Work Smarter with Social Media: A Guide to Managing Evernote, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Your Email

Author

Introduction

This book is your chance to take back control of your working life—not from the Internet, but with it.

Each year, we spend a larger and larger portion of our lives online. Americans now spend more than twenty-three hours a week on email, social media, and other online communications. Social media users spend an average of more than three hours a day on social networks. And a third of working Internet users say that the Internet, email, and cell phones increase the total amount of time they spend working.

Ironically, the tools that allow us to do all that online work often compound the problem of digital overload. In addition to following the latest news on Twitter, building our networks on LinkedIn, and staying on top of our colleagues’ correspondence, we have to invest time in learning how to use an ever-growing number of social media management apps and online productivity systems. Not only do we have to keep up with social media itself, we have to keep up with the tools that promise to help us keep up!

What This Book Does

This book is your way out of the keeping up trap. It puts the focus back on your professional priorities and goals, and helps you identify the online tools and practices that help you achieve them. By introducing you to the tools that offer the greatest benefit to most professionals and helping you to use them more efficiently, it ensures that the time you spend online makes you more focused and effective, instead of more distracted and overloaded.

This book will show you how to use the tools that I get asked about the most and that offer the biggest payoff (and satisfaction), from people who’ve learned how to use them consistently and effectively:

Evernote or another digital note-taking system to stay focused on the work that matters most, so you maximize your professional impact.

LinkedIn to strengthen the professional relationships that have the biggest impact on your growth and opportunities.

Twitter and HootSuite to stay on top of—and engage with—the most important news in your industry and field.

Email rules and filters so that you spend less time on email triage and more time on the messages that move your work forward.

For each of these, I’ll share the tools and practices that offer the biggest payoff for professionals. Many of the practices I outline are widely used by tech-savvy people who are comfortable using and customizing new software tools; many more are practices I’ve personally developed or customized so that my work and priorities drive the way I use technology, instead of vice versa.

You don’t have to do everything in this book in order to get more out of the time you spend online: you can pick and choose the pieces that seem as if they’ll be most useful to you and adopt additional pieces over time. And because I show you how these different tools can fit together, you can be confident that each piece you layer on will work well with the systems you’ve already got in place.

In fact, when I sit down with a friend or colleague, I often show them one piece of this toolkit: a way they can use Evernote, HootSuite, or LinkedIn to simplify one aspect of their working lives. That’s what we did when we initially published these individual chapters on each of these tools. But what I really want to be able to do is give them an integrated road map of how to use the half-dozen essential tools that have the biggest impact on professional capacity and effectiveness. This full book is what you’d get if you sat down with me for a day or two so that we could set you up with the kind of digital toolkit and work flow that maximizes the value of today’s online tools.

Who This Book Is For

You may already be using one or more of the tools in this book, or you may have heard of them but never taken the time to sit down and put them to use. This book is particularly aimed at:

People who want to try (or retry) these tools. If you’ve heard about one of them but never tried it—or you tried it and it just didn’t take—this book is your on ramp. Even people who’ve tried and abandoned tools like Evernote tell me that this approach has helped them finally figure out how to use online tools to make their work a lot more effective and efficient.

People who want to get more out of the tools in this book. Even if you already use LinkedIn, HootSuite, or Gmail’s filters, the approach and tips I provide will help you use them more effectively.

Anyone who struggles with digital overload. If you feel overwhelmed by the ever-growing volume of information and must-try networks, this book will help you figure out which tools and approaches will help you get on top of your work, instead of becoming one more thing to keep up with.

What This Book Is Not

This book isn’t a comprehensive manual for using each of these tools. Plenty of those exist, and they provide a much broader look at the many ways you can use each tool. Rather, this book is focused on helping you work more effectively, so it pulls out those features of each tool that let you get your work done better, faster. Nor is it an exhaustive guide to every digital tool or social network you might use in your professional life—that’s too long a list! These are the ones for which there seems to be the biggest pain point or largest gap between what people could do with the tool and what they are doing with that tool, plus a large base of people struggling with that gap.

It’s also not a guide to becoming a social media celebrity. While it will help you establish and manage your presence on LinkedIn and Twitter, it is not a guide to building your personal brand on social. If that’s what you’re after, I suggest you check out Dan Schawbel’s Me 2.0 or Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy’s Branding Yourself.

It’s not a complete guide to social media or social media marketing from an organizational perspective; it’s about how you personally can use these digital tools to make your own work life better.

About Me

The guidance in this book draws on my personal experience testing and using a wide range of online productivity tools, and my professional experience helping people and organizations learn how to use the social web. From my PhD research at Harvard, where I began my dissertation work by investigating the impact of the Internet on the modern workplace, to the social media training I’ve delivered to thousands of small businesses throughout the United Kingdom, I’ve been researching and guiding online work habits for almost two decades.

I’ve been an early adopter of all the tools covered in this book, and as a relentless tinkerer, I’ve experimented with a lot of different ways of using them. I was one of Evernote’s first 250,000 users and was early to Twitter and LinkedIn as well. As I developed my own approach to each of these platforms, I shared some of my best practices in my blog for Harvard Business Review, and what I heard back from HBR readers helped me continue to refine and enhance my work flow. What you find in this book reflects not only my own learning, but the wisdom of HBR readers and many other people who’ve shared their best practices with me either online or in face-to-face training.

How to Use This Book

You can read the chapters of this book in any order, so I recommend starting with the one that reflects an area of your working life where you really want to bring more focus in the next few months. Alternately, if there’s a specific tool you’ve wanted to start using (or using better), you can let that dictate the order in which you proceed.

Chapter 1: Rule Your Email. Focus on the communications you actually need to see or act on by changing the way you read, organize, and respond to email.

Chapter 2: Evernote. Focus on work that matters most by using a digital notebook to organize all the notes and information you gather or create.

Chapter 3: Twitter and HootSuite. Focus on the online conversations that matter most by building your own social media dashboard and using it to maintain a social media presence in a limited amount of time.

Chapter 4: LinkedIn. Focus on the professional relationships that can have the biggest impact and get more from business travel by using LinkedIn and TripIt.

You’ll find recommended resources in the introduction to each chapter that can help you master the details of each network. At the end of the book, you’ll find advice on how to use these different tools and approaches together, as well as a set of quick-start guides that can get you up and running fast with the most crucial pieces of your toolkit.

1 Rule Your Email

This chapter is for people who get too much email, which is a bit like saying, This chapter is for people who have email. All too often, email feels like more of a hindrance to productivity than an effective communication tool. It’s hard to think of a technology that is so widely used and yet also so widely resented. As a Vision Critical study found, more than 75 percent of workplace email users think of email as hostile, boring, and a waste of time, while less than 25 percent see it as friendly, interesting, manageable, necessary, valuable, important, or useful.

But email can be a useful, valuable, and manageable part of your work life—once you set up your email system to allow you to focus your attention on what matters most. Having an effective email system doesn’t mean finding a way to reply to every message. Instead, it’s about being able to efficiently and effectively complete your most important and valuable work—which often gets squeezed or sidelined by the pressure to read and respond to each incoming message.

That’s why an effective email system begins with a decision to be selective about which messages you will actually address or even see. Many of us are already making decisions about what to answer and what to ignore; we’re just making those decisions inconsistently or haphazardly, depending on what catches our eye or how much time we have on a given day. And if we are addressing every single incoming message, it’s often with an implicit or unconscious decision to prioritize our gold-star standing as an email correspondent over working on tasks that are more urgent, projects that are more important, and personal activities that are more restorative.

An effective email system replaces all those haphazard, implicit, and unconscious decisions with a set of deliberate rules that consistently apply the same criteria. That’s exactly what the email system described in this chapter does: It helps you automate the often unconscious guidelines that determine what you read, when you read it, and whether (and how quickly) you reply.

The email from your boss asking for an update on your project before her imminent presentation needs an immediate answer, so it should always show up in your inbox. Likewise, the message providing a revised quote from a vendor is something you want to see right away. But once you’ve sent a quick thank-you, you should be able to trust your email system to file the original message in the right archive folder without requiring you to think about it. The reminder from your spouse that tomorrow is trash day can wait until you get home, but no longer than that—which is why it belongs in a holding pen that I call an alternate inbox. As for the 4,500-word message from an old college acquaintance, sent to his entire address book, describing his trek through Nepal? Let that one go straight to a folder where you can read it when you next have an hour to spare. And while you may never need to look at that Amazon receipt, sending it straight to an Online Orders folder means it’s there if the sweater you ordered turns out to be too small.

The risk in automating such a system is, of course, that you may miss a message that you really did need to see right away. But if you start small and build your automated system carefully, that’s less likely to happen. I’ll give other tips throughout this chapter about how to make sure your filtering system doesn’t cause any email mishaps.

Once you’ve got the right folders, rules, and processes in place, you’ll spend less of your time and brainpower on the job of deciding which emails merit your attention or response and more on the work that matters most to you—including (gasp!) work that isn’t even driven by email. Instead of checking email throughout the day simply to stay on top of the volume, you’ll build a routine that lets you see urgent messages in your version of real time, while affording you the space to properly address messages that deserve careful thought or preparation.

Keeping track of how much time you spend reading your newly filtered inbox can help you stay within the total envelope of time you want to allocate to email management. Just keep refining those rules and filters until you reach your target.

Setting that kind of email time limit is important. If it feels counterintuitive or too scary to limit how often you’ll check your inbox or how much time you’re spending on email, remember that you’re already making that decision every day (since presumably you’re not spending all of your time on email). But you need to make the decision explicit to ensure that the time you spend on email reflects your priorities and the range of demands on your time and attention.

A good place to start is by looking at how much time you spend on email now and how often you check your inbox—including all those quick inbox checks you do on your phone while you’re on the commuter train or grabbing a couple of minutes between meetings. Does it feel like you’re spending the right amount of time on email or too much? Is that amount of time sustainable, or is it crowding out more-important work, personal time, or sleep?

This chapter will give you the tools you need to ensure that you’re not only spending the right amount of time on email, you’re making the most of it.

What This Chapter Covers

The system I’ll describe here combines the smart use of email tools to automate what can be automated and an efficient set of processes—a workflow—for handling everything else.

This system is built around the rules and filters functions that are now available in just about every major email provider and program (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and so on), though there are significant differences in how rules or filters work among email services and applications. The strategies I’ll map out will work with most email tools that offer rules or filters, so you can implement the approaches no matter which ones you use. However, I’ll refer most often to Gmail and Outlook and give some extra tips based on the popularity of those systems among professionals. (Note that I’m referring to the desktop software, not the Outlook mail service formerly known as