How to Declare E-mail Bankruptcy

"Why is my email broken?" was the title of a blog post today by my friend, Ernie the Attorney. He begins, "Almost everyone I know who uses email extensively for work is overwhelmed by email....Some people declare 'email bankruptcy,' which means that they delete all the emails in their inbox and then start from scratch.  And these are the optimists!"

Today, I'm going to give you the step by step instructions on how to declare e-mail bankruptcy in a more positive and less drastic way. Let's call it an E-mail Chapter 13 Reorganization instead of a "straight bankruptcy."

Let's restate the problem first. It is important for all of us to recognize that we are essentially powerless over e-mail. Yes, for most lawyers, it is and will remain a problem. The reason is simple. We could probably deal with processing the e-mail we receive if all we had to do was read it and then delete it or file it. But much e-mail comes with a task-- an assignment, even if the only task is replying to the e-mail. People e-mail us trying to get us to do all sorts of things from important work assignments to watch funny YouTube videos to meeting after work for a beer. You cannot do it all! You have to triage.

But today we will discuss how to do a reasonable e-mail bankruptcy. This isn't for those of you who are a little behind in your reading. This is for those of you who have over10,000 e-mails in your inbox, those who are receiving threats from the IT Department that they will delete them for you if you cannot handle it and those who are being blamed by everyone in the office when Outlook crashes or the system is just slow.

This is not a good system for filing e-mails. But it will clear out your inbox and it is something lawyers can live with because we all have the fear of deleting that critically important e-mail. The solution requires either Adobe Acrobat (not the free Reader) or Nuance's PDF Converter Pro. The details below are for Microsoft Outlook.

Depending on your backlog and personal level of paranoia, this could take a hour hour or two.

1. Note the number of e-mails in your inbox, so you can feel good about your accomplishment when you stop. Look at the oldest e-mail to see the month and year.
2. Right click on Mailbox at the top of your Mail Folders. Select New Folder and name if for the month and year of your oldest e-mails (e.g. 2007 February or February 2007)
3. Go to the bottom of your inbox and select that oldest e-mail. Then scroll up until the last e-mail of that month. While holding down the Shift key, click on that e-mail. You should now have selected all of the e-mails in the oldest month of e-mail in your inbox.
4. Move these e-mails to your new February 2007 folder. You can either drag and drop and right click on the selected list and move all of the e-mails there.
5. Now that all of your February 2007 e-mails are in one folder, here is your chance to scroll through and see if there are any important client e-mails that need to be filed elsewhere. Note: Be careful with your time here or you will kill the whole project. You can find them later if you need to do so.
6. Now create a New folder on your network somewhere on a drive that is backed up regularly. Call it Archived E-mail.
7. Here's the good part. Now click on the Adobe icon at the top of your e-mail client and create one single PDF from all of the e-mails in that folder in one easy step. This may take a while to process, but this one step can combine hundreds (or thousands) of e-mails into one single PDF file. You can glance at this PDF to see how nicely organized they are within this file.
8. Now delete your February 2007 folder.
9. Create a March 2007 folder and repeat the process. You can decide how far to take this. But your inbox will certainly have a lot less in it as you do this and the IT department will be happy.
10. If it happens that you actually do need to see or print an e-mail that you have archived through this process and you know the date you can open the correct folder and look for it. Otherwise you can use Adobe's search function or some other desktop search tool to do full text searches of your Archived E-mail folder to locate e-mails.

The next step is the hardest. You need to come up with an improved plan to review, delete and file e-mails so you don't have to file bankruptcy again. But if not, you now know how to mass-archive.

A Bucketload of Technology News and Tips

Every now and then you get backed up. In my world right now, it is having too many things you would like to blog about when I have three or four major papers due in the next few days. My friend Dennis Kennedy dealt with that problem by starting a Dennis Kennedy Microblog. Well, I'm not ready to go there yet. But today I am going to try a microblogging exercise as I clean out my "to blog about" box and also pass along several interesting things that I learned about today. So hang on for today's tech news and tips with a load of links for you to follow, if you desire.

Lifehacker's Exhaustive Guide to Saving Your Smartphone's Battery

Ben Stevens gives us 20 Tips for More Efficient Google Searches

Oh, boy. iPhone users will soon be able to make free calls with Skype

Google Blog: Quickly View Formatted PDF's in Your Search Results (like the IRS online forms)

Technology Enables New Work-Life Norms

YouLaw: If Pixar Created a Law Firm Video

Why Companies Are Switching From BlackBerry To iPhone

ABA TECHSHOW Blog: 5 Great Feature Enhancements to Expect in PowerPoint 2010

Larry Bodine's Checklist for Law Firm Associates

Dan Pinnington: Lawyers as Targets of Fraud: The Common Misconceptions

Ethics of Metadata Comparison Chart Updated to Include Vermont

150 attend OBA Tech Fair & TECHSHOW Roadshow

We had a great time at the OBA Tech Fair this week. Thanks to Tom Mighell, Debbie Foster and Adriana Linares for taking the time to come teach our members. I have gotten lots of great feedback. And for those of you who didn't attend, from Oklahoma or anywhere else, please consider attending ABA TECHSHOW 2010 March 25-27, 2010 in Chicago.

ABA TECHSHOW Road Show Comes to Oklahoma

On September 24, 2009, the Oklahoma Bar Association is providing a Technology Fair for its members, featuring the ABA TECHSHOW Road Show. We are very excited to have a host of experts who will be joining me speaking to our members, including Debbie Foster (chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2010), Tom Mighell and Adriana Linares.

We have a great lineup of educational presentations and vendor presentations. We are also going to help our members build profiles on our social networking service, Oklahoma Bar Circle, even taking a picture for then to post on their profile.

We plan on having a great day. Thanks to our speakers for participating. This is a great time to remind everyone to mark the date for ABA TECHSHOW 2010 on their calendar. It will be be March 25-27, 2010 at the Chicago Hilton.

More on E-mail Management Tips for Lawyers

A lot of people seem to be considering e-mail management issues. Could it be because we are all looking at crowded inboxes? Here is a post by Allison Shields with her E-mail Management Tips for Lawyers.

Microsoft Word 2007 - Great Shortcut for Pasting Text into Documents

If you ever use Paste Special in Microsoft Word 2007, you may really love this tip.

We lawyers tend to use the “Paste Special–Unformatted Text” option often. When you copy text from Westlaw or some other online legal research tool, you use paste special to paste just the text into your document and avoid have different fonts or inadvertently hypertexted case names.

One of the improvements of Microsoft Office 2007 was to have a big Paste Button under the Office Button with a downward pointing arrow under it that lets you access Paste Special easily. Even better is to add Paste Special to the Quick Access Toolbar or use the Keyboard combination Alt + Ctrl + V to launch it.

But then you still need to go through the dialog box to click Unformatted Text and OK. Today you will learn to set up a new keystroke combination to paste unformatted text from your clipboard into a document in one action. And, since this is over 90% of my usage of Paste Special, I assigned the keystroke Alt + Ctrl + V to do this. I’ll just click the button on the Quick Access Toolbar if I need to paste special some other way.

I found these instructions in Smart Computing magazine. Even without the editors granting me free reprint rights, I’m happy to note that I love Smart Computing magazine. The September 2009 Edition where I found this tip focused on mastering your browser with lots of great info, but it also included how to set up Windows Home Server by yourself, performance enhancements for the Mac, home decoration websites and many other features. Subscribers get access to online archives of past issues of the magazine together with some sister publications.

The following is © 2009 Smart Computing and reprinted here with permission. All other rights reserved.

Paste Using A Macro

By creating a macro, you can paste unformatted text using a simple key combination instead of going through a dialog box. Although this requires opening the Visual Basic Editor, you don’t need to know Visual Basic to perform this task. We will give you the simple code to do it.

Go to the View tab and click the Macros button (not the arrow) in the Macro group. In the Name box in the Macros dialog box, type PasteSpecial (do not put a space between the words Paste and Special) and press ENTER. The Microsoft Visual Basic editor opens. Delete all of the text in the code editor and paste or type the text included between the blue lines below. (If copy/paste doesn’t work, try typing it instead.)

 ________________

Sub PasteSpecial ()

Selection. PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText

End Sub

_________________

(Blogger’s note: An image of the macro text accompanies this article, but you cannot copy from it.)

Once you’ve added that text to Visual Basic Editor, click File and Save Normal and close the Editor. You now have a macro that will paste unformatted text into a Word document. Next, you need to assign that macro to a key combination.

Click the Office button and choose Word Options. Click Customize on the left and then click the Customize button next to the words Keyboard Shortcuts. In the Categories area on the left, choose Macros. Select the PasteSpecial macro on the right. Click in the Press New Shortcut Key area. Choose a combination, such as ALT-CTRL-P. (Make sure not to choose a key combination that you already use often.) Simply press those keys to create the new command. Click Assign, Close, and OK.

Try the macro by copying some formatted text. Click in the Word document where you want to insert the text and press the key combination you assigned (such as ALT-CTRL-P). The unformatted text is copied into the document.

Having the option to quickly paste unformatted text into a document makes performing a fundamental operation in Word that much easier.

Tips on Using Outlook Tasks to Clear Your Inbox

I returned from the ABA Annual Meeting resolved to try to make better use of Outlook Tasks to improve my life. A tip about Task due dates from Michael Linenberger, author of Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook, is a part of that strategy. So far the results are mixed, but I haven't bought the book yet.

I have a hard time writing about e-mail management because I don't feel I have a handle on it, but most people tell me they don't either. I should note I use Outlook 2007, which is much improved over Outlook 2003. With Outlook 2003 you have to customize the view to see your task list when you view your inbox.

As Mr. Linenberger noted, your Outlook inbox should be like the inbox on your desk in the pre-digital world. It is where people send you memos, requests and assignments. You wouldn't let that one fill up several hundred deep as you might miss something important. So why do our inboxes get so clogged? Simple. Many e-mails require your action. It may be you need to respond. Or it may be a project, an assignment, a great opportunity, a or any number of things. But if it was just reading or deleting e-mail, we could probably keep up with that. But, no, it is stuff to do! To wit, it is a task.

So if an e-mail only needs a short reply or if you can forward it to someone else who then has to do the task, it is easy to do right then. But so many of these require time for research, reflection, contemplation, a decision or other "processing" that you cannot do right now. So the natural tendancy is to leave it in your inbox, so you do not forget about it.

Well, of course that is totally bogus, right? If your e-mail is anything like mine it will take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or so for the new incoming e-mails to shove that one down so it is no longer visible on your monitor. Then it becomes part of the "out of sight, out of mind" group. Hopefully you will remember or scroll down and be reminded, but who knows?

So if an e-mail is being retained because it is really a task, save it as a task! Drag it from the inbox to Tasks on the lower left hand corner of display in Outlook 2007. A new Task appears with the subject line and contents of the e-mail. Then do three quick things: edit the subject line to whatever it is you need to do, give it today's date and determine what the due date should be. It there is a hard due date, add it here. It you need to start on it several days in advance, then give that date as the due date and chance the task(subject) line to "do X by Y date."

But Mr. Linenberger states that for most of these e-mails dragged into tasks, set no due date! Now I recognize that goes against the way we lawyers work. If we don't docket, it we might drop the ball. But, here is what may be a liberating thought for you. We get more requests to do stuff in our inbox than we can possibily do. Most of us could spend all day responding to the requests that people toss into our inboxes and never get them all done. Surely you have noticed how many people can write a few short sentences in an e-mail with tasks that would take you hours to fully complete.

If the e-mail is an important assignment from a supervisor or on a client file, give it a due date on your task list. If it is an old classmate wanting you to search your records for contact info for these 20 people so she can contact them about the reunion, that's a "No Due Date" task. Bear with me.

The next step is to get that e-mail out of your inbox. If you made it a task, usually you can delete it. All of the text in that e-mail is now stored in your Tasks so it is fine to delete it from your inbox. Sometimes you have to file it, as when it is e-mail on a client file. If you aren't using another e-mail filing method (like practice management software) then drag it to an Outlook folder. You should have lots of these folders set up, including one for very major project you are working on. But you should also have general folders just so you can clear your inbox, like Friends, Recreation, Hold, Unsure, 2009 Junk or WhenBored. The point is to move everything out of your inbox, either to a task or file it in a folder.

OK, back to those No Due Date Tasks. You want to collapse the view so they are not in the way for your day-to-day work and then at least weekly check them to see if any now should be assigned a due date or now have passed and can be deleted. A good review time would be Monday, Friday or anytime you seem to be getting caught up on your tasks. The No Due Tasks serves as your triage system. You just hope no salvagable patients die. But it may be that you can't save them all.

So let's end this discussion with a couple of time management clichés.

OHIO- Only Handle it Once. After you open an e-mail, either delete it, file it, handle it quickly or make it a task. But don't just close it and leave it in the inbox to be handled later. Again you should feel free to make a folder that is named DontKnow or Unsure if you are having trouble filing all e-mails in folders.

The pros refer to the Four D's: Do, Delete, Delegate or Defer. But you cannot defer by leaving it to get buried in your inbox. So you Defer by either making it a task (which you will likely get to) or filing it in a folder, which you might get to at some time, but probably won't.

Do It Yourself Stock Certificates

Here's a tighwad technology tip for those of you who are paying for pre-packaged incoporation paperwork kits from vendors. Recently an Oklahoma Bar member inquired about an inexpensive way to create stock certificates in-house when a lawyer does an incorporation for a client. I did a quick search on the Microsoft website and found a really nice Word template for stock certificates that is available for free download. Since it is a Microsoft Word template, you (or someone in your office) should be able to easily customize it to change style or colors or add any language needed in your jurisdiction. Check it out.

ABA's Economic Recovery Resources

Hat's off to the ABA for posting its Economic Recovery Resources page. This is especially timely as I was reading on a blog yesterday a claim that the ABA wasn't doing much to help lawyers in troubled times. It has features on job searching, career transitioning, professional development, stress management and more. Considering my area of interest, I urge you to check out the practice management section. There are links to many really good articles on practice management. It is like the greatest hits on practice management culled from several ABA publications. Regular readers of my blog have seen several of these. But whether you are experiencing the downturn directly or not, an hour spent reading these articles will give you a lot of great ideas to improve your practice.

A Bounty of Law Practice Tips

I try to bring you lots of different tips to allow you to practice law better. But it is rare that I get to pass along so many tips at one time. That is because the March 2009 edition of Law Practice Magazine is once again a technology tips theme issue. 

The idea is to promote ABA TECHSHOW. The result is a great collection of tips on everything from e-discovery to paperless practice to expanding your web presence to easy online collaboration.

You really don't want to miss this issue of Law Practice Magazine. To make sure you don't miss future useful issues, you can either join the ABA Law Practice Management Section if you are an ABA member or subscribe to Law Practice magazine if you are not.

Meanwhile, enjoy the great content in the online version of  the magazine.