Update Released: Tag Your Documents

We’ve just released a really nifty update. As of approximately 7 and a half minutes ago, Home Document Manager supports tagging as a way of organizing your documents. As any of you who use Gmail, Evernote, Zoho etc will know – folders are good, tags are great, but folders + tags is the business! Any of you familiar with GTD’s action tags or Covey Roles will already be familiar with the power of tags.

What is a tag?

A tag can be anything you want it to be. You can create tags corresponding to your project, your workflow, or how you like to organise your tasks. Tags are hierarchical, and completely free form. The important difference between Tags and folder is that tags are not mutually exclusive. A document can be in only 1 folder, but can have any number of tags. The image on the left is just an example of how you could organise your tags.

You can browse your documents with each tag in much the same way as you do with folders. Just click on the tag.

When documents appear in the document list, any tags they have will be displayed underneath their icons (shown left). Using tags is a great way add a little GTD to your paperwork. It certainly saves having papers sitting round with post-it notes stuck on them.

This is very much the beginning of Home Document Manager’s affair with tagging. There are a lot of other tag-oriented features on the roadmap. It’s an important new feature, so your feedback is really valuable.

As usual, no action is required on your part to receive this update. Home Document Manager will update itself whenever an Internet connection is present.

Update Released: Office Document Support Added

I’ve just released an important update for Home Document Manager. We now have support for the most popular Microsoft Office document formats! Currently this is .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt and .pptx.

In order to read Office documents, Home Document Manager requires that you have Office installed on your machine. If you have Office 2003 installed, you will be able to import .doc, .xls and .ppt files, but you won’t be able to preview them within the app (preview wasn’t introduced until Office 2007). If you have Office 2007 installed, you’ll be able to import and preview the full range of Office docs.

Microsoft Word Support

Microsoft Excel Support

Microsoft PowerPoint Support

We’ve also added an option which allows Home Document Manager to use Adobe/Foxit PDF viewers inside the app to preview PDFs. You can enable this in the options.

Enabling 3rd Party PDF Support

3rd Party PDF Viewer

Any issues or suggestions, feel free to drop us a line.

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How To Go Dark Without Missing Urgent Email

Making email your servant rather than your master has become a crucial skill in the productivity stakes, especially in a web culture of being continually available to friends, followers, family, clients etc. by email, Twitter, Blackberry etc. Very occasionally, we need to be completely free of distractions in order to knuckle down, put the blinkers on and focus on a single task.

This always raises the question of what we do with our inbox? Do we ignore it? Let it accumulate a few dozen/hundred emails ready for our return? This often proves to be a distraction, a temptation to check.

Do we delete all emails on arrival? What if something urgent comes in?

GMail offers us a nice way out of the quandary. Depending on what you use a particular email address for, here’s one way of nicely going dark without missing important emails: (note, let’s assume our email address is bob@gmail.com)

Set an Out-of-Office reply. It’s important that the text in the reply is appropriate for your particular uses. There’s also an important aspect to the reply – the way to contact you with an urgent matter.

“Please note that due to an important commitment, I will be unavailable from Sunday 15th March to Tuesday 17th March inclusive. As such, your email message has not been delivered. To get in touch with me, please resend your email at any point from Wednesday 18th March onwards.

If your message is urgent, please resend it now to bob+urgent@gmail.com

Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Regards,

Bob”

Setting an out of office reply

A few of key points:

1. We’re making it clear that we’ve gone dark because of an important commitment, not because we’re going on a 3 day drinking binge in Amsterdam.
2. We’re giving specific dates that we will be out of contact for.
3. We’re making it clear that the message has not been delivered and should be resent at a later date if it’s important.
4. We’re offering a way for people to be pushy if something really is urgent. The fact that they are given this opportunity will dissuade folks from bugging you with every little thing, but people in real urgent need can contact you. The ‘+urgent’ part of the email address is a nifty feature, and will be delivered to you as normal.

Set up “tunnel vision” filter. Add a filter to your account so that any mail not addressed to bob+urgent@gmail.com is deleted.

Adding the filter

Delete it

This helps us stop the inbox count leaving zero unless there’s a a genuinely urgent message. All incoming emails will be deleted unless they’re sent to bob+urgent@gmail.com. When we’re back in contact, just remember to turn off the filter and Out-of-Office reply!

What do you do with your email when you’re trying to focus on a task? What could we do to improve this GMail hack?

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