Check it out, the BBC published a piece I wrote on why it’s important to break the rules and how to do it without getting fired right off the bat. It’s a kind of updated viewpoint on Hacking Work, my latest book. You can read it here!
Stylus.com is the only business-to-business design & inspiration resource that provides validated, cross-vertical blah blah blah. I can’t tell you the rest because their “about” page is a JPG. That said, it’s apparently a big deal for designers, because lots of my designer friends saw the interview when it came out and told me about it.
You can check it out here – I thought they did a great job of highlighting the business value of my last book, Hacking Work!!
It’s always a joy to get interviewed by someone who loves the topic as much as you do. When Briana Abrahms was setting up the interview she was in Africa tracking wild dogs, so it was pretty clear she had the hardcore element covered. We talked about the crow project and how it happened; read it here.
Had a great time doing a podcast interview with these guys; their approach is a decidedly functional mastery of social engineering from a security viewpoint – really refreshing!! Check it out.
Richard Morris gave me a thorough going-over in this interview about how I started hacking, how to make a living breaking the rules, and writing code.
Debbie Evans and I published this article in Wired Italy; it’s about how virtual currency money laundering is primarily a useful tool for the 1% of wealthy corporations and individuals, and what that will mean for the rest of us.
You can get a translated version in English here.
I get to inbox zero – that is, no emails in my inbox *at all* – four or five times a week, and I generally reply to all my emails within 24 hours. Yes, I’ve been accused of OCD, and I *am* a wee bit competitive, but I also think that the system I use can pretty much be used by anybody with the same results. Here’s what I do:
Batch the hell out of it
Every morning I review my todo list and set my goals for the day, and then sit down to answer email. One at a time. Starting with the oldest email in my inbox.
This is harder than it sounds – or, if you’ve ever had more email than you can handle, probably exactly as hard as it sounds. But sticking to this system means that you’ll actually get your email DONE, which is much better than what’s happening now.
By setting aside one particular time to do email you prevent yourself from making excuses to “come back later” to difficult emails that you don’t want to write. This enforced discipline makes possible the next trick I rely heavily on:
Brevity is the
You know the rest, so I’m not going to waste time writing it here. The same goes for my emails – if you want a conversation schedule a phone call. Email can be polite, and even funny, but it’s usually best for exchanging information. To that end, I skim emails (I know, I know! And you spent so much time crafting it, too!), include the minimum necessary niceties, and then look for the questions.
That’s key – in fact, if you’re faced with a particularly wordy email you can just do a search for “?” and backtrack from there. Answer that question, and then a couple more, right at the top of your email. Viola. Done.
As an aside, I’ve collaborated with extraordinarily wordy people before and learned that most of them are easily trained. If you simply reply to the first three questions OR the first set of bullet points they provide, you’ll find that after just a few exchanges they’ll start supplying all their emails to you with bullet-pointed question lists. This is much more convenient for everybody, and don’t feel bad – they’re better off for it.*
Keep it Moving
Often I get stuck on emails that don’t have a clear question in them. This is either because I failed to ask something clearly in the first place, or the person who wrote me didn’t know what they wanted. Rather than let the email stick in your inbox until God shines his light down from the heavens and clears things up, ask a question and send it back to them. Viola! Now *they* have to figure out what the next step is, while you get on with your life.
Waiting
This is my ace in the hole, the one thing that gives me an edge over most everyone I email with. When I send an email I want a reply to I cc myself, and when that email comes in it gets shunted automatically (using a Filter, which most emailing programs have these days) into a folder called Waiting. Once a week I go through that folder, and every email I *haven’t gotten a reply to yet* I follow up on. GMail labs has something called “Templates” which means I can just hit a button and have the same followup email automatically filled out – so I just have to hit send. I’ve also got gmail setup to automatically default to “Reply-All”, meaning that my account is again cc’d, and again shunted into Waiting, where the cycle continues.
The upshot of this is that I can reply to emails as quickly as I like because they never have to sit in my inbox; I know they won’t get lost on the other end because I’ll automatically follow up with them at the start of the next week.
This changes a lot of things – I’m quick to reply to emails, because it means the other person is now responsible for moving things forward. I’m much more comfortable reaching out to people because I know the email won’t get lost, and I get a hell of a lot more results because I’m consistent in following up with people. And finally, any spare time I have throughout the day can very conveniently be spent sending one-liner, 5-minute emails that don’t require long-winded answers. This means that when I DO sit down to batch my emails I can actually spend the time required to be politic and thoughtful and to do any research required.
The result is that I hit inbox zero quickly and often, and more importantly, don’t find it stressful to do so. If you do the above I’ll bet you do the same.
* Alternately, only reply to them via text message until they get the hint.
March 21, 2012 – Note:
For extra ninja power, I went back and noted down the Gmail Labs I use:
Background Send
Canned Responses
Create a Document
Default ‘Reply to all’
Google Voice player in mail
Message Sneak Peek
Send & Archive
Sender Time Zone
Undo Send
Title Tweaks – Changes order of elements in the browser title bar to see if a new mail has arrived even if Gmail window is minimized.
Finally, enable, learn, and use HOTKEYS!! They’re LOADS more efficient, especially when batching.
- Josh
I live in New York and consider it a big city, but after visiting Mumbai I’ll never see it the same way again. The same energy and optimism I saw everywhere else in India was more than pervasive here, except backed with major financial resources and a huge urban population.
The members of YPO Mumbai echoed this; all of the business leaders I met were eager to learn more and grow their businesses outside the narrow confines of what the established silos dictated. I hope to get back soon!!
One YPO member told me that Punjab was like India’s version of Detroit in the 1920′s; the seat of heavy industry, it’s growing fast. But more important to me was the open-mindedness and acumen of the people; one fellow who manufactured nuts and bolts grilled me at length about the viability of VPNs vs. local encryption for the computers used in his manufacturing process – and this only moments after he’d learned what a VPN was.
Punjab may not have the financial backing of Mumbai, or the tech savvy of Bangalore, but it more than makes up for it with can-do attitude of its inhabitants. It was exciting to see.
Bangalore is often called the Silicon Valley of India, and now I know why. An old friend of mine (who started Hummaa.com, a music sharing site) happened to be living in the same building as a load of other tech entrepreneurs (FlipKart.com, the Amazon.com of India, is one example).
Pair the experience of getting down-and-dirty into some exciting new tech models over curry and beer with speaking to the powerhouses of industry at the best hotel in town the next day and I couldn’t help but come away impressed. India is ready to blow up on the world stage, and I’ve no doubt that small-scale startups are going to lead the way.
I’d never been to South America before, and this was a great way to get introduced. The entrepreneurial marketplace in Venezuela is ready to pop, and if legislative hurdles get out of the way I think we’ll see some amazing new technology platforms emerging – they certainly have the resources and the will!!
Talk about kindred spirits!! The guys at Smart People Podcasts were a blast to talk to – motivated, savvy, and full of interesting insights. This is the kind of conversation I look to have over dinner whenever possible; being able to have it recorded was even more fun. 
My wife and I developed a system to analyze our relationship with our possessions by sorting through everything we owned based on both emotional and rational utility. It has made an *enormous* difference in how we buy, use, and replace physical goods, and (we think) hugely improved our quality of life by getting rid of anything that doesn’t improve it.
We explain it all in the video below of a talk we gave at a NY Quantified Self Show a& Tell. Hulda also talks about another system she made for buying clothes based on seasonal usefulness, care-requirements, and compatibility with her other clothes.
Hulda and Josh Klein from seth ludman on Vimeo.
I was lucky enough to get to speak on WBLQ radio, heard up and down the eastern US seaboard. What made it a real treat was talking with CJ, the host, who is as excited about changing the world as I am. Our 15 minute pre-call before the show lasted more than an hour, and the bit that we eventually got on the radio was only a snippet, but it was fun to revisit the topic of crows again – especially with someone who was as curious about them as I am.
Listen to it here.
Here’s how I’ve been billed at conferences like:
And here are some nice things people have said after my talks:
“I hack everything now. When I have an assignment, I think to myself ‘how can I hack this?’. … It [the concept of hacking] has changed my life. Now when I do anything I ask myself – how can I hack this?”
“Josh is a smart, captivating speaker who offers more than his thoughts on technology – he offers real accounts of his lived experiences hacking computers, cellphones, and even crows.”
“Josh Klein will be one of the most exciting cultural players to watch in the coming decade; his personal fluidity between disciplines and movement of ideas across worlds both real and virtual, technological and creative, allows him to be a guide for those of us who are interested in being the architects of our own identity.”
“My brain is still splattered against the wall from this morning.”
“too often, when i’m at a restaurant and asked if i would like some dessert, i feel like i’m being taken for a ride, tempted to increase my bill for no perceptible reason other than the fact that my senses are pre-disposed to consume and therefore need sugar. but there is only one piece of sweetness that i would pay for on the diminutive dessert menu, and that is joshua klein’s brain.”