General – Noah D. Arney

My Inbox Zero Method

Good Morning! I said I’d write a twitter thread about inbox zero, but it was kinda too long for one, so instead it’s a blog post. Here we go, I wrote this mostly as I worked on getting back to inbox zero yesterday.

I just got back from 4 days of vacation, and I had let everyone know I would be on vacation, so I didn’t get as many emails as normal (and outlook tells other people in your org that you’re on vacation before they send you an email). Thankfully I only had around 200 emails to go through.

I did hit inbox zero before I left for vacation, that lasted about 5 minutes. But I didn’t want to be checking my email constantly. I did checked it twice to make sure nothing urgent came in, and I responded to the one super urgent email I had.

So, here’s how I got back to inbox zero.

Ground Rules

the inbox is a to-do list, but not the only to-do list
you don’t need to be on as many listservs as you think, and if there’s a daily, or better weekly, digest for it you should be using that
if you’ve dealt with an email it gets filed
dealt with means that you have no current actions for it
if you’re waiting on a response via email it’s dealt with
if you added it to your formal to-do list it’s dealt with
nested folders are your friend
only have folders you use a lot

Testing out Gutenberg Editor

So I’m giving the new Gutenberg editor a shot. I do a lot of text heavy research posts on my other blog, even though this one is basically shut down for now. I just haven’t had much to say on it.

So I figured I’d use this blog to test the editor before trying to use it on my main blog.
Citation needed?

Thoughts on the Syrian Refugee Crisis

I thought I’d take a look at the countries who are hosting the most Syrian Refugees. So with a quick skim of news reports and Wikipedia I have this.

These are the countries that have brought in the most Syrian refugees by percentage of their population:
Lebanon (22%)
Jordan (10%)
Macedonia (10%)
Serbia (4%)
Greece (4%)
Turkey (4%)
Kuwait (2%)
Qatar (2%)
Croatia (1.5%)
Sweden (1%)
UAE (1%)

The honorable mentions are:
Germany (almost 500,000)
Egypt (130,000)
and surprisingly
Saudi Arabia (75,000)

Remember that the next time someone says that the middle eastern countries aren’t pulling their weight. Saudi Arabia has even brought in more than three times more refugees than Canada’s 25,000 (four times if you’re determining it as a percentage of population).

And the US? 3000 refugees. That’s lower than any other developed country except for Japan (refusing to take any), Israel (refusing to take any), China (refusing to take any), India (they’ve taken in about 50) Czech Republic (holding the few they have in prisons and under investigation for human rights violations), & Finland (though they’ve accepted 20 times more refugees by percentage of population than the US).

Think about that a bit.

Remembering Suzanne

April 4th 2007 Suzanne Klerks passed away. I met her in 2002 when she taught my first year writing course at UCFV. Near the end of the semester I asked for a one day extension on a paper. She responded by giving me a copy of the Little Brown Handbook and telling me I could have a week as long as there wasn’t a single comma splice in the entire paper, a problem I’d been having all semester. I point to that as the pivotal moment in my University experience.

Her guidance over the next few years was key to my progression. It was her who planted the idea of me working in Higher Education, though she originally was encouraging me to look into teaching in Higher Ed. It was her influence that led me to consider my career not as a teacher, but as an educator, something that has led me from high school teaching into Student Affairs with no regrets.