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Does this mean I'm now a cover model?

Backbone Magazine has just published a great overview of the cleantech sector in Canada that contains quotes from a number of notable people in the space including Kirk Washington (Yaletown Venture Partners), Victoria Smith (BC Hydro), Rick Whittaker (Sustainable Development Technology Canada), Raul Pacheco-Vega (UBC), Helen Goodland (Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre) and me. Thanks to the Globe team and Lisa Manfield the author for a great article. You can either jump to the article, to the table of contents of this issue, or to a list of all of the issues.

I haven’t outsourced my inbox yet like Tim Ferriss has. I still do it myself. So every time I hit Inbox Zero, I thank my friend Alex Samuel from Social Signal for her tweeting about her own inbox zero success. I used to have 3000+ emails in my inbox and another 20,000 somewhere in the archive. I finally found a way to clear it. It requires Gmail, a to-do list of some kind and Gmail’s awesome keyboard shortcuts, and some Apple keyboard shortcuts.

Ensure you already have a good to-do list manager of some kind, that you can use to sort and prioritize tasks. I use a basic google sheet in a dedicated Site-specific browser too called Fluid (so it looks like a desktop app and it has an icon in my dock), but you can use anything. The keys to success are in these principles:

• Email is not a to-do list. Period. Get tasks out of there.
• Archiving = peace of mind. I never really understood the value of archiving until I realized that it is a way to file…without the psychological overhead of filing. It is a way of saying “get this out of my inbox and put it away in case I need it again.)
• The important thing is to either archive, action/archive, or put on list/archive everything.
• Eliminate (in this case archive) everything you don’t need to action as fast as you can
• Delegate (with short emails) nything you can as fast and succinctly as possible)
• Put tasks into the task list, then come back and keep sifting.

So once you have your crazy full inbox and your to-do list:

1. Go to the oldest email in your inbox and open it.
2. Scan the contents and using standard GTD thinking, do one of the following:
   1. Task?
      1. Command-Tab to your task list
      2. add the task as an ABC or to-delegate item
      3. Command-tab back
      4. hit the magic “]” key.  (<- This archives the message and takes you to the next most current email.)
   2. <2 minute action?
      1. Command-tab to app to take action. If you need to send an email and don’t want to lose your spot in the email inbox in Gmail, hold SHIFT and then hit COMPOSE NEW MESSAGE. It will pop open a window on top. When you’re done and have sent it, the window will close, leaving you right where you were before.
      2. Take action. If that means writing an email, do it in five sentences or less.
      3. Command-Tab back to Gmail if necessary.
      4. Hit the magic “]” key to archive the message.
   3. Archivable? No action required?
      1. Archive and next with “]” key.
3. Repeat as fast as possible until Inbox Zero.
4. Celebrate.

The beauty of the ] key and the command-tab and the shift-compose is that with a few keystrokes, you can can clear hundreds or even thousands of messages in a few hours. My first pass? I cleared 3000 messages in a few hours. It can be done. And when I was done, I had a complete list of all of my tasks again. I wasn’t living with some tasks in email and others in a to-do list which is always a recipe for lack of prioritization anyway.

Have you hit inbox zero? How do you handle it? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear it.

WANT.

More info here.

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/city-of-berkeley-launches-their-climate-action-plan-using-vancouver-based-visible-strategies-see-it-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/i-wanted-another-subaru-until-i-found-the-strap-on-tank-track/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/i-wanted-another-subaru-until-i-found-the-strap-on-tank-track/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:51:04 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/?p=968 Strap-on tank converts a car into a true all-terrain vehicle

Rinspeed UC: Want to Get More Miles Out of Your Electric Car? Take It on a Train | Technomix | Fast Company.

Their somewhat dodgy claim is that the vehicle “achieves 100mpg in daily driving.” The reason for that is that they know that most drivers drive less than 65 miles per day and that in that case, this vehicle drives the first 40 of those from the batteries and then kicks in the gas engine beyond that. But marketing jedi mind tricks aside, it’s still pretty damned cool. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger loves it and he’s one of the greenest politicians the U.S. has these days.

What vehicle would YOU want if you knew that it could get 100-120 mpg? Hmmmm, Hummers are still too ugly. But how about a Nissan XTerra Hybrid? Or aToyota Forerunner hybrid?

It is these sorts of discontinuous leaps that will be critical to addressing the automotive industry’s 100+ year old thinking. Congrats to the Raser and FEV teams.

Wow. This thing can get 60mpg??? I’ll believe it when I see it. But I have to say that it triggers some deep techno-lust for this geek.

Range Rover concept courtesy of Fast Company

“
“The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” (Timothy Ferris)

I recently had reason to head to Paris for personal reasons. I thought I would use the trip as an opportunity to try working somewhere other than Vancouver – to see if it’s really possible to relocate and still work? Of course, in Ferriss’ world, you only work 4 hours a week. Unfortunately I didn’t get to experience THAT part of the plan.

It worked. Here’s how I did it.

I moved all of my landline numbers into a Vonage account about a month prior – personal home phone, company land-line from San Francisco, company land-line from Vancouver – the works. I set up one voicemail box for all of the numbers and forwarded that to Simulscribe which transcribes voicemails to email (and does a pretty darned great job at it). Then I set up the cell to roll-over to the same Simulscribe address.

Once in Paris, I plugged in the phone and Vonage box. And realized that whoops – you can’t plug 110V devices into 220V. I had fried BOTH of them. Or so I thought. It turned out that fortune favours the stupid. One of the plug converters was fried so it never passed any current through.

So I bought some transformers (220V to 110V step down transformers) for my other various chargers, bought a couple of plug converters (for the Apple power supply and the new phone that I bought) and plugged it all in. It took a couple of tries but after a call to Vonage tech support, the Vonage box was up and running on the local DSL connection and voila – my phone was plugged in and ready to receive calls at any of my numbers.

I have to admit that it was freeing (and a bit strange) to have people look at my calling code and say, “OH! You’re in Vancouver!” and then have to explain that no, in fact I was in Paris, ten hours ahead of them! The sound quality was as good as it is in Vancouver, which is to say, on par with the regular plain old telephone lines that I had before.

There was only one glitch and that was more to do with the Siemens phone than anything else. It would ring but only at the moment it was actually ringing, could you hit the “ACCEPT” button. In between rings, it didn’t look “pick up able”. Weird.

But that very small issue aside, it means that with a laptop, skype, Gatherplace (for screen sharing), Simulscribe, a good DSL connection, and a Vonage adapter – have equipment, will travel.

I hear that Puerto Vallarta has good DSL… Or maybe Costa Rica….

The Bugatti has to race a mile, turn around, and race back. The EF-2000 has to take off, race a mile into the air vertically and then turn around and fly towards the ground another mile and then cross the same finish line as the car.

VERY well done and hilarious that somebody bothered to do it at all!

What a joke. Why are Americans putting up with this? WAKE UP. Unbelievable.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. They should have been hauled off the plane if he was threatening the staff, but charge them with mischief, not under the fracking terrorism act.

Craig Ferguson had a funny episode on this story: “When the other passengers saw these goings-on, they were surprised and thought….’What, entertainment on a Southwest Airlines flight?’” Funny. But not.