Oli Gibson

Firstly apologies to any regular readers on the lack of new posts to the blog at the moment, I’m having a bit of a hiatus at the moment due to a lot of work in other areas but I will continue to post here as and when I can.

Having been inspired by Kevin Rose and Michael Arrington I have decided to write a list of my favorite products that I use on a regular basis. Some of these I use for work, some for fun, some cover both areas and all make me more productive in one way or another. I use most of them every day or nearly every day and they all help me through the week. Let me know what you think of the list and add your own links in the comments below, I’d love to hear what you guys can’t live without.

Gmail
Google Analytics
Google Finance
Google Docs / Calander
Start.io
WordPress
Skype
Spotify
Omnifocus
Drop Box
iPhone 3GS
Tweetie (Twitter)
Facebook*
Digg
YouTube
Photoshop
Pages

*Facebook is only on the list since it is where a large number of friends are. Personally with the privacy issues on Facebook I would prefer not to use the service but due to sheer number of users the positives out weigh the negatives at this point.

This post is part of the Empty Inbox series

Operating a successful and sustainable empty inbox is a process rather than a product. Unfortunately a sudden burst of productive work can’t save you from the chaos, consistency is the key to removing the stress from email.

Was the Stress Justified?

As you trawled though those hundreds of messages in you inbox you may have noticed how most email is only relevant for a short period of time and how most is remarkably unimportant and retrospectively unnecessary. So why did it seem so important before?

I believe that the ‘always-on’ mindset makes you spring to attention whenever that new message arrives. You feel the need to answer it there and then because it must be important. However with the use of hindsight how many of those message really needed to be dealt with immediately and how many could have waited?

Keep it Flowing

Think about when you started answering all the messages that just needed a quick response. I expect you found 5-10 minute periods where you were amazingly productive, where you had that single focus on retiring as many messages as you could. I even expect that you enjoyed these moments, sending those one line responses and making use of the delete key. In fact I know you enjoyed them, it feels awesome.

In my experience most people learn the following things from this series:

• You’ve been stressing about nothing when it comes to email
• Processing and quick responses are key
• You can always win the game if you play by your rules

Try to learn from all I have said here and think about how you would adjust your behavior accordingly. Changing the way you deal with email to be more productive cannot happen over night but over time you will be able to apply all I have said. For now though just congratulate yourself on identifying the problem and finding out how you can go about solving it.