Once in a while we all need to reinstall Windows from scratch. We may buy a new laptop, we may be upgrading, or we may just feel like it sometimes. Migrating programs can be a bit tedious though, especially if they store a lot of info like Firefox. You need to organize your bookmarks, make a note of all addons, export or write down passwords. To make life one bit simpler and more productive you can use the nifty Mozbackup application to backup Firefox, and Thunderbird (even Seamonkey) in a few clicks, here’s how.

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When we install programs many of them clog up our Windows by placing notification icons on the tray. Sometimes this is warranted (Skype, battery status), but in many cases I just don’t see the point (Open Office launcher, nVidia icon). If you go to the respective programs you may be able to remove them, but it may help you to have them there once in a while never the less.

To work around the problem of ugly vs useful (or productive vs pretty), you can hide the notification icons you don’t use. Just right-click the bottom bar in Windows, select “properties” and go to the “notification area” tab. There you can click “hide inactive icons”, this will automatically hide those you don’t use often. he drawback is that when you do use it, Windows will only hide it again after a long time.

If you click customize you can set the properties for any program ever used in the system tray. You can choose between “hide”, “show” and “hide when inactive”. I usually just have Messenger, internet status, volume, clock and battery status show up, this leaves me with a cleaner look and a more organized interface.

This list is one of the funniest lists I have ever seen. I know people visit the blog for productivity, but you need to let loose once in a while. As a special Christmas post, here’s something lighthearted. Remember, to be productive and get organized you need rest, fun and happy times overall.

The list endeavors to give you tips on being an evil overlord, or more precisely, on how to keep on being one. This clever person has noticed that many an overlord hath fallen due to gloating at the end, falling into his/her/it’s own vat full of acid and so on. To keep fellow aspiring overlords from danger he has put together the ultimate list, enjoy!

How to be an evil overlord

Like my friend Martin from gHacks, I too am experiencing the email account shower. I now have about 6, but even when I had only one, I was looking for a solution to back up all my mail and burn them onto a CD. I used Outlook until now, but I may change my mind due to a little program called Mailstore.

Since saving all your mail in Outlook is either time consuming or hard to import to any other program I don’t really like it. Mailstore is awesome because it not only saves your mail from Outlook and other mail programs, it also supports POP and IMAP, so you can grab the mail right off yourserver. The awesomeness just grows because it has the handy feature to actually view the email right then and there, and even search through them.

All you need to do is input the source of the emails and then wait for the program to load them. You can set it up to backup to any location and you can even burn it to a CD or DVD. If you want to backup a Google account don’t forget to choose the SSL option (for both IMAP and POP), since this is available in the drop down box, not as a separate check box like it usually is.

If you are looking for a way to organize your mail and backups productively I think you should give this method a go. While there are some shortcomings (no scheduled backups) it is the only acceptable such program I’ve seen.

Get Mailstore Home found via gHacks

I am starting off on a long road, trying to make my central Gmail account my main information center, and as part of this I am rethinking my labeling system. I just noticed that I am following very bad practice, essentially duplicating information instead of actually adding information content.

I have several labels like “Viki” (my girlfriend Victoria), “Mom”, etc. I have these family members also tagged with “Family”. While it does marginally make sense to tag them with family, but there’s no sense in creating a label for each important contact. The reason is that these are sort of auto-categorized, since all emails from Viki come from the same email address. Therefore why should I assign a label? Labeling email is to create meta info, a common point for more than one email. But for contacts the common point is the contact itself.

The other problem with this method of labeling is that with every day my label count grows by at least 1-2. This means that three months from now I will have 90 labels, great job Daniel, you’re writing an organization and productivity blog for Pete’s sake!

A much more sensible approach to labeling is to pre-determine a set and stay with those. If you really, really need one you can add it, but the goal is to find an all-encompassing solution. Remember, the goal is to add information, not to duplicate it, duplicate info is the number one source of productivity loss.

A good set of labels would be something like this:

• Dayjob
• Online work
• Family
• Friends
• Funny
• News
• To look at
• Urgent

While this is not really complete, it does show the direction to go. The first four identify sources, who is sending, for what purpose. The second two are more contextual, they describe what the emails are about, adding a new dimension of information. The last two labels are action labels, these describe what you should do to these emails.

I will be dealing with my actual method of Gmail organization in my next post, so stay tuned!

One of the problems I was having when I started working was that I didn’t want to mix my work with my private life, and on the net this is not as easy as you might think. You need different emails, different instant messaging addresses, user names, passwords and so on and so forth.

First of all you need to be composed enough to go to the trouble of being consistent. If you need to add a new contact quickly you still need to make a decision if the person is a business contact, a friend, etc. You then need a way of organizing your contacts so you can productively work with them and remember who is who and why and where. You need to look for an all encompassing IM program.

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