Switch Your Email Painlessly

If you've fallen out of love with your email client and want to try another service, TrueSwitch might be of interest. TrueSwitch automatically informs everyone in your contacts of your changed address, then forwards all of your email and contact data to your new account. Transfers between services partnering with TrueSwitch is free (Gmail, AOL and Outlook). For everyone else, a fairly reasonable $29.95. So, if you are one of the "90% of users [who] consider email interruption a barrier to switching to an ISP of their choice", procrastinate no longer.

TeuxDeux

The designer and blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg has come up with a neat little to-do service with a cute name: TeuxDeux. She has pared this free offering back to the absolute essentials of to-do-ness: seven days viewed at once, a list below, order or day of task changed by drag and drop, click twice to finalise a task, click little cross to delete. Future tasks are black, past are grey and present tasks are red. And that's it. It works. One might wish for additional features and email > task capabilities, but any additional features would tend to muddy what is a very clean interface.

Capture Your Screen

The Windows screen capture feature is effective but pretty basic — dumping the display into memory, available for paste into image editing software. Google has released a free extension for its Chrome browser that gives finer grained control over snapshots of browser windows. Once installed, users can select a user-defined area, the entire window or the active area, and define shortcuts that invoke the various options.

Gaining Control over Your Time

If your attention at work tends to wander at times (and whose doesn't?), you may be looking for ways of improving your efficency. A first step might be using something like Rescue Time. A browser based solution with a desktop client, Rescue Time monitors your computer use and supplies you with a whole dashboard of analysis. I found its admonitory eye made me much less likely to check out the latest news or blogs and focus on the task at hand. Time will tell if that effect fades away. Rescue Time also ranks you with other users of the service, so if you are competive, maintaining a high efficiency rating may be an additional motivating factor.  Rescue Time can be integrated with Google and offers a fairly full-featured free account.