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Let’s be frank: you spend more time at your desk than is reasonable. Given that we live in the pale glow of monitor light, how we construct and maintain our workspace isn’t a small subject. Today we’re going to go over a few simple tips on how to best arrange your desk so that you can get more done, and do so more quickly than before.

After all, if you are going to sit and type, you may as well get as much done as possible. Heck, get enough done, and you might get to go home early. Let’s begin.

Desk: Size?

To be frank, you need space. Your chair-desk in college was roughly the size of a matchbox, but now that you are an adult, you deserve square footage. No, you likely don’t need a L-shape wrap around desk, or an X-shaped desk like the traders of yore, but you will need enough space to hold significant hardware – more on that in a moment.

To be frank, you can spend as much money on a desk as you have, or as little. There are cheap, functional options however that I recommend. Head to your local Ikea or a similar store, and create your own. They have desk components that will allow you to quickly assemble a simple table-desk that will serve you perfectly. If you have a larger budget, don’t go overboard, and don’t buy something that you will worry about spilling on; many of us eat a decent portion of lunches at our desks, and to fret about spillage is just extra stress that you don’t need.

Small note: The color of your desktop should be pleasing to your eyes. You will glance at it hundreds of times per day. Choose wisely.

As an addendum to this, your chariot is something that you may want to spend a bit more on. A good office chair will help your posture, and general health. This is one item that is different for everyone. Sit in everything, and find what is best for you. I know a startup in San Francisco that provides flexible, short stools for its employees if they wish; they have proven so popular that half its office now uses the odd chairs.

Monitors

You need one more than you currently have, unless you have five. If you have but one at the moment, a second will change your life far for the better. If you have two, a third will help you in ways you honestly cannot name until you have the fresh pixel space.

Why do monitors matter? They extend your mind, essentially. No more do you have to quickly tab through applications and windows to interact with different sets of information; when you have sufficient monitors; simply pull up the data across your screens, and glance back and forth. This will save you minutes per hour, easily.

I know that the social Internet isn’t for everyone, but if you are the sort of person who tracks Twitter, or Facebook, or Pinterest, or any other such tool, an extra screen will be more than revelatory – it will better sync you to the pulse of the Web that you are looking to command. Your friends will be shocked at how informed you are.

Clutter

Clutter is the enemy of productivity in a desk environment. Banish it as if each soda can, wrapper, napkin, take-out box, and stray pen is an foreign soldier arrayed to destroy your output. Not only does such rubbish directly slow your physical motions as you type and beaver away, but the clutter on your desk will clutter your mind; distractions are to be minimized, and not encouraged.

Whenever you stand up from your desk, put something away, or throw something away. If you stick to this simple rule, you will always have the neatest desk in your office. And, heck, this way everyone can gawk at your beautiful monitors and well-appointed desk without having to peer through foliage!

Lighting

It may not be possible, but natural light is a beautiful addition to any desk. I don’t mean that it will make your setup look nicer – it may, but that is immaterial – but instead that it is good for your mind. A functional work environment is one in which you are supported, body and soul. If there is a window near you, open it. If there is a drape next to your desk, raise it.

Even if the weather outside is a bit nasty, better connecting yourself to the physical world, even as you immerse yourself into the digital realm. Feeling a sunray on your face, or a cool breeze across your fingers as they type is surprisingly cathartic. You will smile.

Health-conscious desk = more productive?

A trend in recent years has been the rise in health-focused desks and chairs. Whether these make you more productive is down to your personal taste, but if a healthy body equals a healthy mind, then from standing desks to exercise ball chairs, they’re worth considering.

Small Bites

The team here at TNW are productivity fanatics. We asked around and were told a few things that our writers do to help keep their copy flowing, and their minds sane.

A few examples:

• Large (and expensive) mousemats like the SteelSeries SX are worth their weight in gold.
• Keyboards come in all shapes and sizes, but once you go mechanical, you don’t go back. Buy a damned expensive keyboard. Again, this cannot be priced effectively, as once you fall in love with a professional set of keys, no one could buy it from you at any price.
• External noise is a foe, buy noise-cancelling headphones if you need them. You can make a cheap pair by slapping earmuffs over earbuds.

Final Thoughts

It may be that your workspace isn’t flexible, or you lack space, or time, or funds to improve your setup. It’s okay, you can upgrade in small pieces. Every month, try to make one addition – or, critically, a subtraction – to your workstation. Your desk will thank you.

Just keep in mind that your mind uses your desk and your desk helps your mind. So long as that relationship is clear to you, you’ll know what to do. Get working!

Image credits: Comstock Images / Thinkstock; Thinkstock; Thinkstock

Finance is an industry that gives a lot of advice. If it’s on the Web and their title is analyst, they have to know what their doing right? Well, it’s not so simple.

As with most things in life, not all experts are created equal. For people who work in the industry, it’s easy to know whose advice is good and whose is not; for the individual investor it’s harder to keep track of what is worth listening to. TipRanks is a powerful browser plug-in that scores equity analysts based on their published recommendations. In other words, it tells you just how many times the analyst has actually hit home runs on their predictions.

The “financial accountability engine” collects any digitally published stock recommendation and ranks over 5,000 analysts by performance so that investors can see their success rate.

I contacted Uri Gruenbaun, CEO and Co-Founder of TipRanks, to find out why he created the company.

“I, like many other good people, followed many recommendations that all turned out to be very bad decisions. The experts vary from high profiled equity analysts and technical analysts through financial reporters and stock forums contributors. Out of curiosity I took one of the analysts I followed (after he rated a stock as a “Strong Buy”) and I Googled him. I started calculating his performance by imitating all the operations he recommended historically (Buying when he rated Buy and selling when he rated sell).

“It was a tedious task but the results were negatively shocking. After doing some more research I noticed that almost every time he posted a rating the stock behaved accordingly during that day and the trading volumes were way over the average trading volumes, meaning I was far from being the only one taking his advice. Clearly there was a problem.

“So with my engineering background I figured that this is something that can be solved using technology.”

Getting TipRanks is simple and painless. Just go to the website and click on the big orange button telling you to “Get TipRanks, it’s free”, click on Add and you’re done. If you use Chrome (and if you don’t, really? why?) the plug-in will simply show up in the corner. It’s that easy.

The thank you page gives a few suggestions to articles you can start testing TipRanks on. After that, you’re sorted. Start checking out Bloomberg and see just how well your favorite analyst scores. If you’re in finance, I would cancel all of your plans for the rest of the day – this is going to be a massive time-suck.

The TipRanks bar shows up on the right side of the browser window, giving you which analysts are found in the article.

Click on the face or name of the analyst and the full bar comes out giving the rank of the analysts performance, how their return rate is compared to the average return over S&P 500 and how high their success rate is.

According to the finance classes I took during my Kellogg MBA, it’s almost impossible to beat the market (you basically have to be the Michael Jordan of trading to do that). If you see this persons average is higher than the S&P500 – pay attention. Also, don’t be surprised that a high ranked analyst has a lower than 50% success rate.

Wonder what analysts say about a certain stock? You can look it up and find out what the top analysts have to say.

There’s some cool technology behind this as well. I asked Uri about the IP:

“Technical IP:

1)     We constantly scan the web (all English speaking financial websites)

2)     We detect articles that have Sell Side advice in them (e.g. David Smith from Credit Suisse was bullish on Facebook stocks and gave them a “BUY)

3)     We extract the information using NLP algorithms we developed that understand who said what on what stocks.

4)     We understand who is the analyst and give you a full report on his recommendation accuracy since 2009 with his success ratio and measured average return compared to the SP500.

5)     We also understand what stocks is he talking about so we show you what higher ranked analysts recently said about the stock.

6)     So basically when you are going through a relevant article with a “hidden” advice inside you will automatically see the analysts measured performance, his full portfolio and what higher ranked experts think.”

Impressive.

Image credit: Thinkstock

Apple built a nifty standby mode into its recent MacBook Pro with Retina Display and MacBook Air notebooks that gives the machines up to 30 days of standby time, but the trade-off is a slower wake up time because your computer state has been saved to your SSD.

Instant wake was one of the much-touted features for the move to Apple’s SSD-based laptops, but standby mode gets in the way of that. By default, it kicks in after about an hour of regular sleep, but Erv Walter has posted on his blog, Ewal.net, a command for manually adjusting the standby time.

Some of you will probably want to keep the default setting in order to conserve laptop power, but if you regularly dock to a Thunderbolt Display or keep your laptop mostly plugged in, bumping the standby setting to a few hours could save you some time. Granted, it’s only a few seconds per wake-up, but those add up quickly for power users.

It’s also worth noting that Apple has the following requirements for standby mode to kick in:

• Be running on battery power.
• Have no USB devices attached.
• Have no SD card inserted.
• Have no Bluetooth devices currently paired.
• Have no external display attached.
• Have Power Nap disabled (if it is supported on your Mac).

Power Nap, by the way, is a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion that lets a laptop check for new emails and iCloud updates while sleeping. You can enable it for battery and power adapter use in the system preferences.

Hit up Walter’s site if you want to tweak the standby mode settings on your Retina MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.

It wasn’t minutes into our meeting before it was clear that this was no ordinary startup. The company and its veteran entrepreneur founder/CEO Siebrand Dijkstra (pictured above), have seemingly done all they can to counter the famed Lean Startup strategy of launching with a minimum viable product and instead have produced one of the most powerful, feature rich products I’ve ever seen a startup produce on first launch.

Today, after two years of self-funded development by 18 staff (Dijkstra has already sold four companies), AppMachine launches in beta at Mobile World Congress, aiming to disrupt the already big “build your own mobile app” market dominated by the likes of Mobile Roadie and Shoutem.

AppMachine distinguishes itself on three counts:

1) Prides itself on being fully native

While many mobile app creators rely on html5 to produce mobile apps, which essentially means wrapping a website around a frame to create a mobile app, AppMachine prides itself on producing native apps for both iPhone and Android.

“Every time you activate apps of that kind (html5 apps), you have to download all the Web content first. That limits their interactivity and it makes them slower. So they’re a lot less enjoyable to use than native apps.” says AppMachine.

2) Unique pricing

AppMachine is taking a unique approach to pricing. Rather than charge a monthly recurring fee, the company has chosen to try charging a one-off fee for a published app. This means users just pay once for their app, and only after the app is published into the App Store. Prices vary between €399 ($529) and €699 ($927), depending on the version you’ve chosen to subscribe to. For most businesses just looking to build an app for themselves, the €399 ‘Gorgeous’ version will suffice.

The AppMachine platform comes in three flavors: Gorgeous, Designer and Developer.

• Gorgeous is recommended for your average small business or individual looking to create an app on the fly, and fast.
• Designer takes it up a notch, making it possible for anyone (ideally a designer) to edit virtually every single detail of the app’s interface. You can not just change colors and layout, but also every minute detail of the apps identity from icons, through to hover effects, all images, color shades and more. The limitations on how beautiful your app can look are only down to the quality of your designer.
• Developer: The developer version will launch later this year, more details on that to come later.

3) Powerful yet simple

After two years of development, you would be right to expect a powerful product. AppMachine doesn’t let you down, but also makes it impressively simple. Dijkstra and his team of 18 developers have built an immensely powerful app CMS that I can foresee becoming actively used by businesses for their own apps but also by agencies for their customers too. With the ability to create an app based on templates, or completely from scratch, plus a plethora of integrations for news, products, location-based services, social media, photos, videos – for many, AppMachine will do all they need and more. For example, AppMachine also provides the “AppMachine Previewer”, which makes it possible for you to view the app live on your (or your customers’) phone as it’s being built. As I say, the antithesis of minimum viable product.

However, it is early days, and while the platform is clearly impressive, building anything of this magnitude won’t be without hiccups, bugs and design polish – so perhaps wait until public launch in May 2013 before making the move to the platform. In the meantime, it’s well worth trying now though to get to grips with how the product works first hand. To do so, sign up here or watch the video below for a teaser of what to expect.

➤ AppMachine

Here’s an affordable way to help colleagues in a remote office easily scan and email documents using a Raspberry Pi computer and an old scanner, as documented by network and systems administrator Eduardo Luís.

The system is set up to be relatively foolproof on the scanning end so that people who are unfamiliar with computers can work it. Putting the system together take a bit of a network background, though, as Luís used a combination of Raspbian, Sendmail, Bind, Python, Bash, Sane, Imagemagick  and Mutt to get it to work.

If you’re interested in building your own version, you can hit up Luís’ site for sample scripts and other tips.

See also: Raspberry Pi launches its first app store to showcase games, tools and tutorials and Raspberry Pi Model A board arrives with 256MB RAM for $25

Sharing on social services is second nature nowadays for most people but revisiting old memories still isn’t something most people bother to do. Part of this is because many services don’t offer an easy way to do it. Here are some fun ways to go back and relive those memories from years gone by.

Timehop

I’ll start this off by mentioning Timehop, which is a service that was created specifically to bring your old memories across many social services back to you. The service supports Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, and Flickr. In the case of Twitter they’ve recently added support for full archives. Besides social services, they also have support for your archive of phone text messages.

After you’ve connected your services you will be presented with a stream of your posts from a year ago on a daily basis through the service. Individual items in the stream can then be shared to Facebook, Twitter or by email. You can also favorite that item on Timehop and are provided with a link to the original post. Another nice feature is the ability to have your memories get delivered daily by email.

If the desktop isn’t your thing there is an iOS app that you can use that will provide push notifications so you don’t miss those daily trips down memory lane. The mobile app also turns it into a community by letting you add friends so you can reminisce together viewing your historic posts.

Everyday.me

I mentioned Everyday.me in a recent post on smart journals and beyond all of those features, it also offers the ability to have an email sent daily to revisit your old memories. However, it takes it a bit further by providing not just a memory from a year ago, but multiple memories on that same day going back multiple years. Pretty nifty.

Foursquare

If you have email notifications set up on Foursquare you will be provided with a section called “Foursquare Time Machine” which will provide a previous check-in. To receive these go to your settings page and click on notifications. From there make sure that you’ve opted to receive the email option “Send me weekly updates about what my friends are up to”.

Memolane

If you want a beautiful visual timeline of your social data across multiple services you should take a look at Memolane. In addition to importing your old data and laying it out in an easy way to travel back manually, they offer the ability to also have emails delivered to you daily. Just go to the settings page and under notificatons check the box for “MemoMail”. They also have a unique app for Android called Memoshake. The app allows you to shake your device much the same way as a magic 8 ball to load new memories from your stream.

Vizify

A new service called Vizify launched this year which takes your social data and lets you create an interactive infographic from the data. It makes for a fun way to view interesting data and patterns from your data. They just recently launched a new feature that breaks down your Twitter stream for the year by providing you details on your top followers, most used keywords and hashtags, and you can even manually view all of your tweets on a visual timeline. You can create yours by visiting this link or you can look at an example by visiting mine.

Do you know of any other ways to revisit old data from social services? Post them in the comments.

Image Credit: Aris Messinis/Getty Images

While this is leading to some groundbreaking work outside the corporate space, such as the ability to track rising food prices in third world countries, or predicting outbreaks of flu, there is a revolution in big data happening much, much closer to home. We’re witnessing the emergence of the ‘self tracking’ phenomenon, being led by the likes of the Quantified Self group, a movement which promotes learning more about yourself through smart tracking and analysing personal data.

While this might sound superfluous to the actuality of day to day life, the opposite is true. The market is becoming flooded with apps and gadgets that allow us to effectively track ourselves and our daily habits to improve a particular facet of our life, be it our sleep patterns, our ability to exercise, or even how much we spend on central heating. Big data will inevitably play a (big) part in our lives from the services that collect mass data to offer innovative services, right down to how we analyse & collate our own data.

Data for self-analysis

This sector is already well established with mobile apps such as Nike Run Plus. This simple mobile app has revolutionised the world of running, displaying your average pace and calories burned, while taking into account external factors such as terrain and weather. The onus on the user is minimal: Simply tap when you begin and end your run to get a complete history, allowing you to track your improvement over time.

Extending this theme of self-analysis, Mood Panda allows you to track your mood over time to spot patterns such as when you might be feeling particularly glad or depressed. Essentially, this is using smart data to help you get happy. Working through a mood diary, what Mood Panda has actually done is take the idea of the diary and simply update it for the smartphone era, where you can get deeper insights.

As with any of these products though, it is only really useful if you actually use the data. So if you notice you’re often depressed on a Sunday (perhaps following a big night out), or particularly happy when you’ve just been exercising, you can then cut out the bad stuff and include only the good.

Saving money

How about using data to save money around the house? OPower is a great example of this and a glimpse into the smart home of the future. It is essentially a WiFi thermostat that responds to the data you supply it with. So instead of setting your thermostat timer in the conventional way (i.e. setting it once at the start of winter and never changing it again), you can configure it so it reacts to your actual living habits.

Rather than have your heating on if you decide to stay out for the night, you can instead use the app to inform the thermostat what time you’re going to get home, or get up and it will adjust accordingly. Through sharing data about yourself, you have just created a relationship with your radiator.

This allows you to effectively save money by avoiding unnecessary heating and the idea of saving money is likely to be what gets most people interested in smart data objects. Mint has been doing this since 2006 before it was acquired by Intuit in 2009, which is testament to the validity of the service. Using the data you supply it with, such as your earnings, bills and desired spending, it suggests areas in which you can save.

Or how about saving money through your actual data? Onavo Count tracks your data usage on your smartphone to tell you which apps are eating up your data or using up data unnecessarily. The app will also alert you when you’re about to go over your monthly data allowance on your bill.

Through smart application of actual data tracking, Onavo Count can even help you save money by recommending which data plan might be best for you based on your usage. You can get the Onavo app on iPhone and Android.

Smart objects

As well as some great apps on the market, there are great innovations being made in the ‘internet of things’ where the objects do the thinking for you. Sleep apps have been popular for a while, where you input your sleeping patterns against your mood to find your optimum time to hit the hay, but one company has taken this even further with smart pyjamas.

The SleepShirt, a product of Rest Devices, analyses your sleep patterns based on respiration patterns. The data gathered is then automatically uploaded to their servers for you to access online. Here you can get insights into the times of night at which you’re most restless or awake to determine when you should sleep. Now you can access the data you’re generating when you’re not even awake to acknowledge it.

For big data to really work for personal use, we’re going to rely more and more on objects that become a seamless part of our daily lives. Pebble is a Kickstarter project that’s aiming to bring data analysis to you on the go. The Pebble watch started off by bringing you information such as when you got an SMS or a call, but it’s been developed to function through apps. Now you can use your watch on the go, generating data all the time so that Pebble can constantly analyse for you.

This is an exciting advancement in big data as it shows the potential for objects to do the collation and analysing for you, without the need to manually enter data or even analyse it yourself. Of course, there will be objections to ‘things’ doing the thinking for us, but the potential for digital technology to play a part in improving daily life and improving efficiency is too powerful to ignore.

This article is published in association with SimplyZesty, a digital marketing agency.

Image Credits: Jim Watson/Getty Images, The Noun Project: Smartphone by Christopher McDonnell/Money by Hakan Yalcin/Suit by Jon Trillana/Laptop by Daxx Longaphie/Piggy Bank by Marie Poumeyrol/Watch by Simon Child

Remember how you felt when tabbed browsing first emerged in popular Web browsers? That’s exactly how I’m feeling now, shortly after downloading XtraFinder, a free app which brings tabs to Mac’s Finder.

XtraFinder, created by Tran Ky Nam Software, works just as you’d expect; with a finder window open, click the new tab button or simply press command + t. From there, you can continue browsing files as you normally would, but now, multi-tasking is significantly easier — if you’ve ever found yourself looking through multiple files across various folders.

Upon first launch, you’ll have to edit your preferences from the app’s menu bar icon. Confusingly, all features are disabled by default, so get started by checking Tabs and any other add-ons that catch your interest, like the ability to view “light text on dark background” and “always show toolbar.”

Yes, the modern file system as we know it may be slowly shifting in favor of a further abstracted iOS and Android-styled system, but until Apple forces us in that direction, I have a feeling I’ll keep XtraFinder running in the background for a long time.

➤ XtraFinder

Update: TotalFinder is another viable option, but isn’t free (usually) — h/t Jason A. White

Image credit: BananaStock / Thinkstock

Most people aren’t great with New Year resolutions, for good reason: nothing really changes on January 1 to magically enable them to stick to (or kick) a habit that they weren’t able to all of the previous year. Still, it’s a good idea to make use of the end-of-year holidays to do a bit of tidying up and start the next one afresh with improved systems for keeping your work and life streamlined.

Today we’re taking a look at clearing out all the junk that has accumulated over the past year, from files on your computer to your to-do list, and finding ways to set ourselves up for a smoother 2013. The first step is understanding where all the clutter comes from, so you can tackle it at the root. You’ll then need to get rid of as much of it as possible with minimal effort. And finally, you’ll need to create a system so that you don’t accumulate as much garbage next year. Here are 20 ways to get organized and get on with your life.

Data

Computers are hoarders of useless files and data, and require a review and cleaning every once in a while. The most common kinds of files that wear out their welcome are photos, videos, documents, and app installation packages. These are all easy enough to spot and remove.

Delete large files

OmniDiskSweeper in action

Windows: Free app SpaceSniffer can give you a visual representation of the contents of your hard drives, showing you which files and folders are taking up the most space so you can swoop in there and delete them. And if you recently upgraded to Windows 8, remove previous installations of Windows to get back oodles of space by following this tip from Brian Keller at Microsoft.

Mac: Grab a free copy of OmniDiskSweeper to quickly find large files, review them and delete the ones you don’t need.

Deep cleaning

CCleaner for Mac at work

Windows: Pirform’s wonderful CCleaner (free for home users) will help you clean out all your browser cache and history, Recycle Bin, temporary files, memory dumps and more, and of course uninstall apps easily.

Mac: CleanMyMac is a mighty housekeeping app that’ll do away with caches, universal binaries, localization files, extensions and more. If you’re looking for a free option, grab CCleaner for Mac.

Backup

For your precious personal files (audio, video, documents and such), consider backing them up to an external hard drive and into the cloud, and reclaim free space on your computer. CrashPlan offers great free apps to manage your backup activities to drives and other computers, is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux, and even offers paid plans (starting at $1.50/month for 10GB of space) for online storage.

Clean out your computer and secure your data by following these tips once every quarter and you should be in good shape.

Debt

Debt has this uncanny way of creeping into your life slowly and making a mess of it; we’ve all been there, and some of us still are. Thankfully, there are now plenty of resources available to help ease the process of repaying creditors.

The folks at Lifehacker regularly offer tips and tricks on how to deal with debt , including coverage on a study that shows that paying off smaller debts first increases your odds of successfully eliminating personal debt.

You can also set up ReadyForZero for free to link your debt accounts, put together a manageable plan based on your situation, make payments and stick to a schedule, and clear your debt optimally.

ReadyForZero

For many, debt is inevitable; being aware of your spending and saving habits, making payments on time and generally staying on top of things is the key to successfully dealing with it.

Paper

Evernote

Weren’t we promised paperless offices and homes by pundits and technophiles about now? That hasn’t yet become a complete reality, but we can get closer to it with a few neat gadgets and apps. For starters, get your hands on Evernote: it’s available on browsers and on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry, and is a great place to put all your thoughts in text, scribbles, pictures or audio, and can even save your scans of receipts, documents and whatever else you have committed to paper.

And speaking of scanning, now’s a great time to get a device for the task: Fujitsu’s ScanSnap range and Doxie’s line of portable scanners scan directly into Evernote, making your documents instantly searchable.

Doxie Go Scanner

What’s great about Evernote is that the more you use it, the more useful it becomes. Having all the things you need to remember in one place makes it easy to stop worrying about misplacing notes and receipts, allows you to retrieve information when you need it and helps you stay productive.

Scan with what’s close at hand

If you want something even smaller, just grab an app for your smartphone to answer the call of duty: The Grizzly Labs’ Genius Scan (available for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone) lets you snap a picture of a document, find edges and fix perspective automatically, and allows you to export scans as JPG or PDF, and can even combine multiple pages into a single handy PDF to share or export into Evernote.

Genius Scan

Email

If messages have been clogging up your inbox all year, now’s a good time to take stock of the situation and clear out all the email you don’t need to ever see again. Spam itself generally averages about 68% of our inbox content. Begin by following these simple tips from Rebecca Thorman on achieving inbox zero (a state of calm brought on by a lack of emails that you need to deal with).

Lose the attachment(s)

Next, locate and get rid of large attachments in your email to free up some space. You can do this easily with your Gmail account for free using FindBigMail‘s service that labels your emails which are over 1MB, 5MB and 10MB in size for easy review and deletion.

There’s a paid plan if you’d like to use it with your Google Apps addresses but you could alternatively use this simple search string: size:xMB (where x equals the number of MB). If you’d like to keep a copy of the attached files, simply apply the #googleDrive label to the message to save the files to Google Drive and then delete the emails.

Find Big Mail

Bookmarks

Bookmarks get out of hand really quickly, perhaps because they become hard to find when you need them. If you’re using Google Chrome, you can enlist the help of Bookmarks Tagger, a clever extension that lets you add tags to bookmarks whenever you find an interesting page, and search for them later by simply entering bt in the Omnibar, hitting Tab and then entering your query. It’s an elegant solution if you can get used to the extra step, and in my experience, totally worth the trouble.

Bookmarks Tagger

Read it later — for real

Another way to get through all the content you want to consume but don’t always immediately have the time for, is to use Pocket. This beautiful free read-later service (available as a web app and also on iOS and Android) lets you get through your saved pages in a clean article format, stripped of ads and layouts. You can add pages to Pocket using extensions for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari or with any other browser with a bookmarklet.

Pocket

Contacts

There’s nothing as bothersome as having a contact list that runs into the thousands when you clearly don’t remember ever getting in touch with that many people. Thankfully, there’s an app for that, and it’s called Scrubly.

Available at a one-time fee of $19.95 or $39.95 a year (with a free plan for up to 250 contacts), this gem of an app works with Outlook, Mac Address Book, Gmail and Google Apps, and enhances your contact list with info from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter contact info.

It also helps you remove duplicate and junk contacts, and merge compatible (having at least two fields in common) contacts. And for those who’re concerned about making things worse, don’t worry — you can always revert your data to its original state.

Scrubly

Twitter contacts

If you’re serious about your Twitter usage, listen up: ManageFlitter is a free web app that allows you to sift through your Twitter contacts and unfollow those who don’t add value to your time on the 140 Express (yes, that’s what we’re calling it now — alright, fine, it’s just me).

Sort users by how quiet or talkative they are, or by whether they follow you back, or are spam accounts. You can even add your favorite profiles to a whitelist so you don’t remove them by accident.

ManageFlitter

Smartphones and tablets

Keeping your mobile devices’ memory clear helps them run smoothly, even if that does mean removing that 3D MMORPG you haven’t played in a couple of months. With iOS devices, it’s a fairly simple task — simply uninstall the apps you don’t use.

Android users will benefit greatly from the same process, but can get even deeper with something like All-In-One Toolbox that lets you batch uninstall apps, clear browsing history and app caches with just a few quick taps.

All-In-One Toolbox

Get to grips with your apps

If your home screen is riddled with icons and doesn’t help you find the app you need when you want to do something, consider grouping them by activity instead of category. For example, I have my currency converter and mobile banking app in an icon group labeled Pay, my simple games in another called Play Quick, and my more engaging games in another called Play Hard.

Grouping apps by activity

App permissions

If you use a number of apps that have your personal information and grant access to that information for registrations and access to features on other apps, you might end up giving away more details about yourself than you intend to.

Head over to MyPermissions.org to review your permissions settings for a variety of services, clean them out with one click and set up alerts to be notified when a new app gains access to your information (using the free Google Chrome extension). It’s not going to take you completely off the grid, but it’s a good place to start.

MyPermissions

Wallets

If you’re still rocking a George Costanza wallet, you need to let the 90s out of your vice-like grip — you know, the one you make with your bear-sized paws to hold that wallet with. Get rid of all the clutter (using our paper digitizing tips above), and go out into the world with a slim, sophisticated wallet that’s more this millenium.

Take your pick from the SlimFold wallet (made of waterproof rip-resistant Tyvek, $20), the RFID-blocking HuMn wallet ($75) and the upcoming Supr Slim wallet.

Supr Slim Wallet

Stuff

The first symptom of hoarding is hoarding itself; the second is denial. Come to terms with the fact that you really don’t need all the stuff you have, make a plan to get rid of the things you don’t use or need, and reconnect with friends, family and those you forgot while you were busy accumulating stuff. To get started sorting out items you don’t need, follow a simple rule of thumb for review: if you lost the item, would you buy another immediately to replace it?

If the answer is no, you have in your hands a liquidatable asset. Get these items together, snap photos of them (using this handy guide, if you’re using a smartphone) and do what you think is best: sell, donate, swap, recycle or upcycle. Just get it out of your house and out of your mind.

You can of course sell your wares on eBay and Craigslist; a number of retailers including Best Buy, Amazon and Tesco also have trade-in programs where you can get store credit for your old products. Kinder souls can donate everything from books to clothes to cellphones, to appropriate recipients found on this list compiled by Julia Brenner over at Apartment Therapy. And finally, Candace Fox has a huge Pinterest board filled with upcycling project ideas for you to get your craft on with.

Candace Fox’s upcycling projects board on Pinterest

Appointments and meetings

If you’re tired of traveling across borders to attend meetings, take some time during the holidays to get used to a better, smarter way of communicating with groups. UberConference allows you to start and join conference calls via web, iOS or Android apps for free on a beautiful interface, and throws in features like outbound calling and call recording for $10 a month.

UberConference

If you need a visual aid for your meetings, try using ConceptBoard along with UberConference; it allows you to create instant whiteboards that you can paste images and text on, and have others comment right within the app. There really isn’t a need for trudging through snow to get to the airport for a meeting in 2013, is there?

Habits

Whether you want to kick a bad habit or stay on track with a good one, apps can be of great help. Chains.cc offers a free web and iOS app that lets you visually keep a chain going for every day that you successfully stick to your goal; the reward is nothing more than a satisfying unbroken chain

It’s hard to explain, but it works — it was, in fact, Jerry Seinfeld’s idea. If you’ve an Android device, you can try Florian, a visual diary that lets you fill a calendar with icons to mark completed workouts.

Chains.cc

To-do items

There are hundreds of different principles one can follow to get things done, but really the one that works is the most obvious — just do what you can do right away. Prioritizing, scheduling and planning are all well and good, but sometimes, getting things done just needs a little actual doing.

Keep track of your tasks wherever you go with Wunderlist — it’s made by the happy Germans at 6Wunderkinder, is drop-dead gorgeous, and is available for free for desktop, web and mobile platforms. You can add notes to tasks, make lists of tasks, and even share them with collaborators, and look good while you’re at it. Once you get used to your own way of knocking items off your list, stick to it and you’ll be golden.

Wunderlist

There you have it: 20 tips for paring down all the things that you can do without or with less of in the coming year. They’re really guidelines more than anything else; incorporate them into your life and workflow one at a time and adjust to them at your own pace. Happy super-productive 2013!

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Whenever we start a new year, we really want to focus on the “new” part. Wherever we can get a “clean slate”, we try.

When it comes to our technology, that may mean cleaning out our files and folders, reviewing our native applications and deleting those going unused, or simply (and finally) getting to that elusive “inbox zero”.

But starting out a new year on the right foot often begins with looking at what we can put on the clean slate in order to make sure we can have the best year possible. Choosing the best tools to help us with that can be a chore, but to start you off on the right path for 2013, I’ve assembled 13 web apps you need to get familiar with so that you can make the most of the year ahead.

1. Asana

A task management app that works for both teams and for individuals, Asana not only allows you to stay connected with those who you are working with, but allows you to stay connected to the things you are working on. Under active development, Asana is an incredibly powerful productivity, and its price point (free for teams under 30 users) is just one of the things winning over new users who are just getting into task management and need to work on the web rather than a specific native platform like Mac OS X or Windows.

2. Buffer

This app is not only a huge time-saver, but it allows you to share socially without skipping a beat and annoying people at the same time with an overload of updates. Buffer allows you to schedule your social media updates and it uses its algorithm to decide what time is best to schedule those updates. That means you can share freely, knowing that Buffer has got you covered without overwhelming your followers in the process. (Buffer is also one of the few services that has App.net coverage available, which is a bonus for those using that service to share.)

3. Evernote

There’s not one productivity app that I can think of that has the ubiquity that Evernote has. Evernote sports a time of features, and has a ton of add-ons that you can use to complement the main web app. And while the focus of this article is on web apps, it is worth noting that Evernote has made native apps for several platforms — leaving almost nowhere that you cannot have Evernote at your fingertips.

4. IFTTT

IFTTT is I service that lets you use triggers to allow for certain actions to take place on a variety of online services. With over 59 channels to choose from, and an almost infinite amount of recipes that you can use, IFTTT is perhaps the most powerful automation service online today.

5. Bliss Control

If you want to make changes to your social network profiles and other online services all from one place, then Bliss Control is where it’s at. With a variety of actions to choose from – including account deletion – and covering a large number of services, let’s control can both save you time and headaches for the rest of the year with just a few clicks.

6. Dropbox

You can lose all those little USB thumb drives. From now on, Dropbox is your thumbdrive no matter where you are. The popular web-based file hosting service allows you to sync files in a folder on your main machine (Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux) to its online service, meaning you can have access to them as long as you have access to your Dropbox account. Dropbox is becoming indispensable service for me, and in 2013 it’s one you should definitely look at adding to your web app toolbox.

7. ThisLife

ThisLife allows you create a timeline of all of your moments, be they photos, videos, notes, and more all in one place for easy access. But that easy access is for you to control – ThisLife takes privacy very seriously and treats it as such. You can share ThisLife accounts so you others can combine your moments into one place, making it easy for you to find the moments that matter to you the most – because they’re all there in ThisLife. As someone who has put together the family photo calendar in the past (taking photos from family members from all over Canada, I sure wish ThisLife was available then. I’ll be using it to its fullest in 2013 – and I suggest you do the same.

8. Zapier

An alternative to IFTTT is Zapier, which is designed for more of the business-oriented services online. For example, Asana is one of the services that Zapier supports – and that’s just one of the 140 services you have to choose from. It’s a tool worth considering as 2013 makes its entrance, even if you’re already using IFTTT.

9. Trello

Trello is one of those task/project management apps that helps you out so much and gets out of the way when you don’t want it cluttering up your review. Through the use of “cards”, you can keep track of everything from larger scale projects to simple to-dos. Like Asana, it is ideal for teams. But unlike Asana, it is free no matter how large your team is.

10. Notification Control

This app is a predecessor to Bliss Control, and it allows you to remove persistent email notifications from a variety of social network apps. So if you want to keep your inbox from overflowing with email notifications (and sometimes they can creep back in when certain social networks make changes) then Notification Control would be another app I’d have at the ready when the new year arrives.

11. HootSuite

If you’re looking for more robust social network management, then HootSuite is definitely worth a look. You can really get granular with how you manage your social media using this service, from auto scheduling updates to managing a wide variety of social network platforms. There’s a reason that HootSuite is so popular…and that’s because it is so good.

12. Rdio

I love music. But I don’t like storing it…and I’m not a fan of ads, either. Rdio solves all of these for me at a cost of just a few dollars a month. Now I can find most of the music I’m looking for right within Rdio, including obscure artists that I haven’t listened to since my college radio days. As for its competition, until they come to my home and native land, they aren’t even an option. And Rdio is here already – and so it’s on my list of recommended web apps for 2013 as well.

13. Prezi

For those of us I have to give presentations, there’s nothing worse than showing up in the venue and not having the gear on hand to connect your machine to their projector. Even with enough foresight, things happen. But thanks to Prezi, I no longer need to rely on cables or compatibility issues. Prezi presentations are web-based, allowing me to share my ideas and slides with ease. Presentations are a snap to create, and they look great as well – even if you’re not that great at design. Forget PowerPoint and Keynote – keep Prezi close at hand and you’ll be ready to present your slidedeck worry-free in 2013 and beyond.