 Aloha, this is Matt Darnell with Supporting Your Tech, joined as always with faithful companion Greg Jackson. Greg, good to have you here. Thank you. I kind of did a jig there, kind of a Greg and a Jackson. I've been called worse. All right, great. So today we're going to be talking about managing your email inbox. This is part two of our talk on that, but as usual we're going to be starting with some current events and some things that caught my attention out there. And the first one here is wireless headphones. And what caught me about the title was their claim was that wireless headphones are improving faster than any other tech, solar, electric cars, autonomous cars. And they said that, and their point for saying that was that with the wireless headphones, they're taking advantage of all the different kind of improvements, like the assistance. Now these wireless headphones, they have assistance where you can just say to the headphones, play, you know, I'm happy, or play this kind of song, or you know, wins my next appointment, you know, you're able to do that. And the battery technology, so much so all these improvements in battery, you know, they're able to do that. The new Bluetooth, you know, there's the Bluetooth, they can switch between there's a Bluetooth low energy and standard Bluetooth. So when they're close to your device, they automatically switch without skipping the music, they automatically switch to the lower technology. So that was just interesting that of everything that's happening around us, that headphones, wireless headphones, are able to take advantage of all these things the better. Can you think of anything that you think is progressing faster? The wireless headphones? I actually didn't think it was progressing that much. I've got a set of Bose, but I can't use that for my conference calls. You know what I'd really like is a Bluetooth headset that I can use for my phone that does the noise cancellation, but I don't sound like a tin can. But compared to anything else, I mean, I don't know, I thought the watches were the smart watches. And I think that that's up there as well. And now they've got the biofeedback rings, I mean they've got some really cool stuff out there. And one of my favorite Seinfelds was when George was talking about toilet paper, about how in his lifetime it hasn't progressed. And you know, a thousand years from now, it's going to be the same. And squeeze the chart. Right, they disagree. That comes in sense now. There's multiple plies. There's colors and anyway. So just when you think something hasn't changed, when you're not looking, yeah, so these new wireless headphones, they are expensive. Like, you know, Beats that, you know, the Dr. Dre brand that Apple bought, you can pay $600 for wireless headphones. I mean, I have to mortgage my house to be able to afford that. I have a Beats set and the Bose. The Bose are way better. Really, when you bought them, were they about the same price or was one more than the other? I think they're in the same. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because I didn't get them retail. So you stole them. Well, I got a good deal. OK, OK, all right. I got them from a co-worker, so. OK, I stole them from a co-worker. OK, I just want to make sure. She might think so. Yeah, OK. So what I got was the Bose were nice. They were, you know, they look pretty durable, really hard on the head. But, you know, they squeeze you real tight. But they didn't have really the noise cancellation I was hoping for. They were a little complicated to work. Bose were a lot better. But I like the Beats squeezed you hard. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were easier to collapse. But what I noticed was that the Bose had better noise cancellation. I can maintain some phone calls on it. But it still doesn't, it does noise cancellation for me. But it doesn't help the person I'm on the phone with. OK, because I don't want to walk in down the street. They're here in the wind noise. Exactly, yeah. I'm at Starbucks. And I'm trying to, you know, I'm listening to my tunes. I get a call. Now I got to switch headsets. So that's, and I don't know what happened to Jawbone. I'm not, they were doing a really great job. And I can remember when the Walkmans first started coming out. You know, this is back in the 80s, right? It's just a couple years ago. Yeah, yesterday, right? The Walkman with the cassette tapes and the A-tracks. But when you, if you walked around with those big, at least called cans, I mean, what a dork. Now you got to have the skinny ones deal with the metal and the small little things. And even a couple years ago, I mean, when I would see somebody walking around with those big old things, you know. I wonder what the age gap would be, if I said like this. I think, you know what that means. That's a boobox, it's a boobox, right? OK, all right. So now, something that, anytime an Apple product comes out, I don't think, and just, we'll just, I don't think Samsung's any better. Huawei's any better. OnePlus is any better, as far as that. But somebody was talking about right to repair. Meaning that if something goes wrong with, again, we're just going to pick on Apple here, with your iPhone. And you go to a third-party repair shop. They put a new screen on there. It works fine. Should Apple ever release software to intentionally kill that touchscreen? Which they do all the time. Yeah, I think it's under some guise of, you know, it's an update and sorry, we just can't accommodate everybody. It's a security. Yeah, I think that's the challenge. But, you know, I don't, when it comes to this kind of stuff, I think, you know, you're buying it because of the ease of use and you want to support. Apple's got to make their money. They probably make it in other ways. So I know they're real tight with how they manage their software. And I would imagine that if it's their ecosystem, they probably want to be able to control it more. Well, and what they usually say is, if someone does use a third-party, like for instance, my Apple Pencil Hero, if somebody was to make another compatible, they would have to use a security hole to be able to get in and have it talk. So Apple is saying, well, we just, we fixed the glitch, you know. Sorry, your third-party stuff ain't going to work. Yeah, they were using undocumented APIs or this and that. So of course, they changed all their stuff not to use it and then they killed the third party. So I think that's really going to be huge going forward. I mean, because car manufacturers, they want you to go to the dealer. That's the dealers, they count that. Okay, when we sell this car, well, the next 10 years, we can expect X-Revenue from just oil changes and obviously that does, we got Jiffy Loops. I mean, imagine like Jiffy Loops was outlawed. The oil that they used, your engine would reject and just dump it right out. And I don't understand why tech's any different. You know, if I choose, if I buy something, I choose to have you repair it. I don't want the manufacturer doing something actively but the only reason they're doing it is so that it won't work and I have to go to them. I'll ask, I'll ask you, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I don't do Macs. I mean, I do PCs because I get to control it. I mean, I don't know what your thoughts are, but I don't go into a Mac. You know, we work with a lot of Dell's and I almost said compacts. And Gateway 2000s aren't, they're not any better. But you know, we would do a lot of Dell's and when those power supplies go bad, I mean, that's not a standard brick power supply that you're gonna find somewhere, right? In a desktop. And when you're buying one of those little micro teeny-weeny ones, I can understand that you got some non-standard parts, but I've got a full desktop. I mean, and they try to make it easy. You pull one tab and the power supply comes out and another tab, the hard drives come out and that type of thing. But those are not, you can't go to Best Buy or CompUSA and buy that power supply. It won't fit anymore. So I think in some cases, those days are just gone. You know, of having a beige box with a standard AT power supply in there and then you could buy it from 100 manufacturers. So it's hard. So even on PCs, I don't think it's as intentional as, I mean, the RAM is not soldered into the motherboard, you know, on that as you would find on iMac and of course they say it's about space savings and heat and that. Well, I mean, if you look at, you know, a gaming PC, there's, you can customize that. So when you're working with some of these manufacturers that have large manufacturing models and they're trying to reduce the cost, I mean, I kind of get it. I mean, it's a waste of money if my Samsung breaks with a $1,000 phone and that's tragic. Well, and if the screen is cracked and Samsung says, okay, it's going to cost $500 to replace that or a guy down the street can do it for 50, you know, that's a real hard thing to do. So yeah, this is right to repair. I think it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. This is going to be class-action lawsuits and that. Okay, so fax machines. And this is something that we see daily, right? And a lot of people think that fax machines are secure, but beside writing some- The government thinks it's secure. Yeah, I mean, beside writing something on the side of outside your business, there's really nothing more insecure than your fax machine. You know, because people, when you think of like medical information, you know, HIPAA talks about encryption when data's in motion, encryption when data's in rep. If you fax anybody, anything, it's not encrypted. So I don't understand how like doc and doctor's offices are the worst. We, you know, we have a fax, you know, as you know, we have a fax server and at least twice a week, I get a fax from this particular medical office with somebody's medical information on it. And we've called them and said, hey, you know what? You guys got a little bit of leak here. So you have that. I mean, there's no verification that the right person is getting it at the other end. It's child's play to be able to intercept the fax and just receive everything that someone is getting. But it's, they're still so prevalent. I've never, I mean, this is like eight tracks. I mean, I've never understood why fax machines are so popular. I'll tell you why. Why is that? I'd love to know. It's simple and it works. It's easy. It's good enough, right? It's simple and it works. When I hit the phone number and I hit go, it scans all the sheets and then I walk away. I don't have to worry about it. That's what all, I mean, when I was in the healthcare, doctors were very, very, very, that's what they wanted. But were they conscious that they were violating HIPAA when they would send that information via fax? So it's not, it is HIPAA compliant to send by fax. The problem is is how you're managing the data once it gets in and out. But that would be like sending it in an unencrypted email. Yes, but HIPAA requirements. And the HIPAA is really one of those weird things where they have a framework, they're not specific. So the people that have the, so that from the time it hits the machine and it's how it's being stored in the machine, so it's gotta be encrypted on the machine. But when it sends it, they accept that. I mean, you and I both know that if you just tapped into the phone line, you could intercept the fax. It's, yeah, it's really weird. You can have no control over the other end. I mean, it's like putting someone's medical information in a bottle and throw it in the ocean. Who's gonna get it? I don't know, you know. Oftentimes they're in public places, people can walk by and take it. Well, and the stats say that the average fax is read three times before it gets the person it's supposed to. And if it's interesting, it's read seven times. If it's got salary information or evaluations or anything. So security numbers, I mean, that's really crazy. And there are, people don't realize there are exploits with fax machines. You literally, cause usually you get these all in one things that they're network printers, they're a scanner, they're a copy, they're your fax machine. And what they were able to do is create a fax, a malicious fax. If you can believe it, a malicious fax that if I sent it to you, it would cause your fax machine to do a buffer overflow which I could exploit. And because that thing was on your network, I could fax it again and program it to start mirroring all the data, sniffing your network for passwords. So you think, oh, okay, this thing is just, if you think it's like a toaster, like a microwave, but it's not, it's on your network, it can be hacked like anything else. A lot of the IT shops don't manage it either. They don't have any ability to manage it. It's just there, yeah. So again, this is Matt Darnell and Greg Jackson with Supporting Your Tech. We'll be back in a minute and we're talking about how you can help to manage your email inbox. Hello. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. Aloha, I wanna invite all of you to talk story with John Wahee every other Monday here at Think Tech Hawaii. And we have special guests like Professor Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii who joins us from time to time to talk about the political happenings in this state. Please join us every other Monday, Aloha. All right, so let's talk about your email box. If you're like me, if you're like anybody else, it's too full, too much in there, too much unorganized data. And we're going over the mop method for email inbox. We talked about M, we spent time on M. M is minimize. Yes. All right, so how we can do that? So now, talk to me about O, what is O and how does someone use that? So O is organized, which you really wanna focus on is how you're organizing your email. So I'm gonna just kinda go over a few tips and tricks. There's some real obvious ones. You wanna be able to use your folders. Gmail's got it, Outlook has it. You wanna create folders on the left. You wanna click and drag emails into those folders manually if you need to. If you can, you wanna set up rules so that things just automatically pop into a box. So for instance, if I have tickets, if a ticket's coming in, I want a ticket folder. All the tickets will go right into their own folder. If I have a specific VIP customer, I can have all those emails come in. It'll actually ding, it'll alarm, and then it'll go into a bucket. You can even make copies of it so you can keep all of it. So I don't, how do you not lose, my issue with that is, back 15 years ago, I mean, you go crazy, right? You have folders and folders and folders and folders and folders, and you set up the auto routing rules, and then it never hits your inbox, you never see it, and you lose visibility, right? I mean, it's not there, it's not there. So how do people organize, sort, put them that way? And what I ended up doing was going through then creating like follow-up. You know, you can flag for follow-up, and pretty soon that 400 things, that were flags for follow-up. So how do you keep visibility on what's important when they're, it's out of sight out of mind, right? I don't see it in my inbox, well, it must not be a problem, you know, I'll ignore it until it bites me the butt. So there was, I don't know if you'd heard David Allen, he does, he writes some books, he talks about organizing, those are some more manual processes. You can use those same processes for organizing your email. And what you're talking about is time and attention. If you're gonna be living, if you're getting that many emails where you're living out of your email box, you wanna set time aside and you wanna restrict your time to doing certain tasks. One of them is just looking at your email, like literally, we talked a little bit, I don't know if I mentioned it last time, but what you wanna do is you wanna schedule time and you wanna let people know, email's gonna be coming into my email box. I'm gonna be checking my email maybe three, four times a day and that's it. How do you let people know that? You put in your email signature, you can let them know. I mean, this is one of those things about culture we were talking about a few weeks ago when we started this series and you've gotta get a sense for, okay, maybe internally, maybe your coworkers, maybe your boss, maybe the people you work with, you've gotta be able to, sometimes you do things and you create habits without being open about it. Sometimes you have to be that way where you just don't respond to your email, you literally put the phone down, turn off your alarms, don't look at your email because really the most important stuff that happens is face to face. Second one is the stuff that you're actually talking to somebody on the phone. Email, again, like I said before, you're not gonna get an award or a certificate for answering lots of email. You look at job descriptions, you rarely see a job description that says lots of email and if you can process a thousand emails, you're hitting your mark. That's really about what the email represents and that's one of the things that you've gotta be aware of is that you've gotta be able to organize your day into okay, I'm gonna spend this much time on email. That commits you to not investing too much time into something that's not gonna reward you. So one of the things you wanna do is you wanna organize your emails, it comes in, you wanna organize your time and there's different ways to do it but Outlook has a lot of different ways that you can manage it. Got a few different, do you have any questions? I've got a couple things I wanted to go over. And so time management is obviously a huge thing. It's huge, yeah. And depends on your job, right? I mean, in our business, we can have a day planned out to the minute, right? What we're gonna do. And one phone call happens whether it's a fantastic sales opportunity or a fantastic problem-solving opportunity, right? One of those too, can completely change everything. So that's the hard part with, when you work in a small business. Now, if I worked for the government or something and the chances of something surprising me, I worked my butt off but the chance of something surprising me that's gonna be really day altering is probably pretty low, right? I've got my things I can do. I see that a lot. But most people I think they're on the go, they're not sitting in front of their computer. They're driving around. They're on their tablets. They get home at the end of the day. And then they've got to sort through all these kind of things. So I think for dinosaurs like us, we're more most comfortable sitting in front. But just like now I was talking to my son and you ever heard that when I told him what we're gonna be talking about today. And he said, what's a fax machine? And he's 13, 14 years old. But he literally, he said, how does it work? And I explained, you put the paper in, it comes out the other side. And he, wait, how does it work? And he goes, why don't you just take a screen capture and send it to him? Yeah, I mean, that was his instant, tell me again why you do that? So, but that's these younger generation. They don't, I mean, they don't have folders. I mean, do you do folders on your mobile phone or do you create them on your PC? Well, so that's one of the, I can't live in the folders because of what you just said, which is oftentimes if you try to live in the folders, you're gonna get lost because now you've got 20 folders. Which ones do I check first? And David Allen talks about a tickler file. The other thing was, you know, the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss. That was one of the tips he gave was exactly that, which is segment your day, don't invest your time into something that doesn't have the amount of importance. But does anything written on organization before 2005 have any prevalence to the next generation to what we're in today? I mean, like when you look at Zig Ziggler, you know, I mean, that's sales, that's for the next thousand years, you know, how to influence people and make friends. I mean, that's, I don't think it's ever gonna change. Well, I say it's never gonna change, but that's when, how do you make somebody like you when all you do is email with them? Is entirely different from how I make you like me when we're face to face, right? How I look at you on my body. Anyway, so I say they're never gonna change, but that, you know, as we move more, I mean, if you're on the, if you live on the moon and I live here, how can I make you like me, right? So is there value in reading these ancient books from 15 years ago, from 10 years ago about organization and time management and that type of? I think email makes us more aware of what's actually functional. I think it's just a different method. So when we look at the technology, some things are timeless, how you communicate with people, the words you use, you know, sometimes we get into conversations with people and you hear something like that someone says something and then the response you get back is, you know what I mean. And an email, that happens all the time. I send an email, don't forget the office keys. You know, it's my favorite, my favorite story that I give people. Make sure you don't forget the office keys. Guy comes back, hey, did you get the office keys? Guy says here, pulls out his keys from his pocket and shows it to me and I go, the office keys, the ones, the Microsoft office keys. We get stuff, even in person, we get stuff mixed up. So, you know, are we doing it all? That's funny by the way. It's real funny. You know, what language are we using? What words are we using? You know, when we do training and when we do the handouts, we, you know, sometimes we have to ask people to, hey, this is a really good time to look at the documentation because when I'm not here, that's all you're gonna have. So, let's go through it exactly word for word. Because some people are just kind of like, let's go, go, go, go, go. With email, you know, we're processing so much information. You can use technology to facilitate some of it, but we still have to care about how much time we're sticking into it, how well we're communicating, when we're sending it, what are the words we're using. So, you know, there's definitely different techniques. Even we were talking on the way here, and one of the things we're talking about is, what about AI? You had talked in one of the previous shows about, when is, when are the programs gonna get smart enough to know that when I get an email from Matt, I probably need to look at it. Like, if he sends an email, I probably need to look at it because it's either urgent, important. What about VIP, right? The email program should be able to do that. And I think we'll get there. There's still some training of the AI that we're gonna have to do, but it's, I think it makes me pay more attention to how I communicate with some people. Well, and when you and I are chatting on teams, my Microsoft teams, and anybody that doesn't use Teams, it's really a fabulous, fabulous application. It's kind of the next evolution of Skype that's got presence and telephony, email chatting, and all those kind of things that either integrates with SharePoint, so I can share 10 gigabyte files with people and very, very seamlessly. But as we're chatting back and forth, I'll tell you something and then you'll say, and it's very clear to me that it's just, I'm getting an FYI, and then you say, oh, should I do this? I said, no, don't do anything. It's just an FYI. So, when you organize, how much responsibility should the sender have on making sure what they want is clear? And what I hate is, especially in internal, I have the answer for you. In internal things, I'll get an email, it's to you, but there's six of us C-seat. And I think, okay, what action are they expecting me to take? You know, how, how, how am I able to do that? So as a sender, I mean, is that training that we need to give people? Well, it's a culture you build because the answer to that, and this is not my quote, this is somebody else's quote, communication is what the sender does. So you have to be able, if you're going to speak, you know, I'm not trying to get, you know, philosophical on you or existential, but as we speak, we're trying to convey an idea. It's our responsibility, if we're going to say something that we get the clarification, the message was received. There's a lot of feelings involved, right? So the receiver's got to be mindful of how they're receiving the message, but it's really the sender's responsibility. And sarcasm is very hard to detect in an email, right? I mean, my humor is hard enough to detect when I'm talking to somebody straight, when I'm writing it down, you can't see that I'm smiling or winking at you or something like that. It's hard to detect, so. The memes help. Yeah, exactly. I'm big on the memes, right? I started yesterday. I'm huge. I'm in, I'm locked into the memes, right? I was just so shocked that Microsoft Teams had the gifts in there, you know, like some from office space, I mean, I was really surprised. I never would have thought that a business application would have had that in there. So real quick, real quick. All right. When we talk about organize, organize your time, organize your focus, organize your language. Who are you talking to? How are you going to convey that message? So this is outbound email. This is everything, even how you're receiving it. Like, you know, when you send an email and you're using language, where does that go? How is that landing with me? We have to remember that 70% of that communication is lost. This is 100%. An email comes in, I'm only getting 20, 30% of that message. How we've got to organize ourselves and go and get in the right frame of mind and say, I'm receiving this email from this person or I'm sending it out when, how, what. Don't use too many words. Don't ask too many questions. I'm classic for that. My emails tend to be a little longer. Well, and I think it was Mark Twain who said, I wanted to write you a short email. He didn't say email, but I wanted to write you a short email, but I didn't have enough time, so I wrote you a long one instead. That's a skill to be brief and brevity. More communication is better. Yeah, so okay, and you can't let emails pile up. No. A lot of it, I think, is disciplined. It is. Like for a little while, I was going with a zero inbox. I said, okay, before I go to bed, my inbox is going to be empty. That's hardcore. I worked for about two days. We did that. All right, so just to get people a preview, so mop, so we've done minimize, we've done organize, and what is peak? Prioritize. Prioritize. Okay, you heard it here, all right. So again, this is Matt Darnell and Greg Jackson with Supporting Your Tech. Tune in next week, week after next, and we'll be talking about prioritizing and how you're able to help manage your email inbox. Aloha.