Challenge of the Month (July) & Retroperspective – Learn basic InkScape

Challenge:

This month challenge is to develop some basic skills in ImageMagick. I have seen Sergej Shafarenka creating beautiful Android Mockups with it and I figure I should spend some time learning it. Lets see how this goes, so far I was a little bit proud of my missing drawing skills.

Retroperspective:

Last month challenge was a big success. I reduced my email to zero pending emails within the month. I focused on both ends, reducing new incoming email and getting ride of existing. Here is what I did to reduce incoming emails:

1. De-registered from newsletters I never read.
2. Tried to reduce sending out emails as this create a lot of “backtraffic”.
3. Applied some spam protection to the vogella.de Google Group. People have now to answer a simple question to join the group. Amazing how many fail answering.

To reduce the existing stack I went every day fishing for emails to solve. This included deleting outdated emails but mostly adjusting vogella.de tutorials as I didn’t want to leave helpful feedback wasted. I learned that often it takes only a little bit more time to actually solve the issue rather then reading it briefly and deciding to do it later.

The other stack of email I had were “task emails” which I send to myself to remind me of something. I have converted them to tasks which I keep separate from my emails.

Having almost no open email feels good, I try to keep it this way. But trying to archive it every day feels a bit extreme. I will target to have no email longer then a week in the inbox.

Btw: A good video about email efficiency can be found here: Inbox Zero from Merlin Mann

[Update 04.07.2011] Ups, I mean to write InkScape instead of ImageMagick -> corrected.