Team Blog

I am easily distracted -- when I see a bird flit by through the window, my head turns involuntarily to track it, just like the cat. And so on, and on, and on, with every trifling thing that affects my field of vision.

This necessitates me putting my back to the room if I want to do Internet marketing instead of visual ping-pong, and THAT is bad Feng Shui for thinking about online advertising campaigns.

My worst distraction is Outlook 2007; it is always visible, interrupting me constantly with updates and trivia even when I am locked in a quiet corner of the office. When inbound email arrives, the messages flicker and rearrange. Then a rule usually processes the new message, with another flurry of screen activity. My mail is always up on its own monitor; numerous inbound messages cause constant flickering, distracting me from the good fight of search engine marketing.

A solution came to me today, fully formed.

I created a folder in my main Mailbox called Inbox-screened. Then I made a new rule called Inbox-screened. This rule moves all incoming messages to the Inbox-screened folder, but it's last on the rule list, so it only really works on unhandled messages and exceptions.

Now I park Outlook in the Inbox-screened folder. The emails there have reached their final destination, so they don't move around by rule sorting. They usually require personal attention; my twitchy reflexes work for me now that they have something important to focus on.

Messages that are already covered by rules can flicker away in the now-forgotten Inbox as they wish, sorting themselves neatly. Only the exceptional message that isn't caught by other rules appears in Inbox-screened. No jumping screens or distractions distract me from deeper thought in the arena of Internet advertising.

 -- Contributed by Dan Lozano