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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?

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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

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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