( Windows Only, although I am sure you can do it on Macs too )
Since I am a blogger and a freelance writer too, its very important for me to immediately capture ideas which I get while surfing the web, so that later I can convert those ideas into full-length posts. Although there are many ways to do it, I found that the simplest way to do it is create a new toolbar for important folders, in your taskbar. So this is how the bottom right portion of my windows taskbar looks ( screenshot )
For those who don’t know, I am a big fan of Gmail and am always searching for tools, tips and tricks to further optimize it and enhance its functions.
In my quest for gmail productivity tools, I came across GTD Inbox, an awesome firefox addon which helps you make your gmail as your ultimate task manager and helps you keep a clean inbox without a hassle. ‘ GTD ‘ means getting things done and thats what it aims to do with your gmail.
Let me describe what it does. It primarily aims at giving structure and meaning to the chaos of your inbox. It considers each email as a task and lets you manage it with a few clicks. Hence it primarily helps you to reorganize your emails according to your priorities.
In a few days of full time blogging, one of the lessons which I have learned is that setting short term goals is much better than planning for the long term.
I think thats because the implementation becomes much easier and we know that none of the ideas are good unless they are implemented effectively.
Hence to achieve your goals, everyday planning is necessary and here I will enlist some points which can help you achieve that in a better way thereby helping you increase personal productivity.
Before you go to bed, just sit for 10 mins with a calm mind and plan the next day. Think about all the aspects like posts, social media, checking stats and some other pending work and decide that what should be on your agenda for the next day.
As my search for methods to increase my browsing productivity continues, I have come across some excellent keyboard shortcuts for Firefox (my preferred browser) which I will discuss here .
I am sure you’ll benefit from it if you use Firefox as your browser .
Yes, we know that if we type ‘google’ in the address bar and press Ctrl+Enter it directly goes to www.google.com . But what about .org and .net addresses? . In Firefox, Shift+Enter takes you to .net and Ctrl+Shift+Enter takes you to .org addresses automatically . So if you wanna go to Problogger , just type the word in firefox address bar and press Shift+Enter .
Recently, Darren posted that how he used Gmail to clear 10,000 mails in his inbox. The efficient use of Filters and Labels in Gmail to archive messages already present and other incoming emails according to different rules, will help you to keep a clean inbox .
However one negative aspect of this method is that if you try to create a lot of filters to prevent messages from landing into your inbox, it could result into a long list of labels (like what I have). And here the problem is that Gmail arranges labels alphabetically on its own and doesn’t give you much freedom there. There are certain scripts which help you create folders out of labels but not everyone who is a non-geek would be familiar with that. So how do you manage such a long list of labels?
It has happened a lot of times , when during work , I decide that I will check my mail or check a particular website after 2 hours or lets say any time . But then I am so engrossed in my current task that I loose track of the time .
Image By LabGP & SigOther
If you work a lot on computers , then chances are that 80% of the time you are using the keyboard to type letters , documents , emails , blog posts etc . So if you add up the time spent in a day typing stuff and then if you increase your typing speed even by a few words per minute , you will find that it makes a huge difference to that time spent and makes you much more productive . Moreover , typing fast has the following advantages :
