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Filed under: Business, Features, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, Google, How-Tos

Five simple rules for keeping an empty inbox

If your email volume is anything like mine, it's totally insane. Thousands of messages constantly streaming in and, only a tiny fraction of those are messages you need to see.

Surprising then, that only a few years ago I was literally living inside Microsoft Outlook. Rigid folders, the nightmarish rules "wizard", and that annoying inbox chime that dings regardless of which folder your new distraction message ultimately wound up.

I completely believe that Gmail saved my life. Okay, that's pushing it. Gmail didn't save my life. What Gmail (and a little bit of GTD-inspired respect for my own time) did was save my attention span. Some careful filtering and a bit of common sense returned a half hour or more of uninterrupted concentration per day.

That's 2.5 hours a week, over 10 hours a month and more than one whole day per year.

So, how did I do it?

Read more →

Filed under: Windows, Productivity

How to ditch the desktop in Windows

Icon-free desktopDesktop icons are a pain to use--to get at them you have to stop what we're doing and minimize everything--so why do we keep using them? Hey, don't ask me. A blogger called AJ, though, has put together a handy tutorial for ditching desktop icons in Windows altogether and replacing them with less disruptive alternatives, namely a handy taskbar pop-up or extra toolbar. It's pretty straightforward and some of you might just say, "well, duh," but seeing that pristine desktop can be a breath of fresh air.

[Via Lifehacker]

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

View more Time Wasters

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