I think I'm on a roll here with this whole productivity-related posts. Thanks again to Ben from the Instigator blog for "instigating" this meme.

For a while I've been wanting to share our cool way of sharing stuff at work. In any typical office working environment, you've got a lot of e-mails flying back and forth between desktop workers. The e-mails are mainly forwards of interesting videos, pictures, articles or documents found on the Web or received through personal e-mails. Most of them are non-work related. Hell, when I got back from my vacation last week, there were 215 e-mails sitting in my inbox, of which about 10% only were related to my project. Most of the others were simply links to interesting sites and articles from my friends (honestly, some of them weren't even that interesting).

The Problem

While I appreciate the gesture, sometimes it gets really annoying to mix work- and non-work-related stuff in the same inbox and having to sort them out. Furthermore, getting frequent new-mail notifications can be very distracting and it often breaks my creative flow.

The Solution

While reading the above, you might have thought of some pretty basic solutions to this problem, including:

  • Only check your e-mail few times during the day (you might run in the risk of missing an urgent work-related e-mail though).
  • Set up filters for e-mails coming from your friends to go to specific folders and disable notifications for these e-mails.
  • Completely block such incoming e-mails and avoid them altogether.

All options are valid and can really work. However, long ago I've thought of another solution that makes use of RSS feeds to share all content that can be aggregated in what's called feed readers (e.g., Google Reader, Outlook 2007).

Basically, if most of all of the content that is shared comes from blog posts, photos, videos and the like, then you can share them with your co-workers using a "pull" model, which goes like this:

  1. Google_Reader_SharedYou subscribe to the cool websites that you often share with your co-workers.
  2. You receive cool new stuff in your feed reader (I'm using Google Reader as an example here).
  3. You share them by clicking on 'Share' under each interesting item.
  4. Google_Reader_ShareYou tell your friends to use their feed reader (for example, Outlook 2007 can read RSS feeds) and subscribe to your shared items. (OK, so you can send the feed address of your shared items via e-mail, but just this once Smile ). For example, here is my shared items RSS address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SharedByAlaeddin. You can see the posts I share on a regular basis in my Shared Reading page.
  5. Your friends receive any newly shared items in Outlook when they choose to.
  6. Everybody lives happily ever after!

Conclusion

It may sound like a long process to set up, but the benefits are tremendous. For one thing, the "pull" model to get your co-workers' shared stuff sounds a lot better than being "fed" those things whenever they will. Your attention is a valuable asset and you should have complete control over it.