Currently, Amazon.com has a big competitive advantage compared to brick-and-mortar bookstores. In a word, that advantage is selection. But that is about to change.

I often hear people complain about how long it takes to get a response to e-mail. Sometimes, to be sure, it is because the person they are waiting on is inept. The simplest request gets lost in a sea of unprocessed e-mail.

Most of us don’t spend enough time thinking. We are so busy doing that we have, I fear, almost forgotten how to think. Yet it is our thinking, more than any other single activity, that influences our outcomes.

The use of e-mail in corporate culture is pervasive. I rarely get letters any more. Even phone calls are uncommon. But I get scores of e-mail messages every day. Yet, I am continually surprised at how people often misuse this medium. Therefore, I would like to humbly offer up 18 suggestions for better e-mail communication and etiquette:

I thought it was about time to overhaul my standard voice mail greetings. I’ve been following the same procedure for several years. I generally update my office phone message daily. I liked providing the current date to let callers know that I was checking my messages regularly. But that has proven to be more trouble than it’s worth.

I am reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. He’s only 29-years old, but is wise beyond his years. This is probably the best book I have read on productivity since Getting Things Done by David Allen.

The old adage, “so many books, so little time,” is more true now than ever.

There are probably as many different philosophies of creating an annual budget as there are companies. When I came to Thomas Nelson initially, the philosophy was the push-up, pull-down philosophy. Management would try to get the individual units to push up their revenues budget as high as they could and push down their expenses as low as they could go.

Inspirational leaders set the pace. Inspirational leaders believe in the future.

This morning I ran the Country Music Half Marathon.