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...
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...
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...