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.

Whenever you work, chances are you need to concentrate to get the job done as best as possible. However our minds aren’t really tuned to be able to concentrate on one thing for hours on end, especially if its something monotonous and boring. If you love your job or hate it, use a work - rest rule to make yourself more productive and happier.

I often use a 60 -10 rule, which means is 60 minutes work, and 10 minutes of play or rest. I mainly devised this to keep my head, eyes and back from overstress, but it has a great psychological effect on me as well. I love what I do, but I look forward to the next 10 minute break when I can stroll around, paly a round of solitaire, just lay on the bed, or whatever I want. If you hate your job you will feel better knowing you only have to work through the hour and you can rest a bit, taking something bad an hour at a time is better than a day at a time.

If you work in front of a computer all day this will also have some health benefits, especially if you use the time to get away from your monitor. Stand up, do some exercise, walk around, stretch, do whatever you need to feel better, rest and get ready for the next hour.

I suggest creating your own rule, the one that works best for you, and also, not to be afraid of breaking it sometimes. Often I am very into something, and taking a 10 minute break would mean at least 30 minutes extra work, so it would be more productive to work 120 minutes and rest 20 just that once. You could also use a 90 -25 rule, or even a 90 - 90 rule, depending on how much you need to work, and how much rest you need to feel good.

You can extend this to the day level as well. Perhaps you hate taking breaks and would rather work 8 hours in one go, and having a long rest after that. In this case you could devise a 2 - 1 rule, where after every 2 days of work, you take 1 day off. This is of course only possible for those of you who work at home, but those of you who have an office job can utilize the hour based rule well.

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!

Oh God, this is going to be a lecture isn’t it? Well, yes and no, you will see that this post is about being honest to yourself when setting up your own goals and projects, since without this you are doomed right from the beginning. Let’s take a look at a financial example which shows this in numbers.

I recently started some money management and I was faced with my credit card statemet. Now my credit card has an available balance of about $400, so I could write that I have $50 cash on me $300 in my savings account and $400 on my credit car, adding up to $750. This is technically correct, but the reality is very different, since my credit card is actually spent out, I have $400 left out of the original $1800. This means that I owe the bank $1400, and in reality my total is not $750, but -$950, a very different picure. This is a very obvious example, but small “white” lies in our every day life stop us from performing as we should because we cheat on ourselves.

If you know you’re a lazy type of guy for example that’s not a problem. The problem comes when you schedule too much work and you say “I’ll get it done somehow”, when it’s obvious you won’t because you’re a lazy type of guy. If schedule only what you can do you will be more efficient, productive and you won’t be in allthat much stress.

This is why it is vitally important to know your limits and not to lie to yourself. All you will accomplish is temporary, your problems will come back, since you are not solving them, merely hiding them. When scheduling, commiting, etc, always face the real situation and don’t hide behind numbers or half truths.

If you have trouble deciding weather an undertaking should be completed or not, a task should be defered or not, if you should be finishing your work now or tomorrow, you may be able to use a technique widely implemented in economics and company finances called cost-benefit analysis. I don’t want to get into technical details, but basically you are calculating if a project is worth doing, you are asking yourself if the benefit is worth the cost. Even if you can’t put numbers to your cost benefit analysis, taking some time to think about stuff may put you on the right track.

Basic cost-benefit analysis

If you need to make a quick decision, take 5 minutes, sit down and at least make an effort to make it a good and educated one. A crude, but effective way of creating yourself a quick cost benefit analysis is the positive vs negative list. List the positive aspects of your potential decision, but on the other side of the ledger, put down all the negative things as well. This is most productive if you try your best to create roughly equal pairs. Go from biggest benefit and largest cost downward on the scale. This may show you tht the costs grossly outweight the benefits or vice versa.

That’s basically the idea behind any personal cost benefit analysis. You can assign weights to specific items, the entry “I might make $1.000.000″ probably outweighs “I will need to make 100 photocopies”, unless you’re very, very lazy.

Advanced techniques, criteria

Life is of course not black and white, so in many cases you will want to make a decision even if costs outweight the benefits. Using the weighing method you can assign numbers to each entry. You can then add everything up, where 0 means costs equal benefits, negative numbers mean larger costs and positive numbers mean higher benefits. You can designate borders for accepting a decision even if it is costly, for example you can deem -5 to be the highest cost you will accept.

Productivity with cost benefit analysis

If you want to take this method seriously you can take it to the next step by creating steps to take, standardizing your method. If you have to make some similar decisions frequently you can draw up a table in Excel containing the frequent costs and benefits of these situations. You can then easily fill out this table and add some entries on the fly too, creating a quick CB analysis for yourself each time.

This will help you make the best out of each situation, and the whole thing really doesn’t take more than a few minutes in most cases. Do you have some similar methods you use? Please let us know in the comments!

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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.