Taming the e-mail beast

I’m a casual follower of Tim Ferris, recreational lifestyle guru and author of The Four-Hour Workweek. I honestly think the guy has some solid ideas when it comes to reducing stress and just generally having a more fun and fulfilling life. A recent post on his blog regarding e-mail autoresponders caught my eye:

http://tinyurl.com/223lvc

Now, while I think the use of an autoresponder for vacation time when you will be genuinely unavailable by e-mail is appropriate, using it as an everyday tool seems over the top – spammy and unprofessional. Nonetheless, it is rare enough that I get an e-mail that honestly demands an immediate response that I’ve been seriously pondering ways to reduce the time I spend with it. Limiting my e-mail checking to two or three times a day seems perfectly reasonable. I’ve started today with two approaches:

  1. Previously I’ve had my e-mail client set up to automatically check e-mail every 30 minutes. Additionally, I have developed the very bad habit of checking mail manually every time I was bored! I called it the “Crackberry effect”. I’ve turned off the automatic feature, and I am training myself to stay away from that check e-mail button except for the appointed times. I’m not sure what those times will be yet – maybe 9, 1, and 4?
  2. I used to have e-mail automatically forward out of ANGEL so instructors could contact me through ANGEL should an emergency arise in a course that requires my attention. The unfortunate drawback to this was that I was getting a TON of e-mail that was not directed to me and that I was required to destroy. I’ve turned off this feature and direc

FCK editor and dokuwiki customization

Recently, I’ve been working with some possible open source solutions to the problem of how to allow our World Campus faculty the ability to easily access and edit content on their own. For a long time, the World Campus model has been somewhat inflexible, forcing faculty to meet deadlines months in advance in order for our instructional design staff to have time to convert this content (usually Word documents) to a Web-deliverable format. This division of labor, while perhaps seen by some as a form of job security, is ultimately inefficient, especially in light of today’s world of Web 2.0 and (easily) user-generated content.

On that note, I’ve taken my charge of finding a workable solution to our IT staff. We’ve been using dokuwiki in-house for a while now, and it’s really taken off as a suppository of information and documentation relevant to our staff. I had started looking at other wiki options (it had to be installed, not hosted), but was basically told, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Happily accepting the challenge that this limitation imposed, I started looking at all the different customizations that are available currently for dokuwiki. I ran across this one:

https://fosswiki.liip.ch/display/FCKW/Home

I have to say that I was wowed (check out the demo if you have the chance). Well we’ve done it and we’re getting closer to something workable for faculty. We knew that the wiki syntax would not go over big, and that a familiar, Word-like editing interface was a much more desirable option. Now we have it. My next step is going to be testing and tweaking a variety of interface customizations (style sheets).