Google Labs is finally available on my Google Apps account and I can start to use it in my daily email life. The first thing I am giving a go is the Tasks feature. This ads a link to a tasks window (pops up like a Google Talk window) which enables you to add tasks and create lists.

The most powerful feature however is the ability to create tasks from emails. When reading an email, simply click “Add to tasks” from the drop down and you’re all set. The message subject will be the name of the task, and a small link will lead you to the relevant message. If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on you can create a task even faster by pressing Shift+T when viewing your mail. Also, once the task is created, you can rename it, especially useful if you received a task in a completely unrelated conversation.

The interface is very “Google”, simple, but effective. I especially like that it feels a bit like Google Notebook. Many list makers give me trouble when creating sub-lists because I have to create a sublist, then add entries, but you can simply press Tab to indent any item. Clicking on the small arrow next to a task lets you add a note and due date, and there are some sorting/moving options at the bottm.

That’s about it here, but still, this little add in is as effective as it is simple. It elliminates the need to use stars for this purpose, which means I can use stars to indicate different things.

I’ve talked about it before, and so many others have said it, StumbleUpon can be a huge waste of time (enjyable though). Today I want to explore one aspect of it that made my browsing much more efficient. Whenever I found a site I liked I bookmarked it in Firefox, and since I like quite a lot, this meant my bookmarks were extremely all over the place. Folders and structuring helped a but, but not much.

Even though Digg and other services are available, I actually don’t like to use these for the storage of “important” pages, since my bookmarks toolbar is still the closest and quickest. All in all, StumbleUpon enabled me to put my bulk stuff, which I hardly ever look at anyway to a completely separate place. In a sense bookmarking interesting or fun pages has become a set & forget type of action.

Instead of having hundreds of local bookmarks with the few ones I need scattered all over I now have a nicely organized bookmark bar, all with the help of SU. So while using it can be a waste of time, it can help you separate fun from work, which is a key element for me for becoming productive

Welcome to a new column where I find and show you some of the best (and maybe even the worst later on) blogs out there. I will be mostly looking at productivity and tech blogs, so if you think you have a site that fits the bill, drop me a comment somewhere.

Today’s spotlight features The 2.0 Life, which is a tech blog, much like Hack Your Day, possibly a bit more application oriented. I came to know this site about a day ago after a comment from David, I visited his site, and I liked what I saw! First of all, the first post I can see now is about Remember The Milk. Anyone who likes that awesome task management service is good in my book. Second of all, look at the cool lollipop social buttons! Thirdly, there’s an image from Anchorman, a film I quite love.?

In all seriousness though, the posts are also gret, if you like sites like Hack Your Day, Lifehacker and so on, The 2.0 Life is for you, with posts about Facebook to Jott, you’ll be stock full of tips for a while.

This is one tip that might only be helpful to me, since I haven’t really met anyone else who does this (apart from my brother). Basically every 3 months or so I have a pressing urge to rearrange my room. I might put my desk somewhere else, put it next to the window, take the bed and push it against the other wall and so on. This change of scenery raises my work morale to about 150% for at least a few weeks, I guess I just like the change of scenery.

I also tend to clean up more thoroughly, so my room just reeks of a new working spirit! Psychologically I think this has something to do with the fact that I hate monotonous tasks. I also hate to redo stuff from 50%, so if I receive an order to overhaul a Wordpress template, I usually recode the whole thing, it’s just easier for me and better for the website. Rearranging your room stimulates the same “senses” in you I think, you get a sense of starting with a clean deck, working in a new immaculate environment.

If you don’t have time to do all this (it usually takes me the best of a day), maybe a simple rearrangement of your desktop stuff and other accessories can help. Put that external hard drive (which flashes in my face no matter where it is) on the other side, lay it flat out, place your desktop lamp somewhere else, etc. If you can think outside the box you can get a better effect. For example, just for the heck of it, I placed my lamp on the floor and I felt 200% better afterward. the light wasn’t as blinding, it was much smoother and more calming.

Click here to read the rest of this awesome productive post…

I took another two weeks of hiatus, promise this is the last, because I had the marvelous opportunity to join a great network of blogs called Grand Effect. I invite you to read the members’ blogs, they really are very good and entertaining! Since the bar is raised quite high, I decided I need to rething and reboot Hack Your Day properly. Hence the new design, the awesome post picker at the top and various little changes around the edges.

From now on Hack Your Day is placed in full momentum, gaining more and more every day. Since I’m a bit busy at the moment I will only be updating onceor twice a day, but nearing February I will be writing more and more, possibly taking on guest writers. All the community functions I started adding will be reworked and be available again, if you have any ideas or suggestiosn let me know.

A big thank you to Sarah Perez, writer for ReadWriteWeb and mastermind behind Grand Effect for this opportunity, I hope I can be of as much help to the GE community as they promise to be for me!

I’ve seen so many discussions on RSS, wether it’s good or bad, an asset or a necessary evil for bloggers. There are a lot of comments like “It causes people not to visit your site, resulting in less traffic”. This is totally true and if you think this is bad, you’re probably not making a lot of money anyway.

For a blogger there is nothing that is more important than his readers. Weather you write 3 line blurb entries or 10 paragraph long scientific analysis papers, the goal is to get readers who like your stuff. In other words, content is king right? So if 100 people come to your site daily, but 10,000 print your articles on toiletpaper and enjoy them on the loo, who cares, that’s 10,000 readers. Tell 10,000 people to buy something and many of them will, resulting in affiliate payments, revenue and whatnot, regardless of the medium they read it in.

Click here to read the rest of this awesome productive post…