Boomerang

Image via Wikipedia It’s already 11 AM, and you’re staring into the monitor with your eyes glazed over. There are still 21 messages in your inbox, and none of them are compelling. So instead, you decide to read a little bit of news and catch up on how the Red Sox did last night. Next thing you know, it’s lunchtime, and there are still 21 unread messages in your inbox. We’ve all been there, and that’s part...

We previously talked about a great way to measure how productively we’re working using a utility called RescueTime. But even when we know how effectively we’re working and have formulated a plan for how to improve, it’s still hard to execute. Distractions are insidious – it always feels harmless to spend just a few seconds or a minute on something else. But it’s easy to let a small amount of time browsing the web or playing a...

Baydin was featured in an analyst report today.  Not an April Fool’s joke 🙂 The analyst firm is ZapThink, and their focus has been on enterprise SOA and cloud computing initiatives.  They are now taking a deeper look at the startup ecosystem – both describing how startups can create value for enterprises and helping startups themselves figure out how to position themselves to get larger companies as customers and form...

When I need to write an e-mail where I need to get the content right (or want to start a blog post), I get very worried about making it come out right the first time.  I spend all the time I’m supposed to spend writing wordsmithing the first few sentences, and it takes forever to get anything done. One of the best ways I’ve found to get stuff written FAST is to close my eyes and dictate a first draft into the computer.  Since I’m...

Boomerang is great if you know you’re going to need to respond to a message later, and you aren’t sure what you want to say yet.  Sometimes, though, you already know exactly what you want to say, you just want to send it later. In that case, you want to go ahead and write the message and have Outlook worry about delivering it when you want it sent.  We have had several of our customers ask us to build a plug-in that will...

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. -Peter Drucker. Chris Sacca, a West Coast angel investor who I met at the Defrag conference, tweeted about a utility called RescueTime the other day. RescueTime is a hybrid desktop application-web service that monitors how you spend your time on the computer and generates reports and analytics for you.  You install the tracker on your computer, where it monitors and tracks what...

Image via Wikipedia Seth Godin blogged last week about a technique that he claims he’s been using for years to make a little bit easier for himself to respond to all of his e-mail. The idea is that you treat e-mail much like an SMS twitter message.  You limit the length of the response you’re going to make beforehand, so that it is easier to finish writing.  Since it’s a pain in the neck to count letters,...

Baydin quietly launched a new product today. We call it Boomerang, and it is a snooze button for your email.  It lets you take a message out of your inbox for a period of time, and then, when you are ready to follow up, it returns the message to your inbox and flags it and/or marks it unread.  Check it out here: http://www.baydin.com/boomerang Why Boomerang? Over the past few months, we spent a lot of time talking with...

When you’re writing managed add-ins for Office, it can be tough to figure out where Visual Studio is storing your settings file (*.dll.config) or any of the other files that it is generating when you Debug your program.  I’ve solved this problem about 6 times, and I don’t ever want to have to solve it again.  So here’s the easiest way to find out where your plugin is ACTUALLY being run from:...

Image by Kansir via Flickr As we continue to develop Baydin, I have been very surprised at how many people complain about “missing features” in Windows Search and the Outlook 2007 search bar, like the ability to search for messages from a specific person or to find only attachments.  As it turns out, Windows Search and Outlook Search include those features (and a bunch more), but Microsoft borrowed a page from Google and hid them...