The Cloisters

One of the biggest culprit of overflowing inboxes is Bacon or “bacn”. For years Spam was the problem, but no longer. Now Bacon threatens us by sending retailer emails that are 5% relevant and 95% trash. It’s hard to let these go lest a sale be missed. Here’s a great infographic from Mashable.com–clicking the image links to Mashable’s post on Bacon.

P.S. The image is from Unsubscribe.com which has just announced that their services are totally free. Maybe we’ll post on this later.

Click for the Mashable post on Bacon

There are probably 1,000 different ways to connect to Twitter. The most unobtrusive and productive way for me has been to 1. Download Google Chrome (a browser) and 2. Install Silver Bird. If it wasn’t for this “combo” looking at Tweets and following others would be a distraction and would take me out of the way. Silver Bird functions within Chrome and provides a small window that quickly disappears.

Part of my solution to ending email (or trying to) has been to use Twitter via Chrome & Silver Bird. Rather than sign up for the daily Groupon email I now follow GrouponNY. Instead of getting an email with the latest articles at Cult of Mac, I follow CoM and I simply see the updates as I have time on Silver Bird. The best feature for Twitter is each “post” is limited to 145 characters (far shorter than you realize; try posting a quote you like on Twitter—you’ll have a hard time getting it in there).

Click to see a full screenshot

Unlike an email where you to have to read (or at least skim) from beginning to end, you need only read a few words. If a NY Times tweet has an interesting headline (all that there is room for) I simply read it and move on (total time 3 seconds). There’s no need to open, read/skim, or even decide to delete or save. The tweet just moves on and out of my way. And if a tweet has a link to an article, but I don’t have time to read it, I simply star the post and come back to it later.

Overall the system works great. However, some companies and blogs don’t tweet (e.g. Wine Insiders). I’ve found Twitter to be a better solution than an RSS Reader, but I’ll explain how RSS can also help cut back on emails in a later post.

[P.S. I'm a firm believer in Twitter, but not as a way to keep others updated about what I am doing. Instead it is a great and efficient way to keep updated on news, worthy articles, and also friends. There's also the benefit of Direct Messages or Mentioning on Twitter to cut back on email, but this is less significant to me than what I mentioned above. Above and away most emails come from companies I've bought from, not from individuals.]