Love him or hate him, productivity blogger Merlin Mann has come up with a great way to help keep yourself on track. The idea is to avoid the seductions of the web by stopping a moment to make sure that you're spending your time on what you really want to be spending it on.

In his blog post on the subject, Merlin describes opening folders full of bookmarks all in one go, which have the potential to suck up huge amounts of time. He therefore created a page on his site that asks him "Is this what you want to be doing right now?", and included it as the first bookmark in each of his folders of bookmarks.

While this is a great idea, if you don't operate the same way, opening complete folders of bookmarks all at once, this probably won't help you much. But what if you could set your browser to open this page by default every time you opened a blank new tab or new browser window?

With the NewTabURL extension for Firefox, you can do exactly that. Slick, and helpful.

With Twitter being all the rage these days, it was only a matter of time before a podcast would grow out of new Twitter friendships. And the time has apparently come, since You Look Nice Today is a podcast created by three friends that decided they enjoyed each other's senses of humor so much in their tweets that they ought to start recording their interactions for everyone else to hear.

You Look Nice Today describes itself as a "journal of emotional hygiene". Whatever that means.

The subject matter of You Look Nice Today meanders pretty erratically, but fortunately it's pretty consistently entertaining. Topics range from what each host uses to wash themselves in the shower, to the relative merits of each of the types of nuts in a can of mixed nuts.

The show is squarely aimed at adults (and probably primarily male adults), and It should be noted that despite the innocuous title, You Look Nice Today is decidedly not work-safe. It proudly sports an Explicit tag in iTunes, due to both subject matter and the odd forceful expletive.

The topics are certainly entertaining, but this podcast is really about the personalities. If you're familiar with the concept of "ratholes" from MacBreak Weekly (and how they can sometimes be the most entertaining part of the show), just consider You Look Nice Today as one huge rathole, and you'll be on the right track. Your hosts are @hotdogsladies, @lonelysandwich, and @scottsimpson. This is how they describe themselves in the credits of the show, by their Twitter names rather than their given names, ostensibly due to the fact that the show grew out of their Twitter friendships. Their real names, respectively, are Merlin Mann, Adam Lisagor, and (unsurprisingly) Scott Simpson.

For the sake of this article, we're going to assume that you understand the benefits of being a filer rather than a piler. If you'd like to get to an empty inbox, but are facing what seems to be an insurmountable pile, take heart; we've all been there. Even for people that are meticulous filers, there are times, such as returning from a trip, where the amount of email facing you seems impossible.

Sometimes when we get overly focused on the end goal we make our task seem impossible, and it doesn't need to be. There's a simple formula you can follow that will help you meet your goal of an empty inbox. If you decide to follow it, your inbox won't be empty today, or even tomorrow, but in a matter of days, most likely less than a week, it will.

It's called Inbox 0.5. The idea is to ensure that you get through at least half of the emails you are facing. Here's how it works:

It's day one, and you're looking at 700 emails staring you in the face first thing in the morning. It's your task to get down to 350 by the end of the day. It sounds hard, but here's the thing. Most of that email is bulk mail subscriptions and the like, or simply out of date. If you can group or sort based on email subject or thread, do so - it will help you dispose of a huge number of emails once you've caught up to date with the most recent one.

It seems like a lot (and it is), but you'll probably find that getting through the first 350 messages is the easiest batch you will face.

Previously in this series we discussed the user interface advancement of collapsing emails in the same thread together, and how that can help to deal with a high volume of incoming email. It's worth asking whether this is really a solution unto itself, or if it is maybe just a way to cope with a bigger problem, that of attention fragmentation.

Have you ever found yourself having multiple conversations with the same person (or group of people) at the same time? Most often this will happen in email; you find yourself quickly writing a reply to one thread, and as you send your reply you notice a new update to a different thread from the same correspondent. It also sometimes happens in instant messaging programs, or even social networking sites - and often all of these at the same time. Is this truly more efficient than speaking to people either face-to-face or over the phone? Is it even healthy?

The topic of email as it relates to health is top-of-mind this week, due to a very in-depth article published at the Huffington Post by Linda Stone, titled Just Breathe: Building the Case for Email Apnea, which was highlighted by Robert Scoble. Linda Stone, if you're not familiar with her name, has been an executive at both Apple and Microsoft, and was the person that coined the term "continuous partial attention". Continuous partial attention refers to the way in which we attempt to multi-task, but really end up only giving a fraction of our attention to any one task, project, or conversation. Linda argues that we end up accomplishing less, damaging relationships, and generally accomplishing the opposite of what we intended when we practice continuous partial attention.