On Ada Lovelace Day, it's my pleasure to sing high praises for my best friend and partner of over 8 years, one of the most wonderful, hardworking and ethical people that I've ever met in my life: Desi McAdam.
Not only is Desi a role-model and example to women software developers through her tireless work as a Principal Consultant at Hashrocket, she's also the founder of DevChix, an organization devoted to advocating women's place in our unarguably male-dominated industry.
Not trying to be immodest, but you know that saying: "Behind every great man is a great woman"... well in this case it's certainly true. I'd be lost without my beloved Desi.
Incidentally, I've been doing Inbox Zero for at least a couple of weeks and it has really decreased my stress levels. Everything emailed to me gets either deleted or archived as soon as I look at it. (As a great side effect, the load of forcing myself to deal with every incoming message caused me to unsubscribe from a bunch of spam and mailing lists which I've lost interest in over time.)
Unless I can reply or deal with it immediately, any email that needs further attention gets a yellow star and is archived. When I'm in the mood to work on reply and followups, I go to the star folder and start working my way down the list of yellow stars. If something has "gone cold" since the time I starred it, meaning that it's been followed-up to the satisfaction of the sender, or is now pending for awhile, I turn the star blue, meaning it's "on ice".
Oh yeah, I use GMail and the Superstars Lab feature. Don't you?
Anyway, stuff that's urgent to take care of gets flagged with a red bang icon. Stuff that's been taken care of gets a green checkmark. Stuff that's old still gets buried sometimes. I admit it's not a perfect system, but it's way better than what I had before.
