The new Chronotebook day planner takes a different approach to laying out your tasks and events—instead of representing your day in a boring sequence of lines or on a grid, it displays time on an axis, like an analogue clock. Each page represents either the AM or PM, and you write your plans like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Check out more photos of the notebook after the jump.
As a follow-up to Gina’s guest post on decluttering your email at weblog Unclutterer, blogger Stowe Boyd details how he keeps his email and to-do list in check with Gmail and the popular to-do webapp Remember the Milk. Using the previously mentioned Remember the Milk Firefox extension for Gmail, Boyd ties all of his actionable to-dos with emails directly within Gmail. It’s a smart and simple system, so if you’ve been looking for a better way to integrate your to-do list and your email, it’s definitely worth checking out. If you’ve got your own methods that do the trick for you, let’s hear about them in the comments. A simple way to simplify email — From Stowe Boyd [Unclutterer]
Google Documents has added something that may not have a lot of flash, but it’s probably the most-demanded feature since its Presentations tool launched—a plain ol’ “Export to PPT” feature. That’s a nice relief to a lot of cross-office compatibility problems, but a more quiet addition of saved searches is what’s really new and helpful. Choose key words, document types, date ranges, authorship, or whatever else you’re regularly looking for, and get those files quickly from the sidebar. Nifty.
Save your presentations to PowerPoint [Official Google Docs Blog via Google Operating System]For something that you look at every day of your working life, your computer desktop doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. That’s too bad, considering that the desktop can do a lot more than display wallpaper and hold shortcut icons. From widgets to workflows, from calendars to computer stats and beyond, you can do a whole lot on your desktop without manually starting up a single program. Hit the jump for our top 10 list of applications and tweaks that make your desktop a truly useful place to land.
The Dumb Little Man blog posts a condensed wealth of tips and tactics for getting yourself up and at ‘em, including a tip that might make you reconsider that toast-and-coffee morning routine. Guest-poster Alex Shalman notes that eating a bigger breakfast gives you energy that burns off all day, while a lighter meal at night has its own benefits: Eating like a pauper, meaning small light meals, in the evening allows us to go to sleep on an empty stomach. If your body is functioning normally, and you don’t have stomach ulcers, going to sleep on a mostly empty stomach will allow you to sleep better. This nightly fast allows your body to take its focus away from digestion and put it towards repair and rejuvenation of the body’s cells.
Windows only: Zero Assumption Recovery is a simple tool that can be a serious lifesaver, especially if you’ve just accidentally formatted a memory card or came home from vacation to a supposedly empty camera. The free download does what many professional (and costly) image recovery programs do, running through memory blocks and piecing together scattered pictures, then dumping them in a folder of your choosing. ZAR supports most major image formats, including JPEG and RAW, and our commenters have given it a try and subsequent thumbs up. Zero Assumption Recovery is a free download for Windows systems only; portions of the program are paid-to-unlock, but image recovery is free. Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery [via Digital Photography School]
Safari for Mac users: Want to have the upper-right search bar highlighted when you hit the Firefox-standard Command+K combination? The 5ThirtyOne blog explains how to set that up. [via]
