Check this out y'all:

A NYT article says that Americans waste $650 BILLION dollars over-checking their email obsessively. BILLION. Not Millions. Not Thousands. BILLIONS. Crazier? We waste $650 BILLION dollars trying to get back into the groove of work after checking our email obsessively.

Why do we do it? Are we that afraid of missing something?

Some of us here can say that we too check our email obsessively. Even going so far as to click on the Gmail logo over and over to refresh the page. Does this sound familiar to you? If so, you're apparently not alone.

How do we stop? How do we combat this problem? Do we love email that much? We hear people complaining all of the time about information and email overload, so maybe we're trying to get a jump on controlling it before it controls us?

Many questions and not a lot of answers, but if these numbers from the NYT are true, oh boy do we have to change some things.

First things first.

Stop. Look, and Listen.

• Stop checking your email so often
• Look and notice that Gmail already refreshes itself
• Listen for emails to come in automatically via POP or IMAP
  

You won't miss something.

What's your favorite way to catch email? We find that checking email on the mobile slows us down a bit. Unless you get too obsessed with that...can you say Crackberry?

Lets hear your thoughts in the comments.

[via silicon valley insider]

Time is money. And every time you have to sit down with your boss, coworkers, and some random consultant thinking what a big waste of time this meeting is, you could also argue that it's a waste of money.

Meeting Miser helps you figure out just how much money. The little web app works by pulling in average salaries for various job types and determining what their time is worth. So next time you sit down at a meeting, just open your laptop and pop in the job titles of all the attendees. Click the start button and watch the dollars rack up.

Somehow we doubt you'll actually show the total to your boss as proof that you should be allowed to skip the next meeting. But at least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that your boring meeting has been scientifically shown to be a complete and utter waste.

[via New York Times Bits Blog]

After a brief absence, it looks like Google has reinstated the time operator in its search engine. In other words, you can search for "time kingston," or "time in kingston" and find out what time it is in Kingston, Jamaica.

Previously, you'd get a little clock and the time for the location you were most likely search for. But as you can see from the screenshot, Google's spruced up its offering a bit and offers you multiple results for ambiguous searches. A more precise search will bring up one result.

Of course, Google's not the only search engine that offers a time feature. Search for "time in kingston" using Ask and you'll get the local time in Jamaica as well as the current weather conditions. No mention of Kingston, Washington though. Yahoo! shows you the time in Kingston, Australia. Windows Live Search just returns search results. Right now we're going to crown Google the winner since it gives you the best chances of getting the result you were looking for with a rather imprecise term. And as far as we're concerned, that's exactly how search should work.

So you use basecamp for project management or Google's apps, or something else, but how do you track your time on a project? basecamp offers time-tracking, but you have to pay a bit for that feature. Any cheapskates out there who like to get something for nothing, even if it means remembering yet another logon to yet another website? Many of us would jump at the chance, it isn't like any of us have a problem with web accounts, how many do you have again?

Toggl is an excellent solution, offered in a completely savvy web 2.0 interface that gets you where you want to go. The site tracks time and lets you hit a toggl (whoa, go figure) button to start and stop your "billable hours" timer. I was a bit wary at first that toggl wouldn't offer a way to change the time it had recorded, leave you stranded with pushing the button every 108 minutes until you got the right amount of time, but my worries were completely unfounded. I was ready for something much harder than clicking on the box and reentering my own length of time.

If you think pie is easy, toggl is easier. Complete with a reporting feature and multiple projects, toggl's goodness clocks in (pun somewhat intended) at the right price of free. As you know, our motto here is one more happy cheapskate, or wait, I don't think we actually have a motto. I'll have to get back to you on that. meanwhile check out toggl, and you will never wonder if you charged your client enough for the hours you spent on that killer project.

Add "toggl" to your spell-checker, jack, and you won't be disappointed.

timeXchange is an online peer-to-peer application that lets users record and report time and expenses, collect and approve team reporting, and protect and control data online. Its important for any worker to keep track of time in order to ensure work schedule and budgets are met. There are many great time management solutions availble, from online solutions, desktop software, to the basic Excel Spreadsheet route but timeXchange has some interesting features that are worth taking a look at.

When setting up a new project, you can choose who gets reports. These reports get sent complete with your hours and tasks listed, making them easier to track and analyze data. timeXchange helps out with collecting and approving timesheets which can be then viewed and analyzed and data exported to other applications. Security is a big concern for timeXchange. Encrypted data and reporting are stored on secure servers, and only those with permissions can access it.

Like any new application, this one takes a while to get used to, and there is a ton to set up, but it seems like this could be a strong player in the time management arena. Other online time management applications are TaskAnyone, ProWorkflow, Tick, Zoho Projects and Basecamp.

[eHub]

In flagrant disregard for computer users, the U.S. government went and adopted an Energy Policy Act that extends daylight saving time by four weeks starting in 2007. Of course, this means that little clock in your computer that goes and changes the time for you while you completely forget to set your clock and wake up late/early for work is going to be off by a couple of weeks.

Microsoft will be issuing updates for Windows XP, and Windows Vista will ship with the new data. But Windows Mobile users will have a harder time setting their clocks.

If you've got a relatively new PDA or smartphone, there's a decent chance your manufacturer will have an update available for download sometime before daylight saving time kicks in on March 11th. But there's no guarantee.

Microsoft's got a handy little web page up showing the registry settings that need to be changed if you have a Windows Mobile 2003 or later device. Sorry, 2002 users, Microsoft refuses to acknowledge that you still exist.

The instructions are really meant for PDA manufacturers to incorporate the registry changes into an installer file, so you might want to wait a few months to see if an update for your device comes out before futzing with your registry settings.

[Via Jason Langridge's Weblog]

Despite the fact that 2006 isn't technically over yet, and the fact that YouTube was actually founded in 2005, TIME Magazine has dubbed the video sharing site the best invention of 2006. And you know what? I agree. YouTube detractors have a lot of fodder for their criticisms, and YouTube is far from a perfect product or a perfect company, but in one fell swoop the company did what much bigger companies have been trying, and failing, to do for more than a decade: It brought video to the web. Now wait a second, I'm not saying that the web was videoless before that. I don't know when the first video went on the web (if anybody does, I'd love to know what it was), but it was probably about 15 years ago. But YouTube made web video truly ubiquitous. Two years ago if you saw a video on the web, you knew that, with few exceptions, its creator had made a significant investment of time, money, technology, or all three. Now literally anyone with enough cash for a nice cell phone or a cheap digital video camera or video capture card can put video on the web with just a few clicks, and--the is the kicker--for free. YouTube did that. If YouTube hadn't come along, someone else would have shortly and the web video revolution would still be upon us, but the history books never remember the guy who comes along and says, "well I could have done that."

The TIME article cites the confluence of three "revolutions" that YouTube's founders, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, stumbled into as being integral to its success: Cheap video production tools (the aforementioned cell phones and cheap, if not free, editing software), the ubiquitous buzzword Web 2.0, i.e. the social web "exemplified by sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg-hybrids," and the cultural revolution of customers "impatient with the mainstream media." On top of those factors and Chen, Hurley, and Karim's epic luck, I think two other factors deserve top billing: Broadband and Macromedia/Adobe. The lack of bandwidth and the lack of a browser-embedded video player that "just works" limited the success of YouTube's predecessors, and broadband finally fulfilling its promises--or some of them at least--and Flash getting robust video support and finding its way into 97-point-something percent of Americans' web browsers were integral to YouTube's success.

At any rate, congrats to YouTube for this deserved accolade (do you think they get a trophy or something?). And if you're into inventions of all kinds, TIME's Best Inventions 2006 is a great read.

Here's a neat little utility with questionable usefulness and a less-than-intuitive UI - but, yes, it's neat. AmbientClock pulls appointments from your Google Calendar and maps them along a circular analog clock. You can also add a secondary calendar (such as that of a co-worker or spouse) for a visual representation of schedule conflicts.

So far, I can't really see what AmbientClock accomplishes that plain ol' Google Calendar doesn't, aside from the "oh crap look how little free time I have today, when am I going to eat?" factor. You can add it to your Google homepage, which I suppose is useful in the at-a-glance sense. However, browsing to future dates didn't work for me in Firefox 2.0. But since it's in beta, I'll cut it some slack.

Apparently, if all goes well, AmbientClock will soon be more than just a Google gadget - it'll be a standalone device. As in, an actual, three-dimensional product you can place on your desk!

We have featured many a Sudoku game in the past few years, and here is yet another for Windows XP, aptly dubbed "Pure Sudoku." I like this one a bit. It is a free download, is fairly light-weight and features nice backgrounds and sounds that don't get in the way and aren't annoying. There are 43 different backgrounds that change automatically (if you care about that sort of thing), many difficulty settings, and over 20,000 puzzles to last you many years, or just one weekend if you are really bored and play really fast. Great for people who are snowed-in. The deluxe edition is only $9.99 (cheaper than most infomercials) and allows you to do more with Sudoku, like a hints feature, the ability to print puzzles, and 3X the number of backgrounds (woo-hoo) and much more. It is a fun little time-waster that already today I have found more addicting than I care to admit. Oops.

Thanks Mark for the tip!

While you were busy learning how to sync your Google Calendars and Gmail with Outlook, the search giant cranked out some unique new Calendar features and fired up their translation engines. First on the list is the addition of 'web content events' - you can now easily add icons to the top of your calendars that display the weather, phases of the moon and when new Google Doodles land on their search page. You can even publish this new data in the iCal format, and instructions on all this can be found at the announcement post.

The other big update is the addition of 17 new languages to the Google Calendar UI, including: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Polish, and English (UK) (those are all links to Google Calendar in their respective tongues).

As usual, these are good updates to a nice Google service, but I can't help dinging them for blatantly missing some of the fundamentals of the calendaring paradigm, such as a bloody todo list (like, um, every other calendar app on the planet) and the ability to set alarms on all events, instead of just those in the default calendar.

I don't want to sound ungrateful though, as I am a happy user of gCal, and thankfully, users in 17 new languages can be too.

Tick tracks project time. The best part? It's free! Tick is a simplistic approach to time management. The interface is extremely clean, easy to use, and straightforward which is a major plus, because who really likes spending their time fiddling with entering time? Not me.

Through Tick, you can create projects, assign the projects to a specific client, name the project, and give the specific hourly budget for the project. When this is set, you can create specific tasks for the job, and assign each task with a time limit. When items change in the project, or when time is entered in the reporting section, email notifications are sent. Reporting is laid out by client, with a breakdown of time entered for each specific client project. Filling out time for projects is simple. Choose your date, select your client and specific job you were working on, and drop your time in. Tick also generates a nice little progress bar that graphically displays how much time has been spent on the project in total, and how much time is left from your set hourly budget for the project.

All in all, Tick is a very useful time tracking application. It is a very simple and easy to use online tool used to keep track of your project time, to make sure budgets are hit. Integration through Basecamp is available through the Basecamp API's, which easily link up the two applications. Upon the launch of Tick, packages will be available from free to $79, and will be announced when it is completely launched.

[via Solutionwatch]

If you're a Mac user to whom the adage "time is of the essence" rings true, you may want to check out Merlin Mann's review of two different timer apps over at 43 Folders. The apps are called Meridian and FlexTime, and both are relatively new programs from two different developers that offer a lot of customization for kicking procrastination to the curb and managing the balance of your day. FlexTime is currently free and Meridian is $19.95 shareware with a 30-day free trial.

Can any productivity-conscious Windows users point us to some useful timer apps for the rest of us?