"workspace" via groundhogdad

The human mind is brilliant, but also brilliantly inefficient. We often get our best ideas where we can’t implement them. The classic example is in the shower, but it happens everywhere, anytime. You’re shopping in the produce section of the supermarket, and all of a sudden, you realize you need to add an important topic to next week’s meeting agenda. Or you see your spouse’s picture on your desk at the office, and suddenly you get an impulse to plan a romantic escapade.

One way to cope with the brain’s lack of discipline is to keep your life compartmentalized. If a personal issue occurs to you at work, just ignore it, and if it’s important, you’ll think about it when it’s relevant. That’s a big risk to take (forgetting the odd anniversary) in the name of simplifying your life. And it’s totally unnecessary.

All you really need is a good collection and transfer protocol. If you’ve been reading Tools for Thought for a while, you probably know the drill by now: write it down, throw it in your in-basket and process it into your calendar or lists.

By what if the source material from work needs to go home, or vice versa? What about the articles you printed out for your Read/Review stack that you could chip away at in between errands? What if you’re a road warrior whose primary office is a laptop?

Using plastic travel folders

The simple solution is to create a set of semipermanent folders for collecting things on the run, schlepping things between work and home, or keeping things on you for supporting certain tasks. You can buy them preprinted from the David Allen Company, but they’re much cheaper to make if you have the labeler that no serious GTD user would be caught dead without.

Since these folders will get a lot more handling the general reference files you keep in your file cabinet, it’s better to use plastic folders rather than generic manila ones. The standard set consists of the following labels:

• In: This folder acts as your portable in-basket when you’re not deskbound, keeping any new documents, notes and receipts you collect from randomly spreading throughout your go bag. If you make your own set, it’s a good idea to make this one a different color than the rest (traditionally, red), since it will probably be the most frequently accessed
• To Home: If you’d rather not process personal items at work, or if they simply need to be stored at home, this is their temporary holding area
• To Office: Same concept, opposite direction
• Action Support: It’s usually more practical to have a single folder for any paperwork that you need to reference on all your errands than carrying separate project support folders, unless you have a lot of them
• Waiting For Support: Not one I’ve ever used personally. I just use Action Support for any actions I’m taking myself or expecting from others
• Read/Review: Technically not a travel folder, but you’ll probably make at least as much use of it in transit as you would in the office. Standing in lines is a great time to get through some of your reading material

Naturally, you can customize folders to your preference. You might want a separate “Receipts” folder instead of throwing your receipts in your In folder.

Storing and labeling

Before I started working at home, I used a three-tray setup at work: one for In, one for read/review material, and one for action support. The Read/Review folder would go, of course, in the read/review tray; the Action Support and To Home travel folders would go in my action support tray; the other folders would stay in my bag.

It’s a good idea to not only label each folder at the tab, but also toward the bottom edge in the center. Insert the folders so that the bottom edge face towards you. That allows you to see the labels clearly without getting obscured by the papers inside — you don’t have to lift the papers to see the labels. Apply some clear tape over each label to keep them from peeling away from the surface. If you really want to make the folders more aesthetic, use clear label tape with white lettering, but for me that’s overkill.

If you have any travel folder categories that you’ve found to come in handy, please mention them in the comments.

(Photo credit: The David Allen Company)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

We previewed the new iGoogle with support for full-screen gadgets months ago and showed you what full-screen Gmail looks like, but now Google has officially rolled out the new and improved iGoogle to regular old accounts. The new full-screen feature—called canvas view—lets you toggle between viewing your gadgets in collapsed or full-screen form. Not every gadget has canvas support yet, but Google does offer up some of the best:

• News - New gadgets from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post give me full-page views of what's new in the world. Nice.
• Games - The Sudoku gadget lets me play thousands of full-page Sudoku puzzles without squinting at 6-point type. The GoComics gadget gives me my fix of Garfield and Doonesbury and lets me choose from all of their other comics. I've also spent many coffee breaks browsing through videos from YouTube and CurrentTV.
  
• Entertainment - I've configured the TV Guide gadget to my zip code and just used it today to figure out when the newest episode of The Office is playing. Flixster's movies gadget lets me access trailers, ratings, and theater information for any movie. I also use the iLike gadget to browse news, concerts, and free MP3s from my favorite musicians.
• Google stuff - The new Gmail gadget lets me read my full email and perform simple actions like send or reply to emails without leaving iGoogle. Last but not least, a gadget that I authored and use every day is for Google Finance, which provides full-screen finance charts and news of the stocks in my portfolio.

For a look at more gadgets built to work with the new iGoogle update, check out their full list here. It's not mentioned in the Official Google Blog post, but Google Reader has even added its own killer iGoogle gadget. It looks almost exactly like Google Reader proper and even supports Google Reader keyboard shortcuts. (I'm sold!)

If you give the new look a try, let's hear how you like it—and which canvas gadgets stand out to you—in the comments.

Ubuntu 8.10, the next release of the Linux distro we looked at earlier this month, will have a much-requested "DarkRoom" theme available, though the lighter Human remains the default. A full screen of the DarkRoom desktop is below. [via]

Linux only: QuickStart, a free automation utility for Ubuntu Linux systems, makes it easy to perform partial or full system backups of any partition, synchronize folders and update them on a schedule, and take care of other tasks a beginner would normally need to spend serious time researching. The tiny app opens a simple interface listing your choices, although dialog prompts guide you through any steps requiring input. The tools for installing DVD playing codecs, backing up your Master Boot Record, and creating synchronized backups seem particularly helpful, and while I haven't tested every function, a handful of them completed without any problems. QuickStart is a free download for Ubuntu systems only; both links below carry non-terminal installation instructions for the script.

Wired's How-To Wiki runs down how to optimize your web connection using tools like OpenDNS, a regular old router, and add-ons that block bandwidth-hogging content you don't care about. If you're stuck on dial-up or a cellphone data modem, see also our guide on how to survive a slow internet connection.

Weblog Apartment Therapy describes how to create a table of contents for your file cabinets to help make your filing system cleaner and easier to use. It's actually a very simple idea: You just print the different folder tab names of your file cabinet onto a piece of paper you can place on top of your cabinet to give you a quick overview of what's inside. The biggest hurdle to a clear, organized paper filing system is a lack of easy access, and Apartment Therapy's simple table of contents method attempts to remove one more boundary to easy filing. If you're serious about fixing up your filing cabinets, check out our extreme filing cabinet makeover.

When you need something done quickly, efficiently, and without any software overhead, the command line is where it's at. It was the first way humans told computers what to do, but as graphics became increasingly important, the command line, or terminal, became an insiders' secret weapon. But with the right commands and a little bit of know-how, anyone can get things done from a text-only interface. Let's take a look at 10 commands and tricks that make the terminal more accessible, and more powerful, on any system. Photo by blakepost.

Note: Mac OS X and Linux users have robust command line interfaces baked right into their systems. To get to them, head to Applications->Utilities->Terminal in Finder. It varies in Linux, depending on your distro and interface, but a "terminal" can usually be found in an "Accessories" or "Utilities" menu panel. Windows users are best served by installing and configuring Cygwin, a Unix emulator, which we've detailed in a three part series.

10. Customize your prompt

If you're going to spend any time at the terminal, or want to start doing so, it should be a welcoming place. To go beyond green or white on black, check out this Ask Lifehacker response, in which Gina runs through a few simple ways to change the colors, and the greeting message, on your prompt for Windows, Mac, or Linux systems.

9. Force an action with sudo !! ("bang bang")

You already know that prefixing a command with sudo makes your system execute it with superuser privileges. But when you forget to sudo, the !! or "bang bang" comes to the rescue. When you've perfectly crafted a long command that does exactly what you need, hit Enter, and d'oh—you don't have sufficient access privileges—you can sudo !! to repeat the last command with superuser privileges. It's the ultimate nerd triumph: "Oh, you didn't like that command? Well, then sudo !!"

8. Create whole directory trees with mkdir

When it comes to organizing music, pictures, documents, or other media, nested folders become a necessary annoyance—as in right-clicking, choosing "New Folder" and then naming and clicking through each of "The Beatles->White Album->Disc 1." It's far easier from the terminal, as the Codejacked blog points out:

mkdir The Beatles\White Album\Disc 1

Some terminal users have to add a \ before spaces, but you get the idea. If you're a Vista user who's just not down with Cygwin, you can still pull this off with the md tool in command line.

7. Filter huge lists with grep

Some terminal commands spit back a bit too much information, and that's where grep comes in. Need to manually kill a faltering Thunderbird? Punch in ps aux | grep bird, and you'll get back the specific number to kill. Need to know which files don't have your company name in them? grep -v DataCorp *.doc. Programmer Eric Wendelin explains grep more in-depth.

6. RTFM with man (and more)

Let's say a program, or web site, has just asked you to run a command to unlock or enable something, but you'd like to know just a little more before jumping in. Add man before the command (as in man ssh) and you'll get manual-style pages detailing how to use the command. Bit too much material to process? Try whatis for a brief description, --help after the command for basic usage, or any of these other command-line learning tools.

5. Manage processes with top

Most systems have a tool to view "tasks" or "running programs," but they usually hide the true guts of what your system's doing from you. The Hackszine blog points out that Mac and Linux users can harness the power of the built-in top command to track and kill runaway processes making your system unstable. There's also ps -aux for a single-screen, non-updating look at what's bugging your computer.

4. Master wget for powerful file-grabbing

The wget command has been around since before there was all that much stuff to actually yank from the net, but this extensible, multi-purpose tool has lots of great uses these days. You can mirror entire web sites locally, resume huge downloads on the flakiest of connections, download the same file every hour to keep tabs on a project, and do much, much more with wget. It's one of those elegantly simple tools that's only as powerful as your creativity.

3. Get way beyond system searching with find

Once again, programmer Eric Wendelin offers real-world examples of how powerful a command line tool like find can be in, well, finding files and directories that match the smallest criteria you can imagine. Want a list of every HTML file that references the hexidecimal color #FF0000 (red)? find can totally do that for you. As Wendelin points out, find, by itself, is about as convenient and powerful as a total-system searcher like Google Desktop or Quicksilver, but piped into and out of other tools like grep, it's a powerhouse. For a more pared-down look at some of find's powers, check out this tutorial at Debian/Ubuntu Tips & Tricks.

2. Set up powerful backups with rsync

You can spend a lot of money and time hunting down a perfect backup app that works with all your systems just the way you want. Or you can spend a few minutes learning the basics of rsync, the flexible, powerful command that makes one folder (on your system) look like another (where you back up). To put it simply, rsync is a cross-platform, completely free Time Machine, if you use it right. Luckily, Gina's already shown us how to do that.

1. See your most-used commands with history, make aliases for them

Once you're comfortable with the terminal and getting good use from it, you might notice some of the more useful commands require an astute memory and typo-free typing—unless you make them shorter and easier. Start off by copying and pasting this command (on one line):

history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -r

It will return a ranked list of your most commonly-entered commands using your command history—and you can start creating aliases to shorten them and make them easy to remember. Or you could search through your recently-used commands with as-you-type results for quick-fire repeats.

While these 10 commands are generic and applicable on all systems with a Unix-like terminal, Mac OS X offers a few Mac-specific tools. Here are useful command line tricks for Mac users.

We're love to have some CLI fun around here, and we know our savvier readers have tons of cool terminal hacks and tricks that are new to us. So, please—share the knowledge and spread the wealth in the comments.

All platforms with Firefox: Just posted an update to the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension which upgrades the gorgeous Redesigned skin to its latest version and the Filter Assistant. The add-on's now meaner and leaner, with a whole new streamlined code base, and no more scripts you don't need slowing down your Gmail. (For example, the HTML Signatures script—which has grown up into its very own extension, is no longer in Better Gmail, as is the Force Encrypted Connection script which Google's built into Gmail natively.) Go download version version 0.5.3.2 (yes, we're getting creative with version numbers here) at the extension's homepage. (Note: The new version hasn't yet been approved at Mozilla Add-ons, so you may not get the update notification within Firefox automatically. Hit the download link at the add-on homepage to manually upgrade.) Now available on Mozilla Add-ons!

Comodo Firewall Pro took home the top honors in this weekend's Hive Five Best Windows Firewalls, followed by the default Windows Firewall and your router's built-in firewall in a close race for second and third.