David lives in San Francisco and is an editor at Gelf Magazine. He also freelances for several magazines including Wired and Business 2.0. He's always on the lookout for new ideas about how to make life at work more efficient, more productive, and more fun. Please feel free to send...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...