Posted by David Towert on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 @ 04:42 PM
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.
Posted by David Towert on Thu, Oct 23, 2008 @ 03:58 PM
I'm following the very interesting Obama/McCain contest on cable news TV and I sometimes find myself wondering what it's like to be interviewed on a talk show. Well, last weekend I got a notion of it and I have to admit, I found it quite enjoyable. I was interviewed by Michael Kastler, host of TechTalk on Chicago WRLR 98.3FM radio about Taglocity - the past, present and future.
I guess it helps a lot when the host is a big fan - Michael called Taglocity a cool product that he uses everyday. He also said he was a huge follower of David Allen's GTD methodology and that Taglocity "synchronizes into it so well".
Michael shared with the listeners how it allowed him to go from around 90 folders to 3 or 4 folders and said "I can't stress enough for me how much of a life change, a game changer for the way that I interface with email just to have what sounds like a relatively simple thing, this tagging ability but combining it with search and conversation follow, and bang, all of sudden you see your flow and the amount of time you spend dealing with email drop significantly."
Yesterday the podcast was posted online so you can listen to it here if you're interested (our interview starts about 28 minutes into the show if you want to jump to the Taglocity segment).
I owe Michael a big thanks for having me on his most enlightening tech show - thanks Michael!
Dave