Pharaoh Hatshepsut
Afternoon in Millerton
Daily productivity: Achieving ‘Inbox Zero’ with Gmail and Mailbox
A lot has been written about email best practice and achieving ‘inbox zero’. I’ve personally found that moving to an ‘inbox zero’ system has resulted in major productivity gains. There’s a number of different ways to achieve this, and often based on personal preferences - but here’s what I find works for me.
My key requirement for my email system is a relatively seamless transition between desktop and mobile (iPhone in my case), since I’m often on the go and use both frequently throughout the day. For desktop I use gmail’s web interface (no email client can match its speed), with a custom archiving & starring ‘multiple inbox’ system based roughly on a blog post I read about a year ago. I won’t repeat step-by-step how to set up multiple inboxes - that’s covered in the link above - however its relatively straightforward and takes about 30 minutes. For mobile email, I’ve played with the iOS versions of gmail, Acompli and Mailbox (Dropbox) and eventually settled on Mailbox (as Acompli, at least pre-Microsoft acquisition, had stability issues for me). My Mailbox setup is simplified from the default setup however. I don’t use the ‘later’ functionality to send emails back to me that I don’t want to deal with in the moment - I just have a ‘swipe right’ for star and ‘swipe left’ for archive.
So here’s how it works throughout the day. I wake up early and quickly triage from my iPhone. For emails that can be responded to quickly (1-2 liners), I respond immediately. I star emails that require a longer response. I don’t bother with emails that require no action at that point. I then get up and start my day, spending time with my family.
My next interaction with email, typically an hour or two later, is on my computer via gmail. I first go through any new emails that have come in, and either star them or leave them. I next do a bulk archive for all emails in the active inbox - the starred ones show up in the other inboxes I have designated. Above is a snapshot of how my inbox looks after this is done.
Emails that were starred from earlier are waiting in a ‘triage’ inbox with a yellow star. From this inbox, I decide whether its a ‘top priority’ (red star e.g. to be responded to today), ‘this week’ (orange star), or a ‘hold’ (mainly used for active email strings that I want to keep an eye on and remind myself of so ongoing priorities don’t slip. I then repeat the above process throughout the day depend on my schedule. I try and do a final sweep before I leave the office for the day, and from home after bedtime follow the same system I do first thing in the morning on Mailbox (opening up the laptop for more urgent, longer form email communication as required). I also try and stay generally disciplined about the amount of email that I send, but particularly so at night - Jeff Weiner (Linkedin CEO) talks about this and other tips that I think are very useful (link below).
That’s it. And here are some other email tactics that I employ to maximize productivity:
- I use gmail filters to ‘tag’ and ‘mark as read’ extensively for repeated email communication (e.g. daily reports, internal activity reports, etc.). I don’t like autostarring.
- I try - but often don’t succeed - in handling emails in a few batches throughout the day rather than dealing with email as it comes in.
- Occasionally I will have an email that I want to send at a specific time in the future. Rather that remind myself to send an email later, I write it in the moment and just use Boomerang to send it when I want.
- Jeff Weiner wrote a great blog post about his email best practices. I follow most of these rules.
Switching to a Macbook
About 6 months ago, I severed my relationship with Windows laptops (most recently a high spec Lenovo) and switched to a Macbook (high-spec 13” Pro) full-time for work.
Like many former (and current) bankers, consultants and finance professionals, the main reason for the hold-out was anxiety over how well Macs work with the Microsoft Office suite - Excel in particular. All of those years building muscle-memory for Excel shortcuts goes out the window with Excel for Mac - which, despite an increasing number of proponents, still doesn’t cut it in my view. More on this below.
The other advantages to Mac vs Windows laptops for me are manyfold, and mostly relate to productivity gains:
- Instant wake-time means that you can be sending an email within seconds of opening your screen, which for my busy life means the difference between tasks accumulating over the course of a day vs striking things off my to-do list. With my Windows laptop I was ‘control-alt-deleting’ all the time and waiting as long as 30 seconds for the screen to turn on.
- Battery life - this is a well-known feature of Macbooks, but what I’ve found this enables is enhanced productivity throughout the day through setting changes throughout my office, in and out of meetings, and grab-and-going without the need for a charger
- The keyboard ergonomically is much faster to type on. I am sure some Windows laptops are good in this dimension, but my Lenovo wasn’t. I was also ‘false striking’ all the time the trackpads which led to my mouse jumping all over the place, despite adding utility software like Touchfreeze.
- The screen is amazing, which also allows me to seamlessly merge personal applications e.g. Lightroom with my work machine so I really only need one combined home/work computer.
- Perhaps its my imagination, but a lot of third party software seems to run (and update) better on Mac. I had constant trouble with the Windows version of Evernote for example - so much so that I was using the Internet application rather than installed application which meant I couldn’t use it offline.
- Value retention - like your new sofa, Windows laptops are almost worthless after you buy them. But the secondary market for Macbooks on eBay is strong - 3 year old hardware on eBay is trading for $500 - $1,000 depending on specs.
Back to the Office suite. To solve this problem I ended up going with Parallels for Mac, which allows any Windows application to be run in the Mac OS environment. The latest version of Parallels integrates really seamlessly, and with a few universal shortcut modifications as well as setting the ‘open with’ settings for Office files, it really is almost identical to a Windows machine - especially when I plug in to an external monitor and (Windows) keyboard. It’s worth noting that the proper installation of Parallels is a little wasteful and cumbersome - for the latest Macbook, I needed to buy an external DVD drive to install Windows 8 on disk, as well as install a complete copy of Windows just for the benefit of using Office. However, with storage capacity of current Macbooks, I doubt I’ll ever need the space back. I explored a few other avenues for utilizing Office on a Macbook, including a root-level install of Windows (so I could boot my Macbook in Windows mode - e.g. a Windows OS with Mac hardware), but for me Parallels is the least idiosyncratic way to get the best of Windows and Mac functionality.
It feels good to have a single machine for all my uses and to feel like I am being as productive as I can be - I think switching was a great choice and can’t imagine going back.
$5 hot chocolates, gentrification and the future of food in NYC
About 6 months ago, I read a great Observer article entitled ‘Death of the Neighborhood Restaurant’, about how restaurants in Manhattan paying market rent now can’t make a profit unless they charge $25 or more for an entree. This morning, a cold brew coffee, hot chocolate and plate of pancakes ran me $39 including tip, at Bubby’s. Around Tribeca, low and high end staple restaurants are closing at a steady clip from rent hikes as their leases come up - next on the close list is The Harrison after a 14 year run. The ‘chain-ification’ of Manhattan seems like an inexorable trend.
I’m neither anti- nor pro- gentrification. On one hand, I wish downtown NYC was still affordable enough for independent shops and restaurants, with lofts filled by artists rather than bankers. On the other hand, I’m not complaining about the safe streets, pier parks, & great public schools that the last 15 years has delivered. I am also happy to pay $5 for a hot chocolate if it means that Bubby’s can stay in business. I think that the faster we get used to not paying false-economy restaurant prices, artificially deflated by sub-market rent on old leases, the better - we need a sustainable restaurant scene. The ‘new’ New York can afford it, even if it means paying $20 for pancakes to enjoy the true cost of a going-out-to-eat experience.
At the same time, the opportunity to build an online/offline brand without an expensive storefront has never been better - having started in more traditional e-tail categories (Bonobos, Warby, etc.), there’s now a lot of NYC innovation in food distribution models. Kitchensurfing is a great example of bringing the talent of the chef to the home, disintermediating the restaurant saddled with high operating costs. Food trucks (who also have idiosyncratic economics of their own) tweet their locations same-day so fans can queue up at lunchtime. Last week Maple was announced, combing a startup team with Momofuku master David Chang to launch a delivery-only restaurant in NYC. Savory, with only a catering kitchen, is creating several delivery-only restaurants for the B2B market, and ZeroCater is activating under-utilized restaurant kitchens during the day to deliver an end-to-end catering service to startups and other companies who provide food to their staff. And upstart ‘online only’ bakeries are cropping up too, such as Mini Melanie, launched by the former pastry chef at Blue Hill (full disclosure - she’s my sis-in-law).
I’m excited to see how the ‘restaurant without the restaurant’ trend develops over the next few years in the city. I’m also happy to enjoy very expensive plated food at a restaurant from time to time, if it means keeping our local restaurants open for the next 20 years.
Tribeca sunrise
Tribeca shapes and shadows
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
- Leo Tolstoy (cc @evelynpears)
Sorry guys, that’s not how it works.
Creativity + Business at the Ranch at Rock Creek
“Chip, get it through your thick skull. Your calling in life is to be an artist posing as a businessman. In fact, prior to this downturn, and for the past decade, you were probably the best-paid ‘artist’ in San Francisco. Your work—both in the hotels you create and in your Joie de Vivre corporate culture—is admired by so many. You are rich, but just in a different way than most of America defines that word.” - Stanford GSB classmate to Chip Conley, as read in Peak
This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending a wedding at the Ranch at Rock Creek, a high-end boutique hotel set in a 6,600 acre ranch outside of Philipsburg, Montana. The property was originally bought in 2007 by Jim Manley as a private family residence, fulfilling a childhood promise he made to his dad 50 years ago. Over the past 5 or so years he’s transformed it from a family ranch into a leading small hotel and retreat, complete with tons of outdoor activities like fly fishing & shooting, a spa, & saloon with a 4-lane bowling alley. Jim’s created a unique mission-driven culture in the wilderness, with over 100 motivated, hospitable staff from all over the west working harmoniously to deliver a great combination of rustic authenticity & luxury.
I love experiencing passion projects like this. Similar to Aire Ancient Baths, who excavated over 100 feet of bedrock to recreate an ancient Roman spa on Franklin Street in Tribeca, it takes a certain combination of vision, will and ambition outside of the realms of pure rationality to create. Success for the entrepreneurs behind businesses like these isn’t measured purely in dollars and cents - it’s seeing their dream come to fruition, creating a sustainable business and culture, and providing memorable experiences for thousands of employees & guests year in and year out.
Last week I met one of the foundational employees at the Wythe, the pioneering Brooklyn hotel, who categorized her launch experience there as the ultimate intersection of creativity + business. When these two elements come together, as they clearly have at the Ranch, the result is pure magic for everyone involved.