The Baydin Blog | Email, Startups, and Search

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When I need to write an e-mail where I need to get the content right (or want to start a blog post), I get very worried about making it come out right the first time.  I spend all the time I’m supposed to spend writing wordsmithing the first few sentences, and it takes forever to get anything done. 

One of the best ways I’ve found to get stuff written FAST is to close my eyes and dictate a first draft into the computer.  Since I’m talking instead of writing, it does not feel as important to get it perfect.  And since I look away from the screen, I get the entire first draft out in a single burst, without spending any time editing until I am done writing. 

And best of all, you can do it for free, if you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7.  Both these versions of Windows come with built-in speech recognition that is surprisingly accurate (about or better than 90% for me).  Better yet, it integrates directly with Outlook, so you can draft email right inside Outlook with your voice. 

To get started, just click your start menu, go to Programs—>Accessories—>Ease of Access—>Windows Speech Recognition.  Go through the brief, 10m long tutorial, and then start writing a new email in Outlook.  Turn on dictation, and say whatever you like.  When you’re finished, just go back through to edit the handful of mistakes, and your email will be all set. 

Windows Speech Recognition also lets you control your computer exclusively with your voice (for example, say “File Menu, New” to open the File Menu and click New).  I find those features much less helpful than the dictation, but your mileage may vary.

One other place that dictation is even more helpful is when trying to write an email on a phone.  Dragon provides a free dictation app for the iPhone that works really well.  I find that, even with not-quite-perfect accuracy, it’s much faster to dicate emails than write them on the iPhone keyboard.

Dictation has come a long way since the 90s.  Give it a try! 

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Boomerang is great if you know you’re going to need to respond to a message later, and you aren’t sure what you want to say yet.  Sometimes, though, you already know exactly what you want to say, you just want to send it later.

In that case, you want to go ahead and write the message and have Outlook worry about delivering it when you want it sent.  We have had several of our customers ask us to build a plug-in that will allow them to do this. Fortunately, Outlook already provides that functionality, called Delayed Delivery.  Here’s how to take advantage of it.

In Outlook 2007

To delay delivery of a message in Outlook 2007, open a new message, and click on the Options tab in the ribbon — as highlighted in the screenshot below.

Click the delay delivery button, and specify the time where you would like Outlook to send your message message in the dialog box that pops up.

Now, just close the dialog to return to your message.  Write whatever you want to say, and when you are finished, click the send button.  Outlook will keep the message in your Outbox until the time you specified, then send it.

Remember, though, Outlook can only send email when it is actually running. So if you specify to send a message Sunday afternoon, but you shut down your computer for the weekend, the message will be delivered on Monday when Outlook launches.

In Outlook 2003

Just like in Outlook 2007, you want to go into the message options dialog to delay delivery. In Outlook 2003, you get there by clicking a toolbar button. Click the Options button as shown in the screenshot below.

The message options window looks exactly the same in Outlook 2003, so just set the time you want the message delivered in the dialog as shown above.  As in Outlook 2007, delivery will happen the first time Outlook is running after the date and time you specified.

And that’s it!

Combine Delayed Delivery with Boomerang, and you’ve taken full control of how you respond to messages when timing matters.

Also try: three.sentenc.es for responding to emails you’re agonizing over quickly, Unsearch for finding out what your coworkers have written about a topic, and Gist to make sure that you’re as up-to-date on your recipients as possible.

Uncategorized deferred sending, delay sending, delayed send, outlook features

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

-Peter Drucker.

Chris Sacca, a West Coast angel investor who I met at the Defrag conference, tweeted about a utility called RescueTime the other day.

RescueTime is a hybrid desktop application-web service that monitors how you spend your time on the computer and generates reports and analytics for you.  You install the tracker on your computer, where it monitors and tracks what application has focus – i.e. which of the 30 applications I’m running is the one I’m actually using.  It sends that information to a server, which turns the data into interesting reports. 

RescueTime has done a great job of classifying different applications (Total War: Rome shows up appropriately as a game, as does Tower Defense) and websites (espn.com, alabama live’s Alabama football section, and si.com all get grouped into a ‘sports’ category) into the right buckets.  I now know that I spend a staggering amount of time on sports websites, more time than I should gaming, and less time on Twitter/Facebook/RSS than I expected.

But even more valuable, RescueTime tells me how the productive time when I’m being “good” breaks down as well.  I know how much time I have spent on developing the CSS and HTML for Baydin.com’s new homepage redesign, how much time I spent QAing Boomerang, and how long it took me to record our shiny new demo video. I know exactly how long I spent in Visual Studio for each of the last three weeks, and how email grows to suck up however much time it possibly can (seriously, between Outlook and Gmail, the number is terrifying).

That’s not to say that I’m doing fantastic job of working harder since I installed it. I haven’t been especially more productive, but at least I know how I’m doing.  And I think I have a better handle on what kind of bang-for-the-buck I’m getting out of each activity.  I’m going to try very hard to spend more time coding and less time writing long emails that nobody’s going to read anyway.

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Seth Godin blogged last week about a technique that he claims he’s been using for years to make a little bit easier for himself to respond to all of his e-mail.

The idea is that you treat e-mail much like an SMS twitter message.  You limit the length of the response you’re going to make beforehand, so that it is easier to finish writing.  Since it’s a pain in the neck to count letters, or even words, instead you count sentences. Limiting responses to two sentences, three, four, or five – and no longer – seems like it could make it much easier to manage email.

The home of the website for the idea is here: http://sentenc.es/ with the different numbers at http://two.sentenc.es/ and so on. 

Given the amount of complexity and richness possible in email (see our Enron email and Twitter analysis), it seems like using this technique on every email is really limiting.  On the other hand, maybe it’s a good framework to start with for emails that aren’t deeply technical in nature.  Or maybe Seth uses something besides email when he needs to convey complex information. 

Do you know anyone who has had success with this?

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