Jamie Thingelstad

Tammy found Two Drummer’s Smokehouse, this middle-of-nowhere place, when researching Williamsburg and we stopped in for dinner on the way into town. The meat was delicious. The ribs were fall of the bone and delicious. The pulled pork was juicy and full of flavor. The brisket was delightful. Probably the weakest showing on the plate was the cornbread.

Boylan-Heights has good burgers with a focus on sustainability and grass-fed happy burgers. The burgers tasted a little different though which I think was the result of them using dry aging with the meat. Tater tots were ridiculous good!

Tammy found The Urban Farmhouse for breakfast in Richmond just down the street from the Residence Inn we spent the night at. They do a weekend brunch with a very, very tiny kitchen. More like a coffee shop that makes a run at making waffles and such on the weekend. They seem to do it all without a normal flat cooktop since everything was cooked in some sort of an iron or skillet. Food was tasty and the pastries were really good as well.

Used Siri dictation to spell my password to Apple TV. Worked great!

Mac OS X, iOS, tvOS and watchOS updates all going crazy tonight!

Apple Watch updates redefine slow. Best to just walk away and come back an hour later.

Nice, Bent Paddle Brewing serving beer samples at REI Bloomington. Delicious break. Hop Forest is delicious.

Microsoft is the only name I would trust in this group.

Microsoft, Google, Comcast, LinkedIn and more join forces to work on encrypted email https://t.co/LUYqz0tEtA

— Steve Borsch (@sborsch) March 20, 2016

Curious about mySleepButton. Maybe I can use instead of melatonin.

First boat I’ve seen on Cannon Lake this year! Goodbye ice!

Looks like another great turnout!

Is the #devops Minneapolis meetup the best one ever?...... pic.twitter.com/3dA7oayWaG

— Andy Domeier (@AndyJD_) March 17, 2016

I get a large volume of email and I try to find every tool I can to better manage it. There are a number of systems that notify me of actions I need to take via email. These clutter up my workflow and I never process these messages like email from people. For example, someone submits an expense report and I need to approve it so Concur sends me an email.

For emails that are always actions, I’ve found it nice to route them straight into my OmniFocus Inbox using a rule. The Omni Sync service has a Maildrop feature that will route from an email address directly to your OmniFocus Inbox.

I use a rule like the one above route these system emails around my email and then close them out in my task workflow in OmniFocus. It’s a great way to keep email clean and automatically get these next actions in my system.

Wow. Never do a Twitter search related to politics. Frightening.

Is there any way to get only some of your iCloud calendars on your Apple Watch? Other family calendars are nice on phone but not watch.

Life after death: How will you handle your digital legacy? ← Not enough for Facebook to monetize your life, why not death too?

I’m not sure why it took me a couple of decades to come up with this but I’ve had these mail rules in place for a little over a year, and they are great! After putting these in place, I was able to streamline my processing of meeting related notices and more importantly take action on the important messages.

Folders

Create three folders in your mailbox like this:

Meetings
├── Affirmative
└── Review

The rules below will route mail into those three folders.

Rules

Note that my email rules are for Office 365 and Exchange Online. These would work directly in any Exchange environment, but I suspect that the spirit of these rules could be put in place in any email/calendar system with translation.

Invitations

My workflow for accepting meeting invites is completely unrelated to processing my email inbox. The first thing I want to do is get all meeting requests out of my inbox so I can deal with them while I’m planning out my day and week. I route these into my “Meetings” folder.

Rule: Meeting Invitation

After the message arrives and…
the message is Meeting Request.

Do the following…
move the message to folder ‘Meetings’
and stop processing more rule on this message

Typically first thing in the morning I process all items in this Meetings folder acting upon each request as appropriate.

Actionable Items

I want to take note of and possibly act upon three kinds of responses to meetings. These three rules catch these and places them in the “Review” folder. I review this folder right after going through the Meetings folder.

Decline

Action is required when people decline meetings. Declines are what made me evaluate how I process meeting notifications. The most common one for me is a repeating 1:1 with a declined occurrence. I would miss these declines and not cancel on the occurrence as the meeting owner. Then I would be waiting for the person to show up only to realize that they had declined the meeting weeks ago due to a planned vacation.

This rule will capture these declines so you can process them appropriately. By catching declines I’m able to make sure that all necessary people I’ve invited to a meeting are there, and we can have a productive session.

Note that this rule includes a forward as well. If you have someone who helps manage your schedule, forward these to that person as well so that they can take action on your behalf.

Rule: Meeting Declines

After the message arrives and…
the message is Meeting Response.
and the message includes specific words in the subject ‘Declined:’

Do the following…
forward the message to ‘John Doe’
and move the message to folder ‘Review’
and stop processing more rule on this message

New Time Proposed

Sometimes people don’t decline but suggest a new time. Now I need to visit my calendar and see if this alternative time works for me and possibly everyone else. I put these in the “Review” folder and also forward a copy to anyone that may help me with this.

Rule: Meeting New Time Proposal

After the message arrives and…
the message is Meeting Response.
and the message includes specific words in the subject ‘New Time Proposed:’

Do the following…
forward the message to ‘John Doe’
and move the message to folder ‘Review’
and stop processing more rule on this message

Forward

Meeting forwards don’t require revisiting the schedule, but I do want to know about it. It’s worthwhile to know that someone decided to add another person to the conversation. Possibly we’ll need a different room, or we may need to adjust the agenda.

Rule: Meeting Forward

After the message arrives and…
the message includes specific words in the subject ‘Meeting Forward Notification:’

Do the following…
forward the message to ‘John Doe’
and move the message to folder ‘Review’
and stop processing more rule on this message

Meeting Acceptances

Meeting acceptances are complete noise. The rules above make sure I see only actionable responses. These notifications I ‘mark as read’ and put in the “Affirmative” folder. I then delete them when a large number pile up. I could just as easily get rid of the folder and just delete these upon arrival, but I do like to see them there for some reason.

It is critical that this rule is last! If you put this rule ahead of the others, it will intercept important notices, and you’ll miss them!

Rule: Meeting Acceptance

After the message arrives and…
the message is Meeting Response.

Do the following…
mark the message as Read
and move the message to folder ‘Affirmative’
and stop processing more rule on this message

Optimize Schedule and Decrease Distractions

By using these rules I’ve been able to:

1. Optimize my process for accepting meeting invitations,
2. Completely ignore meeting acceptances, and
3. Never miss that someone was unable to join a meeting and have a broken calendar when the necessary people aren’t there.