So last week I took the plunge. I turned off automatic mail checking in Lotus Notes for my work email, uninstalled my mail notifier for my personal mail and kept my feed readers closed (Liferea for internal feeds behind the firewall and Google Reader for everything else). I made sure all my RSS feeds were split up into categories so I could process them more efficiently (blogs in priorities 1 to 4 plus some extra feeds separately such as comments on this blog or on my Flickr photos, twitter updates of interest etc. I also customized some of my feeds such as Twitter using Feed Rinse. This allowed me to filter the feed so that I only show updates from particular people, and only those that are @replies to me etc – I really don’t need to make sure I miss every single tweet from everyone I follow!

So now with this new setup in place I’m trying to only check my mail and feeds once in the morning, once in the afternoon and maybe once before I leave the office. If I happen to be at the computer in the evening or weekend then I can check my personal stuff if I feel the need. I certainly feel more in control and I haven’t seen a problem with it yet – if anyone expects an immediate reply to an email, they should contact me by phone or instant message! We’ll see how this goes…

For anyone that’s interested, I highly recommend watching Merlin’s recent MacWorld presentation on ‘Attention Sinks & Time Burglars‘. I’d also recommend any of his other presentations, particularly Inbox Zero.

I would have moved it to another server but apart expecting it to be solved quicker than that, typically it occurred while I’m investigating the best backup mechanisms for WordPress. Apparently any backup process would have been better than the one I used

One good thing did come out of it though – when working out the best way of redirecting domains etc I discovered a great service from EditDNS. They allow free nameserver management of your domain(s), including all sorts of things such as SRV records. Very handy so that’s a recommendation from me.

P.S. Apologies if you already received this entry – I had to enter it again as my database was overwritten. Reliable service huh?

I also thought while I’m at it I’d play around a bit more so I’ve setup a couple of subdomains, one for my little slug machine at home and playpen.garethj.com as a place for playing around with a few things (nothing useful to see here yet though).

My mail is now handled by Google Apps so I can have email addresses such as somecompany@garethj.com for any website/company I sign up to to see where spam might originate from. I might end up with problems as Roo did so I’ll probably end up manually add these company names to my filters and let the rest fall into the spam folder. Or see how Google manages it first – they might do alright!