Julia Roy, A Digital Girl

Be Inspired to Do the Work

I have been working hard lately on streamlining my workflow and increasing my productivity and creative output. Now that I am my own boss working from home, I have found it incredibly hard to stay on task and focused. I've realized my online habits are working against me and keeping me from getting the important things done. The talk below by Tony Schwartz: The Myths of the Overworked Creative has been very helpful in guiding me towards a more productive and sustainable workday. I hope it serves as a piece of inspiration for you too!

  

In the spirit of inspiring a more productive workday, I've shared below a gallery of my favorite desktop backgrounds from MinimalWall. Download a your favorites and make them your backround to remind yourself everyday to focus on what's important and ship your work!

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Achieve Inbox Zero with Rules in Microsoft Outlook

Months back I spent almost an entire weekend hacking my Outlook email inbox to auto-archive itself. My reason for doing this is because I would constantly hear the wonders and benefits of maintaining "inbox zero," but I could never seem to achieve it on a daily basis. To me, having to manually file every email after I had read or responded to it was an annoying task and interruptive to my email workflow during a busy day. Once I figured out how Outlook Rules worked I set up an if this then that type of automated system using Rules, where after I had read an email I could hit a shortkey and it would be auto-filed into a designated folder.

This first requires categorizing your contacts into groups and then using Rules to associate groups with folders. For example, when someone I had categorized in my contacts as "Marketing Team" emailed me it would come into my inbox and, after I had read it or responded to it, I would hit ALT+A and the email would automatically be pulled from my inbox and filed in the "Marketing Team" folder. The Rules setup to achieve this looks something like: 

IF

1. Sender is in Group Category "Marketing Team" 
2. Message is Marked as Read

THEN

1. Move email to "Marketing Team" folder

I did leave the corporate world a few weeks back to start my own consultancy and since then have moved from Outlook to Gmail to manage my inbox, however I wanted to share the Presi I created below to help other Outlook users understand the Rules technique. If you take the upfront time to categorize your contacts and set up Rules, you will find yourself with an email system that is automatically organized to fit your needs, easy to search and much easier to manage.

Hacking My Outlook Inbox with Rules on Prezi

Why I Check my Voicemail

Is this true for you? It is for me. I dread listening to voicemails, seriously dread it. Send me a text message or email and I will read your message almost instantly, versus a voicemail where it's often days after your message before I remember to listen to it. The plain truth is, if you send me a text or email I will likely be reading your message within the hour. Leave me a voicemail, and I will likely be leaving it for later. 

For a long time, my voicemail message read– Hello, you have reached Julia Roy. Feel free to leave a message, but for a quicker response send a text. Nobody listened, still leaving me voice messages I would put off and often forget about. So I enabled Google voice on my mobile, which didn't really help much. Google transcribed messages were 90% of the time delivered to me as total gibberish that I could not make any sense of. GVoice did make me feel like I "got" the message, even if the transcription gave me hardly any understanding of what the voicemail actually said. During my usage of GVoice, I rarely went to go listen to the actual voicemail.

Do these feelings toward voicemail make any sense? When someone calls instead of sending an email, the message content could likely be importance and even urgent. I should make a better effort to check my voice messages, but instead I almost always put it off. Right or wrong, irresponsible or not, I continue to neglect incoming phone calls and messages like the plague. For a girl who–in high school and college loved spending hours on the phone chatting with girlfriends, boyfriends and family–now avoids the phone to no avail, makes me realize voice-to-voice communication is dead for me.

For those friends and family too far away to meetup in person–let's Skype! For those new business call pitches–let's GoToMeeting! Anyone else out there feel the same way? 

("Why I Check my Voicemail" Infographic found on digg.)

Chrome Web Store

I rarely talk about "breaking news" in the world of technology, but I can't help but share my excitement for the Chrome Web Store that launched today. If you know me, you know I am obsessed with web apps. I download and try them all, to the extent that I believe I might spend more time downloading and testing productivity apps than I actually do being productive. Oh the irony. 

I made the leap to Chrome from Firefox a few months back and even though the shift was hard at first–having to find new toolbar apps to replace/replicate my old ones in Firefox and get accustomed to new features–I quickly saw my browsing experience and productivity improve. Chrome is faster, cleaner and has a few key features that I now could not imagine browsing without. Chrome is one example of why I love taking the time to test new platforms, apps and services. Every now and again, you discover a new tool that improves your workflow and changes your habits for the better.  

I've spent the last hour in the Chrome store, and I already feel like a shopaholic. I find a new useful app and I just have to go back for another. I have a problem. 

Hello. My name is Julia and I'm an app-aholic.