Taming the Email Beast

A Streamlined Email Process with Taglocity

I love it when our customers share their Taglocity experiences with us.  Mic Cullen, a sports journalist, recently wrote to us and kindly gave his permission to publish it.  Thanks Mic! 

Hopefully this will give others some good ideas on how to become more productive with email using Taglocity....

 

Taglocity makes my job a whole lot easier. Sounds like a big statement, but to give an example of how much I need it, I hung off buying a MacbookPro until I was sure that Taglocity would run with Outlook on it (under VMWare Fusion, if anyone cares).

I am a sports journalist (among other things), and email is my lifeblood. I use it from 5am to 11pm.

I have a pretty streamlined email process. I used to have a folder hierarchy for filing email in, but that gives issues, as you have to decide which folder an email belongs in, when it might need to be in several. Now, I have just three -folders - Inbox, @Holding, Archive.

However, I have any number of tags through Taglocity. As a result, I can tag one email with multiple tags - for example, the main organisation (AFL), team (Richmond or Western Bulldogs) and a tag like @Action. These can be automatically applied on arrival (ie AFL/Richmond) or manually, after arriving in the inbox (@Action). Tags can be set to perform actions as well as simple tagging, so my @Action tag not only applies the tag, but moves it to the @Holding folder.

As a result, the email is out of my Inbox, because I've looked at it and assigned a ‘next action' (if I can steal and slightly corrupt a GTD term), but it's available to me in my "@Action" search folder, as well as my "AFL", "AFL this week" and "Richmond" search folders.

My other primary tags are "@Visit/Read" and "@Waiting", which are for emails that have a site to visit or a document to read, or because I'm waiting on a response/arrival, respectively. (I'm also wanting to buy a house, so I also have more temporary categories such as "@Housing-new".)

However, Taglocity also does more than just passively tag and move emails, it can also do actions on them. For example, if I have an email that comes in that tells me about a media conference I need to go to, I simply click on the "Appointment" tag on the Taglocity toolbar, and it pops up an Outlook new appointment dialog, with the body of the email in the details section of the appointment, and the subject of the email in the subject of the appointment. Setup the time, and you're away, with all the relevant details there for checking from your calendar. I have it setup so that applying this tag also applies the "@Action" tag, which moves it to the "@Action" folder.

This keeps my Inbox empty once I've dealt with the email, either by responding or by assigning a tag, and allows me to see what I need to do immediately.

My other main tag is that of "Done" - once an item is dealt with, if I want to keep it (as I often do), I simply assign the "Done" tag. This strips off the "@Action", "@Waiting" or "@Visit/Read" tag, and moves the email out of the @holding or Inbox folders into the Archive folder. All the other tags are kept (ie "AFL/Richmond" or "Family/Simon") and so can be easily searched on under the various tags it still carries.

This is not all it does (Taglocity pane, conversation viewer) but that's how I use it.

Information, not Knowledge

One interesting thing to come out of conversations with enterprise IT thought leaders at the Gartner Portals Collaboration and Content summit in LA last month was people are still wary of Knowledge Management solutions. My impression is that KM reached peak hype in the late 1990s and has since delivered mixed results. I've previously heard of KM deployments being referred to as ‘knowledge landfills' so I wasn't really surprised.

What did surprise me is that our Taglocity Groups solution seemed to getting branded as a knowledge management solution.  We initially positioned it, in part, as a knowledge sharing solution but no matter how much I explain that knowledge sharing is different to knowledge management, the connection persists.  So we'll just change it from knowledge sharing to information sharing.

Many people use the words ‘knowledge' and ‘information' interchangeably anyway, and certainly the market hasn't helped to differentiate between the two.  Internet research reveals all kinds of ways to describe the differences, but this article on Wikipedia touches on the pain Taglocity Groups solves:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload.  It states "Email remains a major source of information overload..." 

This is applicable to us because Taglocity Groups provides a platform to minimize the disruptions and inbox clutter that non-actionable informational email creates. Instead, this type of email belongs in a group inbox for people to access when and how they need it.

So how does this sound for new positioning:  Taglocity Groups is a non-disruptive email productivity and information sharing solution for agile enterprises to reduce email overload and transfer knowledge?

Hmmm, can't seem to get away from the K word.  Let's try this then: Taglocity Groups is a private online service for groups of people to collaborate via email, share information, locate expertise, and reduce email overload.  Yes, I think this will help keep Taglocity from getting lumped in with last century's cumbersome knowledge management solutions!