Plugged Pipes in The Productivity Engine

If you have a work pipeline where you just put things in but never or very rarely pull things out, it is a broken workflow that may be stopping up your whole productivity engine.

For example, I used to "star" items I wanted to follow up on in Gmail, but I never systematically tried to review those stars afterwards!  It was a "write-only" system.  Only when I linked Gmail to Outlook and started using the "tasks" view did I start systematically taking care of the backlog of hundreds of starred messages.  My friends were sometimes suprised to hear back from me about years-ago messages I never got back to them on.

Another example, that is in fact still broken for me, is my "to read" pile.  I have for years maintained a list of links and books and movies I found that I felt would be good to read or watch later.  But whenever I actually get free time to read, I always go online, perhaps on Facebook, and randomly collect a brand new link to click on.  Clearly this process is broken!  I should think about fixing it.

Implementing GTD and Inbox Zero using Outlook 2013 with a Gmail account

I’ve used Gmail since 2003, and I love its slick interface, which remains superior in my opinion to any other web mail out there.  Like any web mail, it’s available anywhere I am, on any computer.  I can even “star” any messages that are either next actions or items I’m waiting on someone else for.  It also has Google’s powerful and fast search.

However, at work I’ve always used Outlook.  Outlook also has a slick interface, and its equivalent of “star”, the “flag for follow up”, is even more powerful because it can be supplemented by colour categories, which I use to represent the context where the action needs to be done: “At Computer”, “Errand”, etc.:

1.png

(To get categories nicely set up like this, follow the advice from Outlook Guru Diane Poremsky at http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/outlook-categories-flags-and-imap-accounts/)

I also find Outlook very satisfying because I can drag messages to appropriate folders, and the folder hierarchy is much easier to manage than in Gmail.

Furthermore, there is a separate page called “tasks” where I can view all my flagged messages at once, grouped either by folder or by category.  This makes for a powerful way to implement GTD and Inbox Zero.

So I want the best of both worlds: while at my home office I want the power and features of Outlook, but I want to retain the option of searching and viewing my messages through the Gmail web interface.

You would think this would be simple: just click File -> Add Account and then give the information for Gmail.  Unfortunately, there are some details that if you get wrong, will cause a huge amount of frustration.

I set mine up that way and it worked for a while, but it would intermittently not work.  One day I had to spend a day working with Outlook while offline.  I spent the whole day checking off flags, and moving emails around into various folders.  After that day the sync no longer worked.

The Issue

As I found, the Outlook to Gmail IMAP interface can be painfully slow (as described in this video), and in fact apparently can stop working completely, unless you have certain settings correct.  You can easily get stuck on "synchronizing subscribed folders" during the Send/Receive step, and Outlook will either take forever or never complete the Send/Receive.

This is the IMAP issue I am referring to:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/officeversion_other-outlook/synchronizing-subscribed-folders-issue/ec6835a6-cf06-4f9f-9432-37af831631c4

I paid $100 twice for Microsoft Premium Support, but they were unable to fix the issue.

I also considered just migrating all my Gmail messages into Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail), to take advantage of the fact that this webmail uses the Microsoft-Proprietary ActiveSync protocol, which might not have had the issues that the IMAP protocol has:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/import-gmail-into-outlook/24518/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2011519/how-to-move-from-gmail-to-outlook-com.html

The old tool used for this purpose was called “TrueSwitch” but it is no longer supported, as even Google itself points out:

http://www.dataliberation.org/google/gmail

Another option was to use the Windows Live Essentials to import/export mail messages.

Fortunately I found the solution described below before taking the drastic step of migrating away from Gmail.

The Solution

The only solution that I found was:

(1)    Create New Profile

If your Outlook sync is not working, I recommend you first create a totally new profile and download the messages from the Gmail server again.  I know this is a giant pain if you have gigabytes of data, but on a strong connection it should only take a couple of hours, and for me it was the only way to ensure that the other steps below actually worked.

(2)    Modify “Send/Receive Groups” settings

Run Outlook /profiles and select your new profile.  Then Press Ctrl-Alt-S to visit “Send/Receive Groups”.  Alternatively you can access it from the Ribbon here:

2.png
3.png

I clicked “Edit” and followed the instructions from vishalkarpe in http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/officeversion_other-outlook/synchronizing-subscribed-folders-issue/ec6835a6-cf06-4f9f-9432-37af831631c4

1) Un-check the "Get folder unread count for subscribed folders"

2) Under Received mail items, check the option "User the custom behavior defined below"

3) In the window below that displays your Gmail folders just select inbox and leave the others unchecked

4) Click ok and then exit out of options and perform a send/receive to test if it is now working

(This advice is also contained in the following links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6wXTP1AIq8

http://www.centennialarts.com/support/2012/05/11/outlook-hangs-when-synchronizing-subscribed-folders/)

4.png

If all goes according to plan, your Gmail inbox will also be empty!  All messages are now classified in folders.

As a test, check if when you star an email in Gmail, it shows up flagged after the sync in Outlook, and vice versa!

N.B.: If you ever feel like you might have lost an email across both systems, it might have for some reason ended up in under the “All Mail” label only.  Check there.

5.png

 Backing up the .ost File

I never had to worry about losing my email before, since it was all stored on the cloud at Google’s servers.  But the offline copy of the emails that Outlook maintains stores some extra information that is not copied by the IMAP protocol back to Google’s servers.  In particular, views, rules, and categories are not stored.  So it would behoove you to back up that offline copy.  I’ve done my backup via DropBox.

To do this I first found the location of the offline copy.  I went to File -> Account Settings -> Data Files -> Open File Location…

Normally this file location wouldn’t be within your DropBox folder, so you’ll have to use a trick to automatically create an “Echo” of this folder within your DropBox folder.  Follow the instructions here to use a free Microsoft tool called SyncToy:

http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/sync-other-folders

Schedule to run once a day:

http://www.labnol.org/software/backup-files-dropbox/

I hope this helps someone out there!

Stock Market Returns vs. GDP

On 31 July of this year, I had the following exchange with a colleague at work. 

Michael:

Over the long run, how can stock market returns be higher than overall GDP growth?

If they did differ, then either:

  • Total company earnings as a % of total GDP would grow     unsustainably, eventually reaching 100%

Or

  • Price / Earnings ratios would increase indefinitely

What do I have wrong here?

Michael's Portfolio Manager Friend: 

You don’t have it wrong. I’ve been trying to understand what’s going on as well.

As best as I’ve concluded:

TSX has returned 9.2% per annum NOMINAL since the 1930s I think. Breaking that down:

Probably 3% ish from inflation, so 6% real return.

Of that real return, maybe 3-4% is from GDP (post-war boom years and all that).

The other 2-3% is from a combination of higher valuation levels (more mutual funds, more focus on this area – Ben Graham’s advice no longer applies anymore – can’t find stuff that cheap) and % of public company earnings increasing as a share of GDP (less cottage industries, etc.)

So going forward, it sounds like it’s gonna be brutal for the markets:

GDP real of 2% and trending down as demographics catch up

Inflation of 2% but either way you don’t care what it is b/c it adds no real value for an investor

Valuations no longer climbing, and probably % of public company as a % of total GDP is flatlining.

Michael: 

Exactly!  So if we think that the trend away from cottage industries towards public companies has run its course, and that valuation levels are not going any higher, then we have to hope that real GDP grows at a fast clip.  Or invest in places where that is the case.

One opportunity is in the fact that not every country in the world is developed yet.  So until that happens (say over the next 50-100 years) we still have scope for publicly traded investment opportunities returning higher than domestic GDP growth.

Over that timescale though, I think the economics of the Singularity will dominate, and GDP growth will approach infinity for those positioned to benefit from it.  (the rest will become charity cases)

 

Artificial Comedians

When AIs come onto the scene, they will replace our comedians, our on-air personalities, our actors and actresses.  we will love them because they are so smart and so funny and witty, and they will make the rest of us, actual humans, seem like humourless dolts.

Perhaps humans will use those personalities in their virtual assistants.  So all day long, as we wear our Google Glass, we can be accompanied by wisecracking assistants to make our day more enjoyable.  I can't wait.