Category: Collaboration

The joy of a fresh email account

Increasingly, over the past few months, my personal email — a Gmail account — I’ve had since the beginning is almost useless due to spam. Combined with my lingering issues over the Gmail UI, I reconsidered and got myself a Hey.com account. It still has the new email account smell.

Here are some of the joys I’m rediscovering with a fresh email account:

It’s for personal email only

Over the years, my Gmail and willkelly.com emails became intermingled, mostly when I was a freelance writer. Since day 1, I use my Hey.com for only personal email. It’s not for pitches. It’s not for my opensource.com contributions either.

I can track important personal email

Recently, I used my Hey.com email to sign my Mom up for her Covid vaccination. Using a clean email account gave me confidence that these most important emails wouldn’t get lost in the spam repository that my personal Gmail account has become.

Hey.com does break new ground in email

I went back and forth over whether to purchase a Hey.com email account. The email experience has long been ruined for me because of spam. While I didn’t quite get the filtering features during my Hey.com trial, I’ve come to appreciate them after seeing them in action.
Hey.com does restrict you to their email client, which feels like a step backward somehow. The bright spot is that the Hey.com user interface is relatively novel, with many of the same design sensibilities I enjoy using Basecamp.

How Can IT Organizations Rise to the Occasion in the New World of Remote Work? | Network World

I shared my thoughts about the new world of remote work during a recent IDG TECHtalk Twitter Chat that Network World picked upp.

A4) Scaling up remote access and chat/collaboration tools top my list of lessons. Content management gaps are also going to rear their ugly head for some organizations and offer lessons (not everybody may take heed the content management lessons though). The #IDGTECHtalk— Will Kelly (@willkelly) March 26, 2020

Source: How Can IT Organizations Rise to the Occasion in the New World of Remote Work? | Network World

The law of diminishing returns and content development

Photo by Thomas Dumortier on Unsplash

There’s a law of diminishing returns you have to watch out for when you’re developing thought leadership and other content. “Perfect is the enemy of good,” according to Voltaire. It’s possible to work on content for too long. For example, creating a PowerPoint deck that takes for months. Or, the fact sheets and white papers that snake through endless revisions. After rounds of unnecessary and contradictory reviews, the extra work ends up being a waste. The window of business opportunity closes. Team members must rush to put out a fire on another project. The content then goes to die amongst the cobwebs of a SharePoint site.

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In defense of kindness in the editorial review cycle

Photo by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash

I took an interest in editorial reviews early in my career. That interest drove me to become a technical reviewer in the computer book industry for several years. I’m not sure they even have that role anymore. At the least publishers may not pay for that review anymore. Sitting through curt and incomplete document reviews made me take those extra steps because there had to be a better way. 

Fast forward to today, I’m a stickler for kindness in the editorial review cycle:

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