After a Getting Things Done micro-seminar given by a friend, I took it upon myself to start learning about, and introducing, GTD into my life. I’m not an expert but a few simple changes have made a huge difference already. One of these is how I manage and organise emails.

photo credit: Yodel Anecdotal
I now know what needs action, what I’m waiting on, where reference emails are stored and I don’t keep lots of emails unnecessarily. The system helps me manage my emails. It works with email clients and webmail (so outlook, Apple’s mail, thunderbird, gmail, yahoo mail etc. you name it) and the simple structure can be used at home as well as in the office. Organized emails!

New Folder Structure:

Here are the mail subfolders I have created under my ‘inbox’ and their descriptions. Placing an @symbol in front of the folder name causes it to appear at the top of the screen, so it puts the important folders first

@ Action – emails/items/tasks that require me to do something
@ Read or Review – emails that take me more than two minutes to read
@ Someday Maybe – things I may look at in the future, not right now. For instance training courses I’m interested in.
@ Waiting – emails where I’m waiting for a third party to reply/perform an action etc before I move this email elsewhere.
Current Year – Contains organized sub-folders with each of my current projects. These project folders contain the emails I really need to keep.
Archive (at the end of each year I move the ‘current year’ folder (and it’s subfolders) into the archive and rename it 20XX). I then create a new ‘Current Year’ folder for the new year.

The Rules

Here are the rules I follow in order to process and deal with my emails on a day to day basis:

1. As soon as an email arrives: it is moved into one of the subfolders below the inbox, read or deleted. If the email is going to take more than two minutes to look at I immediately file it into @ Read or Review. No exceptions.

2. I only keep emails I think I will really, really need in the future. These emails are moved into an appropriate project folder under Current Year. This is usually after they have been in the @ Action, @ Read or Review or @ Waiting folders for a time. If I’ve had a ten-email conversation with someone I may only keep one of these messages if I really think I will need it for reference in the future. I used to keep them all. Keeping unnecessary emails clutters up the system and makes it harder for me to find the emails I really need.

3. I delete emails more than I keep them. I used to keep everything in my inbox and sporadically move emails into a project folder or an archive folder. I had so many emails in my inbox I had no idea what I needed to action and things were sometimes lost or forgotten. I kept thousands of messages in my archives that I didn’t even need.

4. I allocate myself blocks of time each day to process the @Action and @Read or Review folders and also check or chase @waiting emails.

How I implemented this system

1. I started with a clean slate: I moved all of my existing inbox emails, folders and subfolders into a folder called ‘old-system’.
2. I created the new folder structure.
3. I started processing new emails using the system immediately.
4. I sorted through my ‘old-system’ folder gradually. I allocated a block of time each day to sort through these old emails. I went through all of the old messages and folders, deciding what I really needed to keep and either moving the messages into the new system or deleting them altogether. It took some time, but I knew I was keeping on top of all my new emails.

Simple as that! This system works well for me. If you can recommend any improvements, please comment below! For non GTD’ers I would recommend you read Getting Things Done, by David Allen.

A lot of people ask me about how to OSX print screen (i.e take a screen grab in OS X) and also how to take a print screen in Windows XP/Vista. I know this has been covered before but I thought I would put up a little post up….

OS X Print Screen

In OSX you press [and hold] the apple command key, hold shift and then press either 3 or 4 (what does the command key look like?… click here). Here are the most commonly used options:

Capture Entire Screen: Command + Shift + 3

Capture Selected Area: Command + Shift + 4;  then click [hold] and drag a box around the area you wish to capture. Once you release the mouse button the image will be captured.

Using the above key combinations will cause OSX to take a screen grab and then store the file to your desktop. The first screen shot will be called Picture 1, and then further screen shots will be named Picture 2, Picture 3 and so on.

Windows Print Screen

Windows print screen copies the captured screen to the clipboard. Once you’ve done this the image can be pasted into a document using your application of choice (e.g Word/Wordpad etc.) by selecting >edit >paste from the toolbar or by pressing ‘Ctrl’ + ‘V’. There are two types of screen capture:

Capture Entire Screen: To take a screen capture of the entire screen in Windows 9x/XP/Vista simply press the ‘PrintScrn’ button. This takes a screen grab and stores it to the clipboard.

Capture Current Window: To take a screenshot of the current window (not the whole screen) in Windows 9X/XP/Vista hold down ‘Alt’ and Press ‘PrintScrn’.

I recently had a problem with a computer located over 300 miles away, it had a nasty malware infection and I didn’t fancy a 6 hour drive. Very often, it’s easier to blow-away a computer and reinstall the operating system rather than spending days scanning and cleaning trojans, viruses and spyware, but sometimes that’s not the easy option.

I started to think about the possibility of cleaning the machine remotely, but I’d need control over the computer whilst it was in safe mode.… well it would have to be safe mode with networking, at least. I often use VNC for remote control (its open source), but as far as I knew I couldn’t get it to run in safe mode with networking….or could I?

This is a guide to using VNC in safe mode (safe mode with networking). Tested with ultraVNC (www.uvnc.com) on Windows, haven’t tested with realVNC: -

1.    Get ultraVNC installed on the target computer. Make sure that you are able to access it; it needs to be installed as a service. You can talk someone through this over the phone. Yes, you may need port forwarding configured at the target site; but if it’s part of a WAN you won’t necessarily have to do this. VNC uses port 5900. Check VNC is working properly.

2.    Download Bootsafe; This is a utility that will allow you to restart the machine in Safe Mode , and Safe Mode with Networking (which is what you need to use). Remember if you restart the computer you won’t be able to hit F8 remotely! that’s why you need to use bootsafe and it needs to be on the target computer.

3.    Open the command prompt on the target machine (Start, Run, ‘cmd’)  and enter the following:

REG COPY HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\winvnc HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Network\winvnc /s /f

This adds a registry key that allows VNC to start and work in safe mode with networking.

4.    Run Bootsafe on the target computer; select ‘Safe Mode – Networking’, click on ‘Reboot’.

If all goes to plan then you should be able to connect to the machine after it reboots in safe mode with networking. Use ‘ping –t’ ; you can see when the machine reboots and when it comes back to life. VNC Safe Mode !

Yes, there are other ways that you can achieve remote control in safe mode, but this did what I needed it to do. There are paid tools like logmein and you can also try VNCscan (I couldn’t get it to work). I’ve since cleaned a couple of machines using the VNC Safe Mode method and it has been surprisingly effective. If you’ve got malware problems try ComboFix combined with malwarebytes.

Standard warning: Step 3 adds a registry key to windows. Editing the registry could damage your computer. Do not edit the Windows registry unless you are confident about doing so.