A lot of the mail we get cluttering up our inboxes is stuff we don't need to reply to, like company-wide memos, daily recipes or jokes, etc. It's not that this stuff is unimportant or spammy though much of it is, it's just that it's hard to figure out what...
When I come across websites that contain important information for whatever I'm working on at the time, I'll often bookmark the pages or sometimes just leave them open for later. Often, though, by the time I'm ready to return to them, I've lost my train of thought or can't find...
Sure, they're only supposed to be for mailing stuff, but the USPS will send you tons of boxes—and envelopes and labels—for free, with no shipping costs. The biggest ones you can order are only one cubic foot, but they're perfect for organizing smaller stuff. (They've even got shoe boxes so...
In the course of doing internet research for a project I'm working on, I'll often come across links that lead me directly to 404 errors. When that happens, I often go to the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive, which has preserved hundreds of terabytes of data since 1996.While the...
The daily annoyances of writing programs like Word have sent several frustrated users running to stripped-down word processors like Google Docs and even Notepad. But if you're a Mac user, it might make sense to get a writing program with more capabilities: Scrivener. Although Scrivener, which costs $35 (but offers...
One of the quaintest relics of the analog age is the idea that a signature is worth more than the paper it's on. It's not—forgers have been taking advantage of dupes well before John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence. Nonetheless, a major tenet of business is that any agreement...
It's hard for me to listen to any productivity advice that includes the suggestion that I turn off my email notification system. I know that it's a waste of time to keep returning to my inbox every time my message detector pops up—I've read Clive Thompson's article on interruption science...
Navigating your own huge Excel file can be difficult; turning someone else's data into something usable and useful can be downright maddening. If you're going to be spending a lot of time immersed in spreadsheets, it helps to know a few tricks to maximize your efficiency.There are plenty of Excel...
As my colleague Leslie Leite has previously noted, the easiest way to for a bunch of people to work on the same documents is through the pseudo-wiki functionality of Google Docs. But if youre still sticking to the old fashioned system of emailing MS Word documents back and...
As you may have noticed, Im a fan of Gmail. Has that changed now that Yahoo! Mail has announced that it is offering unlimited storage to users starting in May? Nope. While I may keep a Yahoo! account on standby in case someone comes up with a genius way to...
Microsoft Word, the medium in which almost all of my work is done, is not a particularly user-friendly beast. It crashes on occasion, and it doesnt interact well with documents written on other software. In its standard settings, it tries—often incorrectly—to anticipate my needs, and it messes with my concentration...
If you ever have dreams of doing an Office Space-style beat down of your slow, finicky fax machine, consider switching to an online service that lets you scan and send out documents and receive faxes from others in a manageable PDF form. Youll use less paper, plus youll have a...
One reason that the present doesnt look as much like the future that we imagined it would be twenty years ago is that voice recognition technology still isnt nearly as meaningful as we thought it would be. The recognition software is slow to learn, makes lots of mistakes, and cant...
Sometimes, its nice to take a break from the digital world. Sure, you could go ahead and scan in every single important file and note in your life like this guy did, but every once in a while, having actual papers and files can be refreshing. If you...
One of the more frustrating things about collaborating with colleagues and customers on projects is that they often use different editing software than you do. This, in turn, can cause the documents, images, and presentations youre dealing with to get garbled in translation. Just because your client refuses...
