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31 Jul 10 3 Time Wasters to Avoid If You Want to Make It Big In Life

Time is the currency in which corporate warriors trade in. And why just corporate warriors, we all do business using this currency only, but not everyone – in fact most of us – are wise with the way we spend time. We often splurge on spending time chit-chatting or just day dreaming, which we should not. But to defeat the “time wasting” monsters, we need to figure out first who they are and where they are. The aim of this blog post is to do that only. To make you aware of the 3 biggest time wasters, so that you can fight it off.

3 time wasting monsters

Personal conversation

This is the most dangerous monster that covertly follows you everywhere, which you always fail to notice until it’s already late. You can find this monster lurking around in your office and even in your home. It makes you feel that you are doing some important discussion, but the fact is you are not. You are just wasting time talking about your personal stuff when you should be working on the project at hand.

There is a time and place for personal discussion. Confine it there only. Do not let it disturb your work schedule.

Frequently checking e-mails

E-mails are important, and some are very important. But none of them is as important as the work you have at your hand, so it will be more fruitful to spend time on doing the work than checking mails, regularly.

Make a mail checking routine. I would suggest checking your mails once or twice a day, but if you expect important mails throughout the day or if you cannot live without browsing through your inbox then check your mail 4 times a day, at max. Do not let this monster kill your time.

Breaks

Taking breaks during a day is important, as it help you energize yourself. A break helps you remove your thought from the project, and hence get a fresh perspective on the subject matter, when you get back to it after the break. But frequent or too many breaks do not allow you to come back to the subject matter, ruining the purpose of the break itself.

Too many breaks create distraction, so avoid indulging in that. In fact, I will suggest you to make a “break taking” plan around your work schedule. This will keep you on track, and the plan will keep this “time wasting” monster contained.

These 3 monsters should be avoided at any cost, if your goal is to do anything with your life.

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20 Dec 09 How to use Labels in Gmail to Make Your Life Easy

How to use Labels in Gmail to Make Your Life Easy

I am a big fan of the label feature. Currently, I am using around 125 labels and filter combination to short my mails. Labels in Gmail are such a lifesaver. It helps us organize our mails and keep the inbox tidy. You can use label along with filter option to create a rule to categorize the mails and even remove them from your inbox. I will tell you how you can use the labels.

Create a label and a filter rule

This is the very first thing to do. Let’s say you have created a label called Sweetheart, and in the filter you mention that any mail from your sweetheart’s mail ID (even more than one) should go directly to that label skipping inbox, or simply apply the label to the mails coming from her.

Color code your labels

Like me, you can also color code your labels. It makes it easy to visually scan through the kind of stuff is there. Like all my SEO newsletters have Orange code, online marketing ones has red code, and all my writing related newsletters has blue code. This has helped me visually scan through the labels.

Activate Hide read labels from Gmail lab

Click settings (you can find it near logout link in Gmail) followed by lab then scroll down to find “Hide read labels”. Enable this feature. This will help you keep the sidebar clutter free, and only labels with unread mails will be visible to you.

Using labels to search

You can also use labels as a shortcut to reach the mail you want. For this, you will need to enable “Go to label” feature from settings >> lab. (See pic for detail).

Hide Labels from subject

I personally do not like hiding labels from subjects, but not everyone shares the same view, therefore, Google has this feature to hide labels from subjects. To activate this, go to settings and then to lab, search for “Hide Labels from Subjects” and enable it (see pic). That is all you need to do, if you do not like seeing colorful labels beside subjects.

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