Okay, so how was January? I started with a week completely off the internet, which coincided with a reading vacation. The fact is that I *love* to read. I averaged about a book a day for a week.

In general, when I wanted to hop onto Techmeme or Google News or Hacker News or Twitter/Nuzzel, instead I opened up my to-do list. As a result, I got a ton of stuff done in January. I quickly learned that if something important was happening, I’d hear about it from someone else.

The month off also gave me a chance to think about email dysfunction. I try hard to filter my inbox aggressively: I auto-archive almost all mailing lists, I don’t sign up for newsletters, and I filter out notifications from web services. Despite that, here’s what my inbox looked like when I got back:

- 258 email threads in my inbox (I had 20 when I left). It was a quiet week: the first week in January.
- 153 threads were non-Google email threads
- only 14 threads directly involved members of my team
- 8 threads that involved my manager or someone up my reporting chain
- 6 threads involving PR or legal in some way

As you can see, a huge issue for me is email threads that originate from outside Google–that’s over half the email threads in my inbox! I’m going to keep ramping down on responding to external emails, because replying to a private communication might help that person, but in the same amount of time I could make a webmaster video or write something more general that would help a lot more people. In lots of ways, email just isn’t scalable.

Added: Someone asked how I stay in touch enough to know what topics people care about if I’m not answering email. Sorry if I didn’t explain that clearly. I still see what people are discussing on SEO blogs and on the Google webmaster forum. I know the most recent trends in how blackhats try to spam Google–that’s my primary job, after all. I look through the questions and comments that people send me on Twitter. When I put out a call for webmaster video questions, I use Google Moderator so people can vote up questions that interest them. I keep an eye on what flavors of spam snake oil are being marketing to newbies on various forums (“I know Google pulled apart my last link network, but now try my Social Rank Tout Suite product! It will automate 100% of all of your link building!”). And lots of people at Google keep an eye open themselves and alert me if they see issues. So I feel like I have a pretty good feel for the pulse of what people are talking about; it’s just that I lack the time to have one-on-one conversations with every person that emails me.

Going away for a week is also a great way to spot emails you should have filtered but didn’t. For example, I had 8 automatic emails alerting me to various people taking vacation. People work hard at Google; I usually don’t need to know if you’re taking a day or two off. I found 4 other mailing lists I could auto-archive or unsubscribe to. In general, taking some time off provides a useful perspective on what’s waiting for you when you get back.

Is anyone else doing a 30 day challenge? What are you tackling?

This month I’m going to try to unplug from Twitter and most news. I’m also going to cut down on replying to email.

I’m going to start out with a week without internet. Harper Reed called it a “reading vacation” and I can’t wait to curl up with a few books.

Is there something you’ve always wanted to learn or try? Why not give it a shot for 30 days and see how it goes?

For November 2012, I mentioned to my wife that I was thinking of trying to get good sleep this month, like eight hours a night. My wife’s reaction could be categorized as skeptical at best. Which just makes me want to do it, of course.

So I’m setting a goal of eight hours of sleep a night for the next 30 days. We’ll see how it goes! If you want more context, here’s what I mean when I talk about 30 day challenges:

Why not think about something that sounds like fun, or that you’ve wanted to start, and give it a shot for the next 30 days?

At first, I thought of writing down the nice thing I did each day, like when I tracked my “month of kindness” challenge. But instead, I found myself adopting an attitude of trying to be more supportive throughout the day. My wife noticed the change in my behavior and remarked on it mid-month, so I guess I still had some room to be a better husband.

If you’re married, you should definitely consider this challenge. I was a little worried that when I revealed my challenge, my wife would feel like I’d been deceiving her or holding something back, but she was just happy that I’d been doing thoughtful things for her this month.

Okay, so what’s up for the month of October? I’m going a little more light-hearted. My wife got me a ukulele a couple months ago, and I’m going to try to play the ukulele each day. The ukulele is a great instrument because you can’t take yourself too seriously playing a ukulele. It’s a very low-pressure instrument.

I’ve never had much musical training, so I’m complete beginner. Don’t expect me to upload any YouTube videos or perform in public. I’m just having fun with it, which is exactly what you should do with a ukulele. Here’s a little video to get your day started:

If you want to join me in a 30 day challenge, just pick out something you’ve always wanted to try and give it a go!

My 30 day challenge this month (July 2012) is “Don’t send any emails after 9 p.m.” Email is the part of my life that is most out of control, so it’s worth trying a few approaches to tackle it. I thought about doing something like “Only send 25 emails a day” but time tracking is much easier. You can help by not sending me any emails this month.

By the way, if you’re wondering about this whole “30 day challenge” thing, you can watch my TED talk about it:

- In 2011, I paused my 30 day challenges to do a “six month challenge”: training to run a marathon. I ended up running the San Francisco marathon (while tweeting!) and a couple half-marathons. Pro tip: ramp up slowly to a marathon. I trained but then said “Hey, I can run 13 miles, so let’s just go for it!” and that was pretty foolish. But I’ve continued to run with some friends I met through USA Fit, and I did an 18 mile run this past Sunday!

- In October 2011, I went vegan with some friends at work. I thought this would be a crazy-hard challenge. But it turns out that Northern California (and especially at Google) is a pretty easy place to go vegan. I gained a lot of respect for people that choose to go vegan for different reasons.

- In November 2011, I needed an easy challenge, so I grew a moustache for Movember. That was a ton of fun, especially the part where a bunch of search folks, including Duane Forrester from Bing, raised almost $20,000 for charity.

- In December 2011, I decided to do an act of kindness or a good deed a day for 30 days. You can read all the different things I did my “act of kindness” Google+ post. It was a really rewarding month, although coming up with something to do every day was kind of stressful (I ended up falling back on giving money or tips more often than I wanted). I definitely noticed my mindset shift–I started looking for nice things to do. It was good to give myself permission to say “yes” to people more often, too. I liked my behavior more this month.

- In January 2012, I tried to draw something every day. My *goal* was that I would pay more attention to creativity and my right brain in 2012: drawing, learning guitar, singing lessons, etc. In *practice*, this was a disastrous failure. I lasted for about 6-7 days, then slipped while on vacation, and never got back into the habit. I want to be the sort of person who draws, but even with a 30 day challenge pushing me, I didn’t actually do it. I need to do some deep thinking about why I didn’t participate in this activity, which I thought I was enthusiastic about.

- In February 2012, I decided to exercise every day. I normally exercise most days, but this challenge upped my focus a lot and I did several “exercise and then bike into work” days. I’d been on the road for 4 out of six weeks between holidays, a vacation, and a trip to India and Korea. It made me really happy to get back into the habit of exercising, and I definitely felt better and saw results.

- In March 2012, I decided to avoid reading, watching, or hearing the news. This was motivated by a TED University talk from TED 2011. The speaker said that he had cut all news out of his daily life. He figured that if something important happened, a friend or taxi driver would mention it to him. The philosophy is simple: lots of news is sensationalized or depressing, you can’t do much about it anyway, and it takes up a fair amount of your mental cycles.

I’ve already learned a lot from my “no news” challenge. I learned that I’m a literal news junkie. Most of the sites I surf for fun (Techmeme, Google News, Hacker News) are all news sites. My default radio station is the BBC World Service. At dinner my wife and I often watch The Daily Show. When I wait in line I frequently browsed news on my Galaxy Nexus. Heck, my favorite podcast for exercising is This Week in Google, which is a weekly breakdown of news about Google and the cloud. I’m not kidding when I say a huge fraction of my “entertainment” time was actually news consumption. And if news is your hobby, that’s fine, but it should be a deliberate choice, not something you back into.

I eventually had to construct a personal spectrum of what counted as news. Twitter stream? Lots of news there. Twitter mentions? Mostly news-free. Google+ stream? Some news at first, but I put newsy people in a circle and set their volume to zero for this month. Reddit? Mostly news free. WIRED magazine? I decided it was okay to read.

The first few days of going news-free were awful. I was unmoored without a constant stream of events to pay attention to. But within a few days, I started to relax and focus more. Without news to occupy me, large swaths of time of time have opened up to do other things. I’ve gotten a lot more stuff done in the last couple weeks. It’s curiously freeing to have no idea who won Super Tuesday or what company just bought what other company. When an occasional piece of news lands in front of me, I’m much more aware of my heart speeding up as I get wrapped up in that story.

It’s also interesting to see which “news” stories are reflected back to me second-hand. Evidently Snooki is pregnant and Rush Limbaugh did something that has people up in arms. It’s made me think a lot more about my information diet. We need better tools to distill the river of news–or more often, bread-and-circus factoids–down to the trickle of things that really matter.

I have no idea what I’ll do after my news-free challenge ends, but it’s definitely made me realize how much time and effort I was putting into hunting and gathering information, and how I used news as an unconscious way to spend time.

To keep myself honest, here I am, clean-shaven, with a today’s issue of USA TODAY on November 1st:

By the way: Kim Kardashian is getting divorced‽! I really thought they had a love for the ages.

This is going to be an extra-fun 30 day challenge because I’m joining up with Duane Forrester of Bing and we’re both raising money for the cause. I have to warn Duane though: he might not realize how fast my moustache grows. For example, here I am just an hour after I shaved clean:

That’s right Duane, I can grow a moustache in an hour, so look out! By the way, thanks to Mike Halvorsen for asking a timely question about Movember during our recent live Q&A on YouTube.

This should be quite a fun month:
- If you’re a woman (or a man who can’t or won’t grow a moustache), you can still help out the cause by donating to our team.
- Men, I hope you will grow a moustache this month. A great cause like Movember only comes around once a year–why not join us? All you have to do is not shave. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
- The Twitter tag is #seostache if you want to root us on. I hope to see some serious stache from fellow people of search!

1. Go skydiving. I was with a group of ~15 people in January and we realized that no one in the room had gone skydiving or run a marathon. Both sounded fun, so I made them goals for this year. I met some great folks at Foo Camp a couple weeks ago who had been skydiving, and this past weekend we went skydiving together:

It was a lot of fun; I’d recommend skydiving to anyone. You’re up high enough that a fear of heights doesn’t come into play… much. (If you live in the Bay Area, I went to Bay Area Skydiving in Byron, California and had a great experience.)

2. Run a marathon. This goal came from the same group in January where no one had run a marathon. I’ve been training for a couple months now and I’m up to nine miles on my long runs. Unless I’m injured, I think I’ll run a marathon this year. (By the way, USA FIT is a great organization in a bunch of U.S. cities where people get together to train for running a marathon.)

3. Get my email under control. This is a recent goal, but it might be the most important. Email is flawed in a lot of ways. Some wise people have referred to it as a “to-do list that anyone can add to.” It’s typically a poor use of time: you’re often talking to someone 1:1 when those cycles would be better spent working on something that will help a broader range of people or to realize a broader goal. Emails can take a long time to craft compared to other ways to communicate. Email is near-universal, but it lacks good ways for better processing or prioritizing (e.g. “show me the five least useful mailing lists” I get). Lots of email is sent to too many people or is just trying to find the right person to ask a question. Email also encourages us to pay attention to things that are urgent at the expense of things that are important.

Like most people in the tech industry, email has grown into monster for me in a lot of ways. I recently had a day without meetings, and I ended up spending the entire day replying to email, and still only took care of the email that I’d received that day. That’s just not sustainable–even a little more email would mean that I could never catch up–and that’s time that I’m not talking with my team, or thinking about new ways to improve search quality, or making videos or blog posts that can benefit a lot of people.

I’ve tried various email challenges before, e.g. not replying to outside emails for 30 days or not replying to emails after 10 p.m. I don’t know what my final solution to email will be, but this is a heads-up notice that I’m going to try a bunch of things until I find a better balance. I suspect that the final answer may be fairly radical, so if you’re hoping for an email reply from me, you should probably lower your expectations to zero. I’m going to try not replying to outside-Google emails for a while and then adjust things more over time.

Email is a big part of the problem, but I’ll probably have to say “no” more often as well. Please be patient with me while I try to recalibrate. I want to make sure that I spend my work time in the best way I can.

30 days of Being Thankful

I knew that January, February, and March would be crazy, including a bunch of stuff at work, traveling, plus several conferences. So I told myself it was okay to do only one 30 day challenge, and it was a pretty easy one. I decided to be thankful for one thing each day. I kept a list, so here are 30 things I’ve been thankful for recently:

- thankful for my wife, plus the fact that she’s a good cook.
- thankful for my family. No one’s crazy and we all love each other.
- thankful that I can afford to take time off with my wife this week for our 11 year anniversary
- thankful that my wife is funny and we laugh together
- thankful that an Android phone can be a powerful personal computer, and that Google Docs lets you edit a doc from Android.
- thankful for This Week in Google (TWiG) because they provide free techie podcasts that I listen to while I work out
- thankful for my cats, but especially for the furry orange one who likes to perch on me and sleep next to me.
- today I’m thankful for the other cat, the gray striped-y one who sometimes lounges on my legs and keeps me warm
- thankful for caffeine, which is helping me to work down my email backlog.
- thankful for my health. Glad to be over my whooping cough.
- thankful for an aisle seat on a plane, that the plane that landed on time, and fortuitously running into Googlers in the airport to share a cab with. But also thankful for beautiful snow in Washington D.C. that didn’t derail my travel plans.
- thankful for thoughtful discussions of how Google works and how to make it better
- thankful to be heading home from D.C.
- thankful for smart, effective, hard-working colleagues
- thankful for my bike
- thankful for exercise and my health. And for a long bath after an eight mile hike.
- thankful that my Aliph Jawbone Icon can be updated to A2DP, so I can listen to music on my Bluetooth earpiece with my Android phone
- thankful for sleep, but mainly because I haven’t gotten enough of it.
- thankful for the chance to vent with some smart people.
- thankful for good copy editing
- thankful for Data Liberation and my lockpick set.
- thankful for daffodils
- thankful for an empty locker room. It sounds silly, but it’s more fun to get dressed in an empty locker room than a crowded one.
- thankful that my best friend back in Kentucky keeps sending me cool stuff he’s writing for me to read
- thankful for Linux and Chrome: two great things that keep me productive and safe on the internet
- thankful to WIRED magazine for writing about topics I want to read about
- thankful for colleagues who come together to work on important things
- thankful to Kara Swisher for introducing me to Val Emmich’s song called “Get On With It,” which is great to work out to
- thankful for Daylight Savings Time so I can start biking into work again
- thankful to have had a fortunate life so far: I feel like I get to make a difference and be rewarded for it

I was looking back over the list and I realized that some of the things I’m thankful for are high-tech, but most aren’t. Which leads me to my next 30 day challenge…

30 days with no electricity

Okay, the stuff below was an April Fool’s joke. I’m still on the electricity!

I think sometimes we get caught up in the excitement of technology and the online world. We forget that there’s an entire world offline–a world of books, and visiting with people, and being active instead of sitting in a chair. So my next 30 day challenge, I’m going to turn off my internet connection and reconnect with the offline world. I’m turning off my cell phone and won’t answer any email. Instead, I’m going to visit with friends in person, catch up with family, and generally try to use as little technology as possible.

I’m even trying to minimize the electricity I’m using. For the next 30 days, I’m going to camp out in my backyard. This will be my home for the next 30 days:

I’ll still take showers indoors, since that doesn’t need electricity, but otherwise I’ll be getting up with the sun and going to bed when it gets dark. This will be a really difficult challenge, but I’m looking forward to it. I’m heading offline after I publish this blog post, but I’ll let you know what I learned in 30 days!