could see making this work, was to make yet another account. And I could imagine that there would be conflicts accessing across devices and platforms, between apps and mobil sites. I did manage to make it work. It took installing a little program for managing Live accounts, but I could finally log in, sync to the web, and access it from the app on my tablet. Hurray!
It’s more than a little relieving that I can invest the time into getting some sort of organization in order and not be limited to my work desktop. Also that it’s on a platform that will likely be supported for a while. Ultimately, I just needed to spend some time figuring it all out. It was a good day for that. And in time for my research day on Friday.