Flint's Blog

Outlook's New Best Friend

I use Microsoft Outlook to manage most of my work life.  Since I get a ton of email, I have a rigorous discipline for staying organized - try not to read any email more than once, keep my Inbox down to a manageable number of items, move things to my task list if I have to follow up at a future date, etc.  Most importantly, I have a filing system so that every email worth saving is put into a folder to save in case I need to look at it in the future.  I've got customer folders, department folders, project folders.  I've got folders of folders.  I've got so many folders that I can't find anything.  Yikes, maybe my system isn't so good.

When I really need to find something that I've filed away, I used to use Outlook's built in Advanced Find tool, seen below.

This should be Exhibit 1 for the case of how to design a bad user interface.  I'm not a big Microsoft basher since I have a pretty good appreciation for how hard it is to develop good sofware. But this User Interface sucks.  And to make matters worse, this is not even the biggest problem.  I have a ton of saved things and the Advanced Find takes forever to run (well technically not forever but anything more than 30 seconds is forever in my view of computer response time). If Google can index the entire Web and have a search result in subsecond response time, then perhaps Microsoft picked the wrong search algorithm.

So last month I started using a new Outlook add-in called XOBNI (Inbox spelled backwards, pronounced ZOB-KNEE).

Now this is what a good interface should be.  This bar sits on the right of your Outlook window and can be collapsed away easily if you don't want to look at it.  Just type it in the top search bar and a few seconds later any emails that are stored in any folder that contain what you're searching on are returned.  Xobni doesn't index your deleted items which is a small gripe that they say will be addressed in the future.

There are a bunch of other features that might be good if I could get in the habit of using them but the search alone makes it invaluable.

Best news of all - it's free.  I'm not exactly sure what their business model is - maybe it's just get everybody using their tool and sell to Microsoft.  Well that's OK with me since they're saving me a bunch of time.

If you use Outlook, this is a no brainer add-in.

Planning a Business, Product, Idea, etc.

There was a great post recently at The Business of Software blog entitled Why you should burn your business plan.  The gist of the article is that it's not so much what is in your business plan, it's that sitting down to actually think out, draft, edit, and forecast is by itself a crucial exercise.  I couldn't agree more.

Writing in general is a painful exercise for me.  I don't particularly enjoy it, I make basic grammar errors all the time, and would prefer to just manage by feel.  However, anytime I'm faced with any type of significant decision - whether it's a new product, a new direction, a new management structure - I always try to get my thoughts on paper (not real paper of course).  It's not particularly fun but there's just something about writing it down that makes your brain think differently.

I spent a lot of time on the original business plan for Billtrust.  We were going to provide an outsourced billing solution for the QuickBooks marketplace.  Intuit had recently decided to become more open with a software developers kit and it seemed like perfect timing to provide a value added business service like outsourced billing.  That first business plan was so wrong it's comical.  However, that doesn't mean it was a waste of time.  I had set some milestones in the plan and within six months it became pretty obvious that the plan wasn't working and it was time to "re-plan" (re-plan is secret  code for you better come up with something else).  Fortunately for us our solution was fine, it was just that we were targeting the wrong type of customer and were able to recover.

Sometimes the writing is just for me.  Other times I circulate to my management team because I don't feel strongly about my conclusions or need additional input.  If I'm going to distribute externally, I always have my Mom do some editing for me.

No matter how much you dislike the process, spend the time and write it down.  No one ever says "Darn, what a waste of time collecting my thoughts and putting them on paper."