As the amount of information that is potentially important to us continues to grow, it’s now more vital than ever to be able to process and consume it more efficiently. Here are some tactics to help you become more efficient with your time and information processing. RSS and keeping up with headlines If you aren’t an…

Almost anywhere you go nowadays you will see someone’s head buried in their phone checking email, texting someone, playing a quick game, looking something up, or just simply wasting time. You may even be the type that as soon as you hear a ‘ding’ or vibration from your phone you instantly check what is…

We continuously push ourselves to get more done and work faster, yet it doesn’t seem to work. What if it’s not that we’re not working fast enough or hard enough, instead it’s just that we fall prey to the numerous productivity traps that eat away at our days. The simplest way to improve our productivity…

There are many great articles that tell you what to do in order to get things done. Some advocate very practical steps, like breaking the task into smaller pieces, or delegate more. Others are more high-level, about maintaining discipline or mindfulness and gratitude. For the record, I…

Last week we helped you identify some of the best alternatives for Google Reader. Google has made some significant changes to the Gmail interface in the past few months – all which lineup with their direction towards a more “Google+” type of world. Google has introduced their new, more simplified interface for Gmail which they…

Just the other day, a co-worker was called out by another co-worker that they “weren’t answering their email quickly enough.” This comment was made even when our company employs a host of ways to contact each other immediately. The issue that was being discussed was urgent and had to be handled that day, but the accusing…

It’s gone on long enough. Email has managed to take hold of too many lives, distracting us from what we really should be doing by sucking us back into responding to messages coming at us on an ongoing basis. The technology of email is wonderful in…

Ah, Inbox Zero. An achievement that so many of us long for. It’s elusive. It’s a productivity benchmark. It’s an ongoing battle. It’s also unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, the way Inbox Zero was initially termed is incredibly valuable. Merlin Mann coined the phrase years ago and what he has defined it as goes well beyond…

I’ve become an email killer. It’s not that I hate email, it’s that I hate email backlog. It happens to the best of us. We save emails that we can’t initially reply to yet, we hold onto emails that we want to dive into at a later date and we keep emails as a reminder of…

Even at the best of times, starting a focused job search is a complicated process that includes research, deadlines, preparation and follow-up. Luckily, Google offers many services and applications that help you manage the job search project and plan your next action steps. Start fresh, eliminate the distractions of your existing Google profile and create an…

After putting together a course on How To Email Important People and speaking with nearly 200 individuals about their email habits, I’ve noticed a few common problems that people have with email. The number one complaint is that people don’t get responses to the emails they send out. Here is an sampling of the statements I heard: “I…

Your email inbox is killing you. Well, maybe that is a little extreme, but the peeps over at AwayFind think that living in your inbox isn’t the greatest thing in the world. So, to rid you of obsessively checking your inbox 20 times or more a day they decided to develop a new service for…

In my last post, I talked about six of the most common work habits that sabotage your productivity. The first offender on my list was how frequently you check your email. As I was writing my last article, I found that there was a ton of information on that topic, and it was…

How many emails do you have in your inbox right now? Are you an inbox zero freak like me? Or do you have emails piled up and unread that you’re hoping you’ll get time to get to? I’m not judging – I used to have as messy an inbox as anyone. And even now, if…

Considering how useful – revolutionary, even – email is as a communication tool, it can also be an incredible drain on productivity. If you’re anything like me, you have discussion listservs, newsletters, Google alerts, Facebook updates, blog comments, advertisements, automated backups, reminders, and all manner of other stuff pouring into your inbox all the time…