I use my desktop a lot for storing files I quickly download, extracting wordpress plugins, image captures for my blog, and a host of other things. In about 3 days, my desktop gets cluttered up with things I don’t need, so I just delete everything. Every once and a while though, I delete something I do need and spend hours in the trash searching for it. If this has happened to you, here’s a method which makes your trash can a much more friendly place.

Basically, when I have a load of files to delete off my desktop I don’t highlight them all and drag them to the trash. Instead I create a folder, name it: “Deleted from Desktop on july 26″, I move all my files in there, and delete the folder. This means that I can delete everything and then when I remember I need something, just go back to the relevant folder and resotre it.

You can also use this method to group deleted files by other criteria, lile client the file was for, or the job you  used the file for. Since I develop loads of Wordpress themes and all have index.php files, style.css files and so on, I can just drag all the files for a theme I don’t need anymore into a folder with the name of the theme, and drop that into the trash instead of all the separate files.

Use OS X style stacks in Windows

This is by far my most popular article for some reason. Take a look inside and you will find that you can use Rocket Dock with a plugin to create stacks just like in OS X. I don’t think you get the settings and flexibility of OS X, but you get a nice way to browse files in a folder, or open some applications that look good on any desktop.

Separating work and play with user identities

This article was even covered by Lifehacker, a way I used to separate some aspects of my life so I can focus better on the matter at hand. If you work a lot at your laptop, but also use it for recreation, this is a great way to deal with distractions and whatnot.

One shortcut collection to rule them all

This post simply describes a great site I found which contains all the shortcuts you will probably ever need. Grouped by application, you will find all shortcuts for apps from Microsoft Word to Adobe Photoshop, with online apps like Gmail and Yahoo Mail included as well!

Browsing and file management were two things for me that somehow never really came together. However Firefly, a Firefox extension gives you the power of a file manager right inside your browser, let’s take a look if it’s any good.

Once installed you can simply type a path like “c:” to get to the root of the drive to view files. They will be shown as a list and you will be able to perform simple file management tasks via the Firefl toolbar, drag and drop, or keyboard shortcuts.

You won’t find the power of Windows Commander or XYplorer, but for everyday basic needs its great, and gives you a lot of productivity by saving you the time it takes to switch between apps. You basically just get the interface to do cutting, pasting, copying, renaming, and some more basic tasks, but that’s really all I need. One unique option is that you can switch the number of viewing pane, horizontal and vertical alike. Creating 8 views might seem like chaos, but it may save a lot of time in some cases.

What I find most useful is the way you can navigate around using Firefox and Firefly combined. Since we are in a browser, we can use the versatility of bookmarks to navigate all around our computer. If you access a remote directory often, just create a bookmark with the keyword “dir” for example and whenever you type dir into the address bar you will be swooped there. With a few of these bookmarks and the ease of use of Firefly, you will be performing file actions much more productively than before.

Firefly fills a space which is rarely catered for by the software industry and it really can make you more productive, but I will still not use it probably. I don’t really know why, I just don’t like third party file browsers, I use the simple old Windows interface, so sue me.

If you do even a bit of website building weather for you own site/blog or for others you are destined to get the cross browser developement headache. Not only do websites look different in Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer, Safari, but they even look different in Windows and Linux using the same browser.

If you build a lot of sites, let me show you a setup you can use to test on multiple browsers. First of all, I gather you already have Windows installed, or if you don’t because you’re a linux user, go ahead and install it first. Once done, you can install the new Ububtu Linux from Windows itself, without the need to muck about in boot screens and so on.

Now, you have two systems installed, all you need to do is get all the browsers you can into these systems. WIndows has IE by default, so you need to install the others only. I recommend installing three browsers here, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Firefox and Opera have large fan bases, and Safari is sort of a middle ground between installing OS X.

Head on over to your linux system and if you have Ubuntu, Firefox will be on there by default. The options you have here are much mor evaried. The good news is that most problems occur between IE and all other browsers and you don’t have to think about IE in linux too much. The bad news is that there are many more browsers used. Apart from numerous smaller browsers you can install Galeon and Konqueror, many Linux distros come with these as defualt. Galeon is based on the gecko engine (like Firefox), so you won’t have many problems there.

The main difference I’ve seen with Linux vs WIndows is the differnece in text size, usually smaller in Linux. This can cause some elements to shift about, but if you have some experience with IE problems, solving these will be a cicnh.

Being a blogger means some pretty different work methods than other types of work. Just think of GTD contexts for example. If you are a blogger you have @computer and @computer and @computer, if you specialize in some area, you might also have @computer. All in all, in some cases you will need special methods, or use available options differently. Here are 5 tips for Google Reader productivity geared especially toward bloggers.

Using tags

My primary use for Google Reader is to find stories. About 60% of my posts are about things I haven’t read before, out of the top of my head, the other 40% is about interesting stuff I read about. I write for 5 blogs at the moment and all of them require special types of content. One requires longer stories, the other requires shorter stories, one requires posts about web development and css and so on and so forth. Tags are a great way for me to indicate which blog the story could go to later. This enables me to go through all new items quickly and categorize them.

The great thing about tags is that you can also use them for personal interest. If I come across a story about the new Gibson guitar, I will want to read it later, I can just label it “personal” or something similar.

Sharing is networking

Sharing is a great way to stay in touch with your readers, let them know what kind of person you are and show people what kind of stuff you like. For example, Hack Your Day is all about productivity right? Well, apart from writing the blog I also play guitar and sing, I like guitars and so on, so the best way for me to communicate that is to share these kinds of stories. I can’t really blog about them on Hack Your Day, but if someone likes the blog enough to look into the author, they’ll see what other stuff I like, they may discover that they like similar things. Due to that they may refer other people to me, they may want to work with me and so on.

The new note options also enable you to share your opinion with you shared item. Since in your notes only the post title and your notes are shown, in theory you could also cover the item like a blog post. If you’re a popular blogger your readers will be interested in anything you have to say, so giving them as much as you can will make you even more popular.

Using stars

Many people I know use stars very unproductively. They star a load of items to read later, only read about 30% of them, and then keep many starred until the end of time. If you are a blogger, Google Reader is a professional tool you can use, so use it productively, give those stars some meaning.

If you don’t use the tagging system I described or if you only have one blog the best use of stars is to indicate articles you want to cover in the future. Once you’ve covered it, be sure to remove the star though so you can get an accurate reading of how many sources you have left.

However if you do use the tag system, there really is no point to using the stars like this, since the tags serve the same purpose. Once you’ve covered the story, just remove the tag. You can still use stars pretty well though for a multitude of things. I use them to indicate upcoming applications. There are quite a few apps which I love and are either in closed beta, or are still in production and I want to wait some more with a review. In these cases I add a star so I know I need to come back and check up on them later.

Reading by importance

Many people have hundreds of subscriptions and complain that they need to go through thousands of rss items daily. You’re a blogger, going through items does not make you money and is not at all a productive use of your time! I would more accurately describe it as a total waste. I just missed about 3 days and I went through about 150 items, which means 50 a day, which I don’t see growing all that much.

The secret to productive reading is categorization by importance. I have a local news page in my RSS feed which produces around 50 items a day. These however are not important so if I have read my important onces and I feel tired, there is no need to read these.

I suggest creating three folders, “daily”, “important”, and “other”. This is the combination that works best for me, let me show you how I use them. Daily items are ones that I read every day obviously. This would be Lifehacker for example, Freewaregenious and so on. If I find that more than 50% of a site’s post are worth covering (extremely rare), they get into the daily folder.

The important folder is for sites who produce some great stories, and I do read daily, but I don’t mind if I skip some stories. These sites typically produce 20% - 30% cover worth stories. This of course doesn’t mean the rest aren’t good, they just wouldn’t fit on any blogs I write to.

The other folder all the other feeds I like, but I don’t necessarily read all the time. These could be news feeds, blogs of friends, twitter feeds and so on. These are the feeds that are very fun to read, but produce no extra worth for my blog(s).

If you use this tip you will find that you use your time much more productively. I understand that its fun to read a lot of blogs, thoughts, ideas, news, but when you really get down to it, the good old 80-20 rule applies. 20% of the items contribute to 80% of your blog, while the other  80% hardly contribute anything.

Using trends to establish what to read

Google Reader has some built-in statistics which may seem like a “just for fun” option, but you can use it to your advantage. As I’ve said above, it’s important to spend time with the truly important feeds, and usig the data in the trends page is a great way to establish importance.

The best way to establish what you need to read is to initially use stars to indicate items you want to cover for any of your blogs. In the trends section, you can then take a look at the number of stars from each subscription, the more stars, the more important.

Update frequency could also indicate the importance of a blog since this raises the chance of you giving something a star. It also enables you to take a look at how many posts you create on your own blog on average. Hack Your Day has 0.8 posts daily right now, which tells me I need to write more, I would like to raise that to 1.5 at least.

There are other types of data you can take a look at. If you email yourself (or others) all the stories you want to cover the emailed data is quite handy. You can also take a look at the most inactive feeds and simply remove them.

You can also take a look at when you read feeds most, by time of day, day of the week and last 30 days, which can give you a good overview of time management. I read the most items on Tuesday, don’t ask me why, and indeed this shows me that I am not using my time right. I want to work on blogging roughly the same amount each day, so a very flat graph would be my ideal data set, showing that I spend the same time every day. This urges me to take a look at how and when I work, so I can optimize my time usage.

Firefox 3 introduces a new bookmarking system which utilizes databases to store your history, favorites and so on, so you have much more power and control over them. Recently I reinstalled my system and decided to go with a fresh (not restored) Firefox, so I can organize myself better.

In fact, the best way I think you can go about organizing your bookmarks in a new install is if you do it the GTD way. When you arrive at a web page, spend 2 seconds and decide if this is worth a bookmark or not. Most likely the first pages you visit will be, since these will be pages you visit often anyway. In this case, just press CTR+D to bring up the bookmark menu.

Keep the name, or modify it to something more easily understandable. Remember, bookmarks are for you, so it’s ok to abbreviate, use acronyms and so on. Choose a folder and choose some tags. Tags are new in Firefox and can be put to great use. SInce I write to a load of blogs I can bring up all the bookmakrs for admin pages easily, while still keeping these in the same folder. When you’ve saved your bookmarks you can also go back and enter a keyword for them. Just right click on the entry, click on properties and enter something easily remembered and short.You can then type that into the url bar to go to the site.

The key to keeping organized is consistently following the rule to decide at each page what to do. Take the time to organize your bookmarks into tags and folders. This will create some extra work now, but after a few days of browsing you will have the most important sites covered and the work you’ll need to do from then on will be minimal while you will be much better organized.