Seth Godin suggests his email checklist to help solve this problem. His last point on the list was: If I had to pay 42 cents to send this email, would I? Would you?

TEDChris suggests an email charter that makes a lot of sense to me.

There’s also this website that exists to spread the wonderful goal of email etiquette.

You could perhaps pass this along to other co-workers, or if you’ve got authority/responsibility, maybe even make some changes in your company email policy.

Writer Merlin Mann also has a great series called Inbox Zero that tells you “how to reclaim your email, your atten­tion, and your life”

It used to be viagra spam in the 90′s. The 00′s have the problem of attention scarcity. Maybe we can do a little bit and help ease the lives of those you work/play with.

P.S: If you’re a developer with a few spare months on your hand, I will pay to get something like http://personamail.info/ for Windows.

This post was written after countless wasted productive hours of going through unnecessary emails I was copied into, reading 5 line emails where 1 would suffice, etcetera etcetera. 

A couple of hours of work and thanks to a good reference map, i made something that I think looks better.

The entire map can be viewed here. It doesn’t cover the entire rail network but does include most stops one would use within the central part of the city. I’ve got the jpeg on my phone as a shortcut that launches the image, which I can then use to zoom in/out etc.

Feel free to use it for any commercial or non-commercial purpose. Do drop me a line if you choose to use it though (hello@nkhil.com).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

I know there are a lot of to-do list apps and programs out there. I’ve tried a few of them, I haven’t found anything that was hosted on my computer (when the internet failed) and was also backed up (when the hard drive failed). Not to mention something that was simple enough to be useful for productivity.

Here’s what I came up with: http://nkhil.com/to-do-project/

It’s a simple webpage that uses HTML and CSS I put together in about 20 minutes. By using Dropbox’s public folder, the list can be accessed anywhere.

I added the ‘Important’ and ‘Other’ distinction so I know which pile to prioritize (and get  the better, more important work done).

A quick how to:

Creating and editing the list on your local machine is the easy bit. Feel free to download and edit my files – link

Having it sync and back-up online was done  using Dropbox – by adding the files to the ‘public’ folder inside my dropbox folder (this makes the file accessible anywhere with an internet connection). Remember to right click and ‘get the public link’ for the index.html file

The file still needs to be edited and updated using a text editor (I use notepad++ and Kompozer). I can’t help but think how awesome it would be to be able to edit the file in the browser, but haven’t come across anything except for using something called a blob builder in html5.

I’d like to hear if there are similar projects done using simple JS scripts or HTML5 (if you know of any).

UPDATE:

Having used this method for a while, I’ve gradually shifted to using Astrid for Android. It syncs tasks over the internet and my mobile,  and also syncs tasks over Google Tasks.  A huge plus is that I don’t have to use a notepad editor.

Although, I still use just a good old fashioned pen and paper for my to-dos quite a bit!