2007: 16,643 emails

In the tradition of doing a year end tally, I thought I'd open the hood of my email In Box and give you some insight on how I cope with our modern world's increasing information overload.

In 2007, I received 16,643 emails, an average of 1,357 email per month, or about 44 per day. My annual average is 16,294 emails. Here is the month by month breakdown:


(Last year I had no email in January through March—I must have accidentally reset my stats program.)

Of those 16,643 messages, 6,799 were junk email, which is 40% of all my received email. Here is the month by month breakdown of that:


Last year, my junk email ratio was 46%, so things are improving. I cracked down on junk email in late July and you can actually see the drop on the chart—my received emails and junk emails were cut in half.

How do I manage to process over 16 thousand emails? If there are 8,760 hours in a year, I've spent only 201 hours processing emails, at least on Eudora (I'm sure I've spent much more since I got my laptop in July of last year). 201 hours is 2.29% of my entire year. If you include time on my laptop remote checking email, and tack on Myspace and Facebook emails, let's assume 5% of the year was spent checking emails. Even so, that's not too bad. If it were in the double digits, I might be worried.

Now let's have some more fun with numbers:

201 hours / 9,846 legitimate emails = 1.22 minutes/email

Still, not too bad.

But how do I sift through so many emails? I have a few tricks...

1. Eudrora, not Mail, Yahoo Mail, or Gmail.


1. I've always debated whether I should switch to an internet email service like Gmail, but so far the local email programs like Eudora are still superior, as you'll soon see with my custom filters for spam and other mail. Plus, I still use my Yahoo! mail account to collect email from my home account. And when I send email from my Yahoo account, I set my "Reply to:" to my home email account so all mail still gets funneled through my home account.


2. I am vigilent about spam.


1. I don't post my email address on any web site. If I do, it's a web site I trust and my email is written out, e.g., myfirstnameATrossprudenDOTcom. This keeps naughty spam spiders from finding my email.
   
2. I ask my friends not to tack my email on their mass emails. Emails can be forwarded endlessly and it's only a matter of time before some spammer grabs my email. If they must add me to their mass email, I ask that they put me in the BCC: field.
   
3. I use email aliases. I own my own domain (rosspruden.com) and can create and delete new users on the fly. In my case, rather than have 10 different email accounts, I have aliases which all point to my main email. If an alias gets siphoned off by a spammer, I can delete that alias and create a new one in minutes. It's like a condom for emails.
   
4. I installed an awesome local spam filter. I'm a Mac user, so I use Spamsieve with Eudora. Spamsieve lets you teach it how to filter your spam so it gets better over time. Last year, it caught 96% of all spam. This year, it caught 98%.


3. I use filters to self-sort all incoming mail.


1. I eliminate all emails I CC: myself on. I set those emails to go directly to the trash (which I never empty, but I know those emails are there if I need to search for them). I also belong to a number of mailing lists, and all emails sent by me to those lists are sometimes sent right back to me. Don't need to see those emails. They go directly to the trash.
   
2. I filter certain emails directly into folders. For instance, all my blog posts are emailed to me for archive purposes. But I don't need to waste time looking at those. They go right to where they will live forever. I never see them.
   
3. I divide my email into direct and general emails. Many of my incoming emails are not sent specifically to me: my email may in the CC: field, or the email might be from a mailing list. While I do need to read those emails, they usually aren't high priority so I filter them into a folder called "Once/day" which I check only—wait for it—once per day. I also turn off any sound or visual alerts so I don't even know when I get those emails. That helps me not get distracted with low-priority stuff.
   
4. What's left are emails sent directly to me, and that's a considerably smaller percentage than 9,846 emails. On those emails, I have a sound alert set so I know—if I'm at my computer—when I've got incoming mail.


4. Brevity.


1. (These groups of tips are more subtle—I had to think hard about them because they aren't things I consciously decided to do, but things which I've evolved into doing.) With every email, I try to be as succinct as I can in one or two sentences. Bereft of facial expressions and vocal inflections, email is often a medium where misunderstandings happen without effort or intent. Knowing when to be brief saves time. But knowing when brevity does not reflect the correct nuance, and which will lead to trouble later on, is equally important.
   
2. I don't use signatures anymore. At the end of every email message, I used to tack on my email address and all my contact info, but that 10 line block of text just ends up being "junk text" I need to sift through whenever I review a thread of discussions. Distill as needed.

I hope these tips make your 2008 more productive! If you have any tips you use which I haven't listed here, please share them with me.

Happy New Year!

What if Microsoft sold an iPhone?

I came across this brilliant video and had to share. The strange thing is, I could actually see it happening... which is why it's so funny.

Enjoy.

24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot

One of the funniest parodies I've seen in a looooong time. Oh, how the world has changed in 13 years...

Social Networks

This month and last, I've been researching social networks to lay the groundwork for a massive social networking idea. (In fact, this idea is so massive that it has the potential to eclipse Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, and LinkedIn combined. And yeah, I'm freaking out, too.)

Anyway, I thought I'd experiment with Twitter a little... problem is, I don't have too many people on Twitter to follow. But Twitter looks very fun, so if any of you out there Twitter, you can find me by clicking on the link at right, "Watch me blather constantly".

Not giving, but living

Today was my best Christmas Day ever. I have to say it aloud, for perfect moments do not last long, and are thus so easily forgotten.

Had I the option to go back in time a day and tell past self how great this day will go, my past self would have thought the main reason was about presents. Yet in hindsight, I can't immediately remember what gifts I received, or even what gifts I gave. Today a harmonious confluence hung in the air like errant beads brought together to create a once-thought-lost necklace:

• The brined (22.73 pound) turkey I made this year was exquisite. In fact, it was so moist and succulent that it actually fell apart as I carved it.
  
• The mashed potatoes (the first I had ever made from scratch) were superb. We'll be making more of those!
  
• The microwaved sweet potatoes (sprinkled with Equal and cinnamon—how much easier can you make it?) were remarkably delicious.
  
• My 9 month old daughter's sleep schedule was ideal... she crashed at exactly the right time and stayed asleep for longer than expected. Critically, she did not cry once, or even got cranky at all.
  
• My wife took care of our daughter for most of the day, letting me do the bulk of the cooking. And she even did the dishes when I passed out after dinner.
  
• Our new holiday-appropriate plateware, a gift from the in-laws, was simply gorgeous to look at, a definite step up from our casual plateware, or even our formal china.
  
• Our tablecloth, a crimson fleur-du-lit pattern, was positively regal.
  
• I was surrounded only by people I care about, of whom I shared a close bond with three—my daughter, my mother, and my wife. And I got to see them all interact with each other... and get along.
  
• Our house did not seem cramped with too many guests.
  
• My mother finally got to play the Pirates of the Caribbean Monopoly game she gave us this year, which she'd been hounding me about all week—so I knew she'd be shutting up about it. Also, during gameplay, I realized it was the first time I'd played Monopoly with a largish group since I did my stint in real estate and its high-stakes negotiating, meaning the possibility to do creative deals was much more possible; the end result was leveraging my initially disparate properties into 4 monopolies, a personal best.
  
• While playing Monopoly, typically an impossible game to play in my family without some sort of fight breaking out, everyone was laughing consistently for at least an hour. In fact, I'm still giddy from it.
  
• I finally crawled into bed to watch the endlessly charming movie Stardust with my wife. I feel like a kid again.
  
• I drank 2 Newcastles while watching a movie. I feel like a teenager again.

At the end of this wonderful day, I'm left with a feeling that Christmas is not really about giving gifts to each other at all. Not physical gifts, anyways. It's really more about sharing your time with friends and family. It's about laughing as deeply as you can with those who really matter to you, and holding that memory as close as you can to your heart for as long as possible. It's not about giving, it's about living.

Do that well enough and everything that you think matters drops away. Spend time with your friends and family. Find the way to interact that you all enjoy the best. Spin it out as long as you can. People come and go, but those memories will live as long as you do.

Merry Mithrasmas!

This post is for Richard, whose epiphany has stayed with me:

...one day I read an essay by Isaac Asimov in which he made reference to the "Christian myths." It was like someone turned on a light in my brain. Why, I wondered, did we study Greek and Roman mythology in school, but treat Christianity like it was the truth? I didn't cast aside my beliefs overnight, but I did start to wonder why we accept some things without question and not others.

This video, then, is for Richard.


And, appropriately, here's the new trailer for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, starring Luke Goss as the baddie! I worked with Luke two years ago on Something In The Clearing and Luke is a class act. I'd love to work with him again!

CLOVERFIELD: Marketing the American Godzilla

Last week, I spent 2 hours of my life learning about Slusho drinks and Tagruato's deep sea drilling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, first go watch the trailers for Cloverfield (first the teaser, then the full trailer).

Now, in one sense, Cloverfield isn't unique at all—it looks like a retelling of a tired genre, the Japanese monster movie. In another sense, however, it's innovative because it tells that story from the point of view of a small group of people. Unlike Godzilla, a monster which also attacks New York (why New York? Why not Charleston, West Virginia [thanks for the correction, Joe!] or Flagstaff, Arizona?), the viewer will probably have more invested in what happens to the main characters. It's like Blair Witch meets 9/11 and Godzilla. It's not surprising J. J. Abrams is behind this project—Cloverfield is a close cousin of Lost: put people you care about in an insane situation and see how they react.

Lost's popularity lays in the "peeling of the onion"—the more layers you peel back, the more layers you find. Each answer only gives you more questions. Of course, foreplay only lasts so long and some viewers have become frustrated with Lost's serpentine plotlines, while others are drawn to the story's emotional core: its characters. As in real life, Lost's story comes to you in scattered pieces of information. Like Ian Fassburg used to say, "A woman who's almost naked is far sexier than a woman who's totally naked." Viewers like to be given a challenge, a puzzle to figure out.

This is why Cloverfield looks to be such a great film. By framing the story from the point of view of strangers, without the benefit of any omniscient "meanwhile..." cutaways, the viewer is immediately handicapped and must struggle along with the characters to make sense of the impossible. A monster attack? What monster? How big is it? Where did it come from? What damage is it doing? What does it look like? Can it even be beaten? What will happen to us? What will happen to the city? What will happen to the world? These questions are visceral, emotional, atavistic. The trailer exploits that by piggybacking on the fears of another cataclysmic attack like 9/11... it's not by coincidence the characters witness a huge explosion from a Manhattan rooftop.

Some other simple tricks to hook the viewer into the story—the release date synchs up to the story's time, so photos taken in the film (and posted on the official web site, pictured at left) are datestamped to when the film is set for release... so the viewer will be able to easily imagine they're watching a live telecast. The first trailers didn't even list a movie title, just 1-18-08, the release date of the film. Even after the title was released, Abrams said the only official web site for the movie is www.1-18-08.com, but as of today there's nothing much on that site except for a few photographs. Flipping the photographs on 1-18-08.com (it's a Flash site) gives you more information about the characters, which leads—with some detective work—to their Myspace profiles:

myspace.com/robbyhawkins
myspace.com/jamielascano
myspace.com/robbyhawkins
myspace.com/hudsonplatt
myspace.com/jj_hawkins
myspace.com/lily_ford
myspace.com/marlenadiamond
myspace.com/beth_mcintyre

Look at each profile carefully—each person has each other person's profile in their top 8 friends list. Clever!

Rumors were also circulated that the film's title was to be called Slusho. Slusho? What the hell is that? A Google search for "Slusho" yields Slusho.jp as the top result, which appears to have nothing to do with Cloverfield... at first glance.

But look closer: the site has a commercial contest where the public can submit their own commercial for Slusho. The address for contest submission is Bold Futura, LLC, 1223 Wilshire Boulevard, No. 1422, Santa Monica, CA 90403. Huh? What's a Japanese company doing with a Santa Monica address?

Researching Bold Futura, LLC took me to boldfutura.org, which was live when I saw it, but is now defunct. From that site, I first heard about their affiliate company, Tagruato, a deep sea drilling company. A glance at Tagruato's web site, tagruato.jp, shows an interactive map of deep sea drilling; their most recent, and biggest, drilling rig is in the Atlantic Ocean, not far from New York City... Googling Tagruato led me to an intriguing blog at tagruato.blogspot.com, which appears to be run by a Greenpeace-like group blaming Tagruato for destroying our oceans. On that blog, they claim to have received notes from whistle-blowers inside the deep sea drilling company that "bad things are happening."

ALL these sites have been created to promote Cloverfield and, without realizing it, you can easily get pulled into this alternate reality and start to care about the characters listed on Myspace. This kind of marketing isn't new—it's called "immersive entertainment" and it's been used for films before. The goal is to create a world where easter eggs are sprinkled across multiple web sites for those curious enough to seek them out. When someone finds a new piece of the puzzle, they discuss its meaning and import with others and the end result is a phenomenal word of mouth about the movie. I mean, look at me... I'm practically a walking advertisement for a movie I haven't even seen yet.

I had so much fun learning about this marketing campaign that I just had to buy my own Slusho T-shirt and baseball hat... I'm told the box it arrives in includes newspaper stuffing offering even more clues about the movie!



If you want to know the complete lowdown about the ad campagin, here's a real site which lays out everything currently known about each of the sites listed above:
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20546

And don't forget to see Cloverfield on January 18th!