The first message one could consider email was sent more than 30 years ago, and that’s probably when people began associating angst and uncertainty with the words “Inbox” and “unread messages.” The tools available to read and send emails have advanced considerably since then, but what you actually do with all that chatter, without eating up entire days of work time, is up to you. Luckily, we’ve covered a wealth of filtering and processing methods and software tweaks that make email less stressful and time-consuming over the years, and a list of our top 10 productive email boosters is after the jump.
If you’ve got 5-10 minutes to spare this week, you can earn a chance to win a $300 American Express gift card from our pals at Lifehacker US: all you have to do is fill out this (detailed, multi-screen) survey, and enter your email address at the final screen so we can notify you if you win. Standard contest rules apply, and the deadline for submission is Wednesday, April 23rd. Questions? Hit up the little men behind the survey curtain at surveys@gawker.com. Thanks and good luck!
Tempo isn’t the first or only web-based project tracker, but it conforms pretty well to whatever methods you prefer for entering and receiving data—email, Twitter and SMS messages, mobile or desktop browsers, or even RSS feeds. The site is geared toward those tracking personal or group time spent on particular clients, with a tag-based tracking system and all the graph and chart-y goodness you’d expect out of a data-rich site. Tempo is free to use in its “Adagio” version for one worker and one client, $5-$49 per month for incremental versions after that. Tempo [via eHub]
People get pretty attached to their favourite books, but an over-abundance of just-can’t-toss tomes can overwhelm your shelves and leave you with useless, seriously heavy boxes. The Unclutterer blog offers some tough love for book lovers, but this tip in particular stands out for college grads: Get rid of any book you’ve read, don’t plan on reading or referencing again, is in the public domain, and can be found in its entirety online. That’s right, I’m talking about ditching your Dover copy of The Scarlet Letter.
Looking at my own shelves, I can see more than a handful of candidates that meet that criteria. The idea is, presumably, that if I really want to yank a copy down and reference it, it’s actually easier to do with an online copy. While you’re de-booking, read a few suggestions on re-organising your bookshelf.Photo by Stewart. Bringing your bookshelves back to order [Unclutterer]
Linux only: Open and extract files from ZIP, RAR and 7Zip archives you’ve forgotten the password to, or never found at the download location, with RarCrack, a free Linux command line utility. Using a brute-force algorithm, RarCrack simply gets to work determining the password for compressed archives, which, in the case of most downloaded RAR files, isn’t all that tough. You can point RarCrack in the direction of any special characters you know were used in creating the password, but the standard use—rarcrack yourfile.zip—works just fine in most cases. RarCrack is a free download for Linux systems only; Source files are available at the home page, and Ubuntu Unleashed explains how to quickly compile them. RarCrack [via Ubuntu Unleashed]
