Category Archives: HubSpot

Thank you Google

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I spend a lot of my day, most probably, on email.  I spend more time consuming, thinking about, replying to, or acting as a result of email than I do with my sons (2 and 5).  I spend more time on email than I do awake with my wife in the same room.  I probably spend more time on email than I do sleeping.  I definitely do not sleep enough …

So Google, the company that is pioneering driverless cars, the fountain of youth, and “secure” internet searches did something amazing today, the took a really, really long time to deliver much of my email.  Their coverage of the event has an Googley quantity of stats and numbers to tossed in.  I guess those are supposed to make me feel like “wow, these folks really take this seriously.  After all, they’ve done some basic math to understand how many of their customers were impacted and math is, like, hard.  Right?”

The thing is Google.  I’m cool with this.  It’s ok.  I’m actually not mad at you at all … seriously.

Today you showed me just how terrible I am at email.  You showed me just how disruptive Gmail is to my day, to my productivity, to happiness at work.  The fact that it takes me until late at night to mostly get through my daily load (~300) and it’s only getting worse.

But today for the bulk of my workday, I was getting only about 50% of the messages folks were sending my way and it was glorious!  Guess what? I actually got to finish some things I started.  I actually got to help people when they needed my help.  The slower rate of incoming email actually had me checking less, and spending more time on tasks.

I know this is nothing new.  There are folks all over these here green internets waxing poetic about how they regained the spring in their step just by backing away from email more and for longer periods of time.  But I never thought this would work for me.  I’ve always prided myself on going above and beyond to get back to folks as quick as a can with as thorough an answer as possible.

It wasn’t all smiles and happiness though as I got about 50 really not-awesome emails whilst I was driving home and here I am at 1am with some still unread.  Maybe tomorrow Gmail will fail a bit harder so I can catchup.

My awesome shirt

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Last Wednesday I wore a new shirt to work.  This might not seem like a big deal to most people, but for me, it was.  You see, this shirt that I speak of, wasn’t a t-shirt and actually had a collar and buttons.  Ok, to be totally honest, while it did have a few buttons, the primary fastening duties were  handled by snaps.  Yes snaps … that awesome.

Despite the awesome that was this shirt and the event of it’s unveiling, the truly awesome part of the day was that that night, while sitting in the old television room* at home with my wife, I happened upon the news that there was a new video on the excellent Dev & Design Blog at work: Keeping Busy During The Winter.  After watching and like it so, I showed the video to my aforementioned wife.

“Wait, this is from today.” she uttered with more than a little surprise.  Yes, at 0:53 of the video, there I am, munching a yummy free pretzel at work while wearing my brand new shirt.  That awesome video went from shooting to the interwebs in hours and that is more awesome than my shirt.  Another example of HubSpot’s Product Team killing it.  Big props to the filmmaker @ssiskind.

* Yes, both the room (122 years) and television (8 years) are old.