Now that you've got an RSS reader (right?), you need to make sure that it doesn't become another email-esque albatross that you check way too often and spend way too much time going through. That doesn't necessarily mean, though, that you need to cut down on the number of feeds...
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...
If you often upgrade your electronic devices but never get it together to do anything with your outdated gear, there's a new website called Second Rotation that will give you a little bit of cash for them. For eBay and Craigslist pros, it's not particularly useful, but for those of...
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...
Among the several different places I like to go to drool over the latest and cheapest gear on the market, Newegg.com is one of my favorites. They've got a huge selection to choose from, their prices regularly beat those from Amazon, and shipping costs are often free. Need a docking...
What happens when you Google yourself? If you've got a popular name, any pertinent results are usually washed out by waves of news about the serial killers, athletes, and CEOs who share your name. If you don't have one, then the results will probably be a mismash of labeled photos,...
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...
I used to think that LinkedIn requests were obnoxious. I felt like I was being roped into a social network that, unlike Friendster, has been scrubbed free of interestingness and instead has a glossy PR sheen. But as a business professional, it's become unavoidable; not having a LinkedIn profile is...
Being able to connect on the fly is incredibly important. Whether you're taking a work trip, a working vacation, or just want to get out of the office for the day, you're always ready to go if you can set up your laptop and get an internet connection. (Though you'll...
In the New York Times today, there's an interesting article about a computer problem for PCs that has happened to me several times. I'll be getting set up in an airplane to watch a movie or presentation on my laptop when the sound stops working. Once, it was because I...
Or if you don't use one yet, get one now. Really Simple Syndication is a really simple way to manage the articles, blog posts, and web searches that you want to keep up with—without actually having to take the time to go to each site. Web-based Bloglines has treated me...
So you need to set up a conference call with several busy folks and, over email at least, the group has come to an impasse about which half hour over the next week fits in best to everyone's schedules. Enter Doodle—a simple concept that allows you the organizer to bring...
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...
While many of us use Skype recreationally to chat with fellow Skypers around the globe, you can also pay a little bit of money to turn your Skype account into a cheap phone line while you're travelling on business or on a working vacation. For about $4 a month, you...
For slow typists like me, speech recognition software has always been an alluring beacon to what I thought would be workplace efficiency. Instead of casting off my qwerty shackles and doubling my words per minute rate, though, I've instead wasted a lot of time playing around with junky software that...
Hopstop—a site that helps you map your travel plans in major cities in the US—isn't perfect. As many readers of TechCrunch point out, it doesn't always point you to the most efficient routes, and it sometimes overestimates the time it will take you to get places. But it's still the...
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...
Even if your parking bill is on the companys dime, you still dont want to spend precious pre-flight time trolling long-term lots looking for a space. So head over to airportparkingreservations.com to reserve an off-airport space (with anywhere from $10 to $15 down) at almost every major US airport beforehand....
One of the coolest things about the new features that Google recently released is something called "My Maps." It lets you create your own maps—including landmarks, routes, etc.— and share them with whomever you want. Just sign up for a Gmail account which should have anyway and go...
Sure, we all know that we should be backing up all of our files regularly. And, given that storage has dropped below a dollar per gigabyte, there are certainly no space constraints anymore. But even using the "system tools" menu on our PC to...
