While tagging is super awesome, and I can find anything in about 3 seconds, it is not a great tool for an overview of your email. All you see is fifty tags on the left, sorted by name and this doesn’t help you look, feel or be organized.

A nifty Greasemonkey script, folders4gmail is a tool to help you organize your Gmail labels into groups, just like a folder structure. If tag mail from your family you could have “family”, “Mom”, “Dad”. You would see these tags quite far apart if you have many more, so enter folders4gmail.

If you create the following tags: “Family”, “Family/Mom”, “Family/Dad” you will be presented with an expanding list, showing you Mom and Dad as subcategories of Family.

You have two installation options. You need to install Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension that allows you to modify popular web services like the example here and then download the folders4gmail script (this takes about 10 seconds overall). Alternatively you can grab the Better Gmail extension from Lifehacker. This adds many Greasemonkey scripts to Gmail, like widening the view, skins (on its way for the new Gmail) and a host of other stuff. The advantage here is that you don’t need Greasemonkey for it to work.

You can use Better Gmail with the old Gmail interface, it has more features, since the others are being converted, or you can use the new Better Gmail 2 with the new interface.

Download Greasemonkey from the Mozilla Addons Page
Download Folders4Gmail from Userscripts.org
Download Better Gmail from Lifehacker.com
Download Better Gmail 2 from Lifehacker.com

If you’ve been reading the blog, you know that while I really try to be as productive as possible, I am also a firm believer in looks. If an app is ugly but is better than anything else, well ok, but I just love using things that look good as well.

If you want to spice up the look of your Windows folders, or program icons, take a look on the net and you’ll find tons of places to get icons. One of the best site I found was VistaICO.com. They don’t have a huge throng of icons, only a few sets, but those or awesome quality.

Go to the download page and take a look at their packs, plus the audio icons, archive icons, etc. The design is a but weird, it looks like a pay site, or an ad scam, but it really isn’t. I use a couple of their icons on my own desktop, and I’m going to look into the Christmas set very soon, to get into the Christmas spirit.

Download awesome icons from VistaIco

I still use Outlook for my work life, and actually I find it quite a well made program. One feature I don’t use, as long as my inbox goes, is filters. I bet some people are reaching for the phone to call the medics on me, but read on, let me explain.

The reason that I don’t use filters is that I loose track of stuff that way. If you have many folders, and everything that would be in your inbox gets sorted, you will click on a folder and process that email. You may do another one, but after a while, you will be tired and say “oh, only one email in the next one, I’ll do that tomorrow”. And this is where the problems start. To get rid of this problem, I do the following.

I have all mail come to my inbox and at a glance I take a look at all of them. My rule is, that nothing can go out of my inbox until I’ve dealt with it. I either give it to someone else, or reply myself. This is sort of like GTD, but there is no option to defer it to another date.

Having stuff in my inbox folder actually bugs me so much, I will be inclined to do it, rather then leave it for later, and even if I do leave it for later, I will do it in 24 hours, not three or four days.

Did you know how much space you can save by not chucking out your plastic bottles as is?

If you empty a bottle, just take off the cap, step on it, or crumple it with your hands and press down on it hard. Keep on pressing, and put the cap back on. The bottle will want to snap back into shape, but can’t, since it can suck in any air, it’s closed. It will stay flat, and conserve a lot of space for you, you could probably fit 3 or more deflated bottles in the space of a normal bottle.

I have to admit, this idea was not born out of my environmentally friendliness. While I try to watch the environment, the reason I started this was that I was really lazy about 5 years ago to take my trash downstairs and I came up with this to be able to stretch the lifetime of a bag a bit.

If you haven’t read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, you are truly missing out on a lot. It is the basis of his GTD system, and provides invaluable information, and is also an interesting read.

It will outline how to put your life back into order, by putting everything out of your mind, down onto some medium. You can than think clearly to process these thoughts and actually do everything you want in an orderly fashion, productively.

His other book, Ready For Anything is a sort of second chapter to his first book. It deals with the problem of diving into this system. Everyone knows this should work, but some people have trouble getting into it, something is holding them back. He deals with many of these questions, providing useful answers to all.

Now these two books are available as a bundle, in hardcover, and for an awesome low, $35.95 price. This really is cheap, you could even buy it as a gift for a GTD obsessed friend or family member.

Buy the two books on David Allen’s site

I work with at least ten folders I use often, at at least five files which are called up daily for modification and countless applications I need a lot. In my quest for a way to access these quickly I have come across PS Hot Launch, a perfect freeware utility for the task at hand.

It advertises itself as “a perfect alternative to the Start menu and the Quick Launch panel”, and while I won’t be chucking the start menu in the bin anytime soon, it’s the best tool I’ve seen for this purpose so far.

You can create a list of programs and folders which you use frequently, organizing them into virtual structures, just as you can in the start menu. You can then right click on the icon in the system tray to access this menu. I do not use this feature however as the Vista start menu is very usable, I do however use the hotkey feature.

The hotkey feature enables you to bind hotkeys to any folder or file. This does mean you have to remember them to use them effectively, but if you use it often this will not be a problem. I have “win+alt+p” bound to my Hack Your Day post directory, “win+alt”x” bound to an order excel sheet for another project and “win+alt+f” bound to my trusty Firefox. These are just some of the ways you can use this easy to set up application, have fun, be productive.

PS Hot Launch homepage
Related post: Reach any folder from My Computer