He told me that he asks people to follow a few simple rules when sending him email. These seem obvious, but Im amazed at how many people don’t know them.

To: Adding an email address to the To field implies you want the person to take action. Either they owe you a response, or they need to act on some instruction in the email.

CC: Implies that the email is for information only. No action is necessary

BCC: Best used for large lists. If you’re sending to a lot of people, don’t have 50 people in the CC list. Invariably someone will click “reply all” and send uninteresting information to everyone!

Additionally, if forwarding a message where there is only one person in the “To:” field, you can modify the subject line to say “NRN” at the beginning. This tells the recipient there is “No Response Necessary”.

As email volume increases day by day, simple methods can help us stay sane.

Send these helpful tips to the worst offenders you know.

• Brad Pitt, Fight Club
• 300 workout

Unless you want to look like the incredible hulk, the key (as you will see in the previous two workouts is high intensity, high heart rate, lots of exercises and lots of reps. I guarantee that if you do these exercises, your positivity and your ability to focus on your startup will increase ten-fold (or your money back).

…if someone’s friend becomes obese, that person’s chances of becoming obese increase by more than half.

Siblings and spouses also have an influence, although a reduced one — people whose siblings became obese were themselves 40 percent more likely to grow obese, while people whose spouses became obese were 37 percent more likely to.

To me it makes sense. We mirror ourselves on what we see in our friends. Let’s take that a little further:

• Lazy friends make you lazier?
• Rich friends make you richer?
• Smart friends make you smarter?

So, here’s my recommendation:
Surround yourself with the people you want to be most like

Im lucky that I’m involved with BetaHouse, my co-working space. Being around smart, talented entrepreneurs has opened my eyes to opportunities.

In the past, when I spent time with my friend Kristian, I would get in better shape because he would invite me to go running.

The people with whom you surround yourself can have a positive or negative impact on your life. If they are having a negative impact, get rid of them.

Think on your developers wavelength. Read Slashdot. Make sure to check out the comments. You’ll start to learn how geeks communicate. Make small talk with developers about the cool things you learn.

Earn your geek stripes on the command line. If you’ve got a mac, great! Just fire up Terminal, and do a search for commands to try on google. Otherwise, get even geekier. Download Vmware and install linux!

For the more adventurous, set up your own development server running linux, subversion, trac, RoR. That’s what I’ve been doing over the past few days.

Shed your old skin. Be a bizveloper!

I included a sign up box in the top right, popular posts in a large footer at the bottom and a sign up box at the bottom again. I also made a few other changes to the theme. It’s important to me that I have a good looking and functional site.

Im not ashamed to say that I used Ramit Sethi’s I will teach you to be rich as inspiration for some of the other changes.

Any other recommendations?

A couple of Scott Adams’ tips are below, but I recommend you check out his post for the full whack:

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.

Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.

Im trying to be a better writer! Cheers to self-improvement.