Category ‘Personal’
Postponing mails
Have you ever postponed a job one of your buddies sent you via mail and forgot it? Here’s what I do.
I often get that kind of emails saying “Hey, can you quickly do this and that for me?”. Usually, I can - but I don’t want to - at least not immediately. So what I do is, I postpone it and happen to forget it once it’s out of the first page of my GMail inbox. But there’s quite an easy way to prevent this from happening using a neat feature of the GMail web interface called labels. Labels are best described as virtual folders, or if you know iTunes (smart) playlists. The mails are not being moved from the inbox, but you can tag them with something.
I created myself two labels, one called ‘finished’ and one called ‘postponed’. Whenever I read a mail and consider the work attached to it to be finished I apply the label ‘finished’ to it, whenever I postpone some work I apply the label ‘postponed’. That way, I know at a glance in my virtual ‘postponed’ folder that there’s work left.
How do you manage your mail? Any suggestions on mail management? Tell me using the comment function.
Why I’m blogging in English
If you know me, read my about me page, followed a link from a German site or noticed my TLD is .de you probably know I’m German. So why am I blogging in English?
Since my early days in web development, which happened to start at HostingPosts, a free hosting provider, I’ve always been using English when talking about web development related topics. I quickly advanced to a moderator and later an administrator at HostingPosts, for I was trying to give something back to the community by helping other members out, when they had web development-related problems. I practically never talked to my German friends about web development, probably since they were just not interested in that kind of stuff anyway.
When I got my two VPSes at HostEurope I first joined a German discussion board about web topics - HostEurope’s customer board is a great place if you need help, if you have access to it (obviously only if you’re a HostEurope customer) make sure you check it out.
The decision whether to blog in English or German was a tough one, though. It took me almost two months to make the final decision, but I went with English for two main reasons:
- I have some English friends, who would probably enjoy reading my blog and they obviously don’t speak German
- A lot of people in Germany speak English anyway
Oh, and there’s another reason, too: I’m blogging in English, because I can 
I know my English is not perfect, so you’re welcome to correct spelling mistakes (shame on me for not paying attention to Firefox’ spell check plug-in!) or weird grammar.