Tips & Tricks – Adventures in Linux and KDE

Every once in a while people ask me about my email routine, so I thought I’d write about it here.

Everything I do starts with the philosophy that work and project email is a task queue. Therefore an email is a to-do list item someone else has assigned to me.

Ugh, how horrible! Better get that stuff done or rejected as soon as possible so I can move on to the stuff I want to do.

This means my target is inbox zero; achieving it means I got all my tasks done. Like everyone, I don’t always achieve it, but zero is the goal. How do I work towards it?

#0: Separate KDE and non-KDE emails

When I’m not in KDE mode, I want to be able to turn that stuff off in my own brain. To accomplish this, I have a home email account and a KDE email account. I adjust all my KDE accounts to only send email to my KDE address.

#1: Use an email client app

To manage multiple email accounts without going insane, I avoid webmail. In addition to not supporting multi-account workflows, it’s usually slow, lacking useful features, and has poor keyboard navigation.

I currently use Thunderbird, but I’m investigating moving to KDE’s KMail. Regardless, it has to be a desktop email client that offers mail rules.

#2: Automatic categorization (0 minutes)

I configure my email client with mail rules to automatically tag emails with colored labels according to what they are, and then mark them as read:

This results in almost all newly-arrived emails becoming colored and marked as read:

When I get a new kind of automated email that didn’t automatically receive a color label, I adjust the rules to match that new email so it gets categorized in the future, too.

#3: Manual categorization (1-3 minutes)

When I first open my email client in the morning, everything will be categorized except 5-15 emails sent by actual people. To see just these, I’ll filter the inbox by unread status, since all the auto-categorized colored emails got automatically marked as read.

Then it’s time to figure out what to do with them. For anything that needs a response or action today, I mark it as urgent by hitting the “1” key. For anything that needs a personal response in the next few days, I hit “9” to tag it as personal and it becomes green. And so on.

Any emails that don’t need a response get immediately deleted. I never miss them. It’s fast and painless. Put those emails out of their misery.

#4: Action all the urgent emails (5-15 minutes)

Urgent means urgent; first I’ll go through these one at a time, and action them somehow. This means one of the following:

If it’s from a person, write a reply and then delete the email.
If it’s from an automated system, open the link to the thing it’s about in a web browser and then delete the email.

The email always ends up deleted! For people like us emails are not historical records, they’re tasks. Do you need to remember what tasks you performed 8 years ago on Tuesday, May 11th? Of course not. Don’t be a digital hoarder; delete your emails. You won’t miss them.

At this point I may realize that I was overzealous in tagging something as urgent. That’s fine; I just re-tag it as something else, and then I’ll get to it later.

#5: Action all the merge request emails (5-10 minutes)

Since my day job is “quality assurance manager”, these are important. I’ll go through every automated email from invent.kde.org about merge requests for repos I’m subscribed to and action them somehow:

Open the link to the merge request in my web browser, and then delete the email.
Decide I don’t need to review this particular merge request, and just delete the email.

More deletion! I never keep these emails around; they’re temporal notifications of other people’s work. Nothing worth preserving.

#6: Action all the bug report emails (5-15 minutes)

My web browser is now filled up with tabs for merge requests to review. Now it’s time to do that for relevant bug reports. I follow the same process here: open the bug report in my web browser because it needs a comment or other action from me, and then delete the email — or else immediately delete the email because it’s not directly actionable. Delete, delete, delete. It’s the happiest word when it comes to email. Everyone hates emails; delete them! Show them you mean business.

#7: Do actual work

At this point I’ve spent between 15 and 40 minutes just on email, ugh. Time to do some actual work! So now I’ll spend the next several hours going through those tabs in my web browser, from left to right. First reviewing merge requests, then handling the relevant bug reports (closing, re-opening, replying to comments, changing metadata, marking as duplicate, CCing others, etc). During this step, I’ll also triage the day’s new bug reports.

Sometimes I’ll check email again while doing these, since more will be coming in. It’s easy to delete or action them individually.

After all these tabs are closed, hooray! I have some time to be proactive instead of reactive! Usually this amounts to 0-120 minutes a day during working hours. I try to spend this time on fixing small bugs I found throughout the day, opening and participating in discussion topics about important matters, working on the KDE HIG, and sometimes helping people out on http://www.discuss.kde.org or http://www.reddit.com/r/KDE.

#8: Action all the rest of the emails (10-25 minutes)

Towards the end of the day I’ll look at the emails marked as “Personal” and “KDE e.V./Akademy” and try to knock a few out. It’s okay if I’m too tired; these aren’t urgent and can wait until tomorrow. After a few days of sitting there, I’ll mark them as urgent.

And that’s pretty much it! This is just my workflow; it doesn’t need to be yours. But in case you want to try it, here are answers to some anticipated objections:

Ugh, that sounds like it takes forever!

It really doesn’t.

On a Monday maybe it takes more like 35 or 40 minutes since there are emails from the weekend to process. But on Tuesday through Friday, it’s closer to 15-20 minutes. Often 10 on Friday. Thanks to the automatic categorization, all of this is much faster than manually looking at every email one by one, and much more effective than getting depressed by hundreds of unread emails in the morning and ignoring them.

Deleting emails is too scary, what if I need them in the future?

You won’t.

But if that’s too scary or painful, set up your email account or client app to archive “deleted” messages in permanent storage rather than truly deleting them. Just keep in mind that you’ll eventually run out of storage space and have to deal with that problem in the future. Once it happens, consider it an opportunity to reconsider, asking yourself how many emails you actually did need to dig out of cold storage. I’m guessing the number will be very low, maybe even 0.

This might work for your workflow, but I get different types of emails!

Maybe so, but the general principle of automatically tagging (but not moving) emails applies to anyone. I firmly believe that anyone can benefit from this part. Make the software do the grunt work for you!

What do I do about all of those the old emails in my inbox? There are too many, I’ll never get through them!

If you’re one of those people who has 50,000 emails in your inbox, select all and delete. You won’t miss any of them.

Seriously. All of them. Every single one. Right now. Just do it.

How do I know this is fine?

Old notifications about things like bug reports or merge requests are worthless because they already happened. Delete.
Old mailing list conversations long since dried up or got actioned without your input. Delete.
Old at-the-time urgent emails from important people are no longer relevant, because the people who sent them long ago concluded that you’re unreliable and decided to not contact you again. Because that’s what happens when you let emails pile up: you’re being rude to all the people whose messages you’ve ignored. Feel sad, resolve to do better, then delete.

The good news is that you can get better at this anytime, but it’s almost impossible without making a clean break with a messy past. You’ll be looking at old stuff forever and won’t have time for new stuff.

I just get too much email, it’s impossible to keep up no matter what I do!

You need to unsubscribe from some things. Maybe a lot of things. Longtime contributors to any project will have accumulated years worth of subscriptions to sources of emails that are no longer relevant. Prune them!

This may trigger Fear Of Missing Out. Recognize that and fight against it. You can almost always reduce your email load by unsubscribing from this stuff:

Activity in Git repos for projects you no longer contribute to.
Bug reports for products you aren’t involved in or responsible for anymore.
Medium to high traffic mailing lists that are mostly or entirely irrelevant to your present interests and activities.
Almost all the spam from LinkedIn.
All the spam from online stores, newspapers, political campaigns. The “unsubscribe” button will work, don’t give up!

Resist the temptation to filter these emails into folders that you tell yourself you’ll remember to look at once in a while. You probably won’t, and by the time you do, everything in them won’t be actionable anymore — if it ever was in the first place. Unsubscribe and delete!

Today I’d like to share a tip about Okular, KDE’s flagship document reader app that’s eco-certified in Germany and used professionally around the world to secure documents.

Okular has robust support for digitally signing documents using a cryptographic signature, and it’s going to become even better soon. But what about signing documents using handwritten signatures, for those who live in places where digital signing hasn’t caught on yet?

Now, this is typically the point at which everyone who lives in a place where cryptographic signatures are common will chime in about how handwritten signatures are pointless and insecure. And they may be right, but it doesn’t matter because handwritten signatures are still used and considered valid in most of the world. And thankfully for people who live in any such part of the world, Okular turns out to support them pretty well.

The process involves some setup that you do once, and then after that’s done, the process of signing documents is suuuuuuuper simple. The time invested is worth it, trust me! So here’s how:

One-time setup process

First, you’ll need a piece of paper. Write your handwritten signature on it:

Next, scan it with SkanPage or take a picture of it with your phone and then transfer it to your computer using KDE Connect. You’ll end up with an image on your computer like this:

Open it up in Gwenview. Click the “Show Editing Tools” button in the toolbar to show the “Image Operations” sidebar. On this sidebar, click the “Crop” button and crop the image so that only the signature part is visible.

Then Click the “Adjust Colors” button:

Boost the contrast and brightness and reduce the gamma to make the background become completely white, and make the text look darker. But don’t make the text look completely 100% black; you want to preserve the appearance of real pen-strokes. It may take a bit of tweaking but keep at it! The end result will be something like this:

Now save this image somewhere on your computer using the PNG format–maybe in your Pictures or Documents folder. Don’t delete or move this image in the future!

Time to open up Okular. Go to the “Settings” menu and click “Configure Okular”. Then go to the “Annotations” page and click on the “Add” button:

A dialog window will appear. In this dialog window, give it the name “Insert Signature”, change the type to “Stamp”. Click on the little folder button next to the “Stamp Symbol” text field and navigate to the signature image file you just created:

If your file doesn’t appear in the “Open” dialog, that’s because you didn’t save it as a PNG. Re-save it as a PNG in Gwenview.

Click OK and you’re done!

Use it to sign a document

Now, the next time you have a document that needs signing, Open the annotations menu by clicking on the downward-pointing arrow next to the “Yellow Highlighter” toolbar button. Don’t click on the “Yellow Highlighter” text itself; click on the arrow next to it:

Now draw a box where you want the signature to be! There’s usually a “Date” field, so you can use the “Insert Text” annotation accessed from the same menu, and draw a similar box where you want the date to be. Enter the date when prompted.

Voila: