You can upload documents in a variety of formats like PDF, TIFF, JPG, and other image files as well as a ZIP of your document. Without creating an account you can convert documents up to 1MB in size and 5 pages long. Creating a free account allows you to upload documents that are 20MB in size and longer than 5 pages.

The biggest bonus that comes with account creation isn't the expansion in file size however but the format preservation. You can convert a PDF with columns into a Word document with columns and so on. The free version simply rips the text from the document into plain text—as seen in the screenshot above. If all you need is the text to slap into another application, the free account is more than sufficient. Note: For the advanced conversion that comes with an account, you get 5 credits good towards 5 pages of conversion, after that you’ll need to purchase additional credits to use the service. Basic conversion is always free. Thanks sharp-eyed readers!

Have your own favorite OCR tool? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Learn Wave’s Keyboard Shortcuts

Every good webapp has a full set of keyboard shortcuts for getting around and performing the most common actions, and happily Google Wave is no exception. While Wave is still missing common shortcuts (j/k, please?), there are a few you must know now. Here are the ones to learn first:

• Arrow keys: Move up/down within a list of waves, and left/right from inbox to open wave panel with your arrow keys.
• Spacebar: Go to the next unread wave in a list
• Ctrl+E: Edit a selected wave
• Shift+Enter (in edit mode): Finish editing your wave; equivalent to clicking the “Done” button
• Enter: Add a reply to a selected wave directly under it
• Shift+Enter (in view mode): Add a reply to the bottom of a list of waves

Here’s the full list of keyboard shortcuts. Alternately, you can click on the image below to see them all.

Filter Waves with Advanced Operators and Saved Searches

Wave is a very Googly product, so searching is simply a matter of typing a keyword into the search box. But like Gmail, Google Wave also offers several advanced search operators that let you find waves based on who they're with, what they're tagged, and other attributes. For example, to see all the public waves—that is, waves in which anyone using Wave can see—use the with: operator. In fact, if you’re feeling lonely in Wave, the first Wave search you should try is with:public.

To save a search for reuse, click on the “Save Search” button on the bottom right of your Wave inbox. When you save a search you can also specify filter actions for all the waves that match it. Right now the only choices are “Archive” and “Mark as read.” Once you run that with:public search, every public wave you read will end up in your inbox, which becomes overwhelming almost immediately. So save your with:public search and check off “Archive” so they don’t clutter up your inbox. (You can also “Mute” chatty public waves that did make it into your inbox if you’re not interested in every new update.)

The opposite of with:public, the with:me search is very useful for just seeing waves that are explicitly with you (not with the public group). To limit your results to only waves you’ve updated, use by:me.

Other search operators include tag: for tags, and has: for attachments like images, files, and gadgets. For example, has:gadget returns waves with gadgets; has:image returns waves with images in them, and has:attachment returns waves with gadgets, images, or files. You can combine search operators, like with:public has:gadget, and use the minus sign to exclude waves as well, like -has:image. Here’s the full list of Wave’s advanced search operators.

Make a Wave Public

Now that you know how to find public waves, you probably want to make one of your own waves public. Problem is, there’s no one-click button to make a wave public. The trick is to add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts list. To do so, click the + button on the bottom right of your Contacts module. Type public@a.gwave.com into the Address field, and even when Wave says “User does not have a Google Wave account”, press Enter. The public group will appear in your contacts list, as shown. Add public to any wave you want to make public, but be prepared: Public waves often get destroyed by newbs and bots who haven’t been in Wave long enough to grok the etiquette (see below). Also note that if you switch computers, you may have to add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts list again.

Know Wave’s Bot Etiquette (and Bounce Unwanted Bots)

One of the biggest problems with public waves is that anyone can edit them or add recipients to them: including content-changing, and sometimes busted, bots. When you do your with:public search, you’ll find dozens of waves that have been destroyed by newbs adding bots to them that delete or mangle the existing content so bad that even playback is broken. Good Wave etiquette dictates that you don’t add bots to public waves. If you want to mess with a public wave, from its menu choose “Copy to New Wave” and go to town with your private copy.

If you’ve created a public wave and someone added a bot to it that you want out, add the Bouncy bot to your contacts (bouncy-wave@appspot.com). Then, add Bouncy to the wave, and reply to it adding the command bounce:botaddress, replacing botaddress with the email address of the bot to bounce. Bouncy will oust the unwanted bot from your wave. This only works on bots. After Bouncy’s done his job, you can delete the wave with the command and Bouncy’s response. Update: The Google Wave team has enabled the “Remove” button for bots only, obviating the need for Bouncy. To remove an unwanted bot from a wave, click on its icon at the top o the wave and lean on the “Remove” button. This only works on bots, not humans.

Garden Your Waves

Like a wiki, useful and popular waves require oversight and gardening, or else they fall in to disrepair or go out of date or get vandalized (especially if they’re public). You can oversee, clean up, edit, and update any wave you’re a participant in, and everyone will appreciate it if you do.

First, empty “blips” or replies are a common occurrence around Wave, which is still kind of twitchy in different browsers and new to a lot of folks who might accidentally hit Enter when they didn’t mean to reply. Delete empty blips when you come across them by clicking on the wave action drop-down on the top right of it, and choosing “Delete.”

To automate this process on waves you create, add the Sweepy bot (sweepy-wave@appspot.com) to your contacts and to the wave itself. Sweepy will not delete existing empty blips, but it will delete any newly-added empty replies automatically. (Sweepy is one of the very few bots that may supersede the “never add bots to public waves” rule, as Sweepy’s functionality cleans up the wave. For more on bots and gadgets, see this Google Wave Extensions list.)

If a wave becomes totally destroyed and you want to restore it to a former useful state, use its playback feature. Pause at the revision you want, and use the “Copy to a new wave” menu item to fork it into a new copy.

Bookmark a Custom Wave Layout

Netbook owners or those who keep Wave open in a small window appreciate the ability to minimize unneeded Wave modules and maximize the reading or writing area on the wave you’re working on at the moment. To load Wave with certain modules minimized by default, you can use a custom Wave URL with the #minimized parameter. For example, https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact launches Wave with the Navigation and Contacts modules minimized. The https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search URL minimizes Navigation, Contacts, and Search panes as shown here.

URL-observers will also notice that every individual wave has an ID that appears in the URL when you click on it. This means you could bookmark or IM a link to a public wave to anyone on Wave.

What Doesn’t Work in Wave

The Wave Preview is a pre-beta webapp, and lots of things aren’t working or just simply aren’t implemented yet. From the “it’s not just you” department, here are some notes on what’s not working:

• Some bots and gadgets: A couple of bots I mentioned in my first look at Google Wave worked in the Developer preview, but don’t work in the regular preview, namely Bloggy, Polly, and several others. The best way to see if a bot works is to just try it, or search for its name and the with:public operator to find discussions about it.
• Requests, or waves from other servers: The Requests link in the Navigation pane is presumably for you to approve waves that come from other servers. However, while Wave server federation is part of the protocol, it’s not yet working for real. That’s why users on the Developer preview can’t wave at users on googlewave.com. Yet.
• Removing Wave recipients: Right now you cannot remove non-bots from a Wave once they’ve been added to it. Copy your wave to a new one and reinvite folks instead.
• Uploading files (that are not images): While you can drag and drop images into a wave (and be sure to try that, it’s fantastic fun), you can’t upload other filetypes using the Files button yet. Update: While the files menu on the lower righthand corner of a wave is disabled, you CAN add files to a wave by dragging and dropping them onto the wave, or clicking the paperclip icon on a wave’s toolbar in compose mode.
• The “I’m online” green dot: When the Wave preview first launched, a pretty green dot would show you which of your contacts was online at the moment. This feature had a serious bug involving Suggested Contacts so the Wave team had to pull it. Expect those dots to come back in the next few weeks.
• Playback (sometimes): If a wave is huge and has lots of revisions or a bot has made extreme changes, playback on waves can be wonky or just not work at all.
• Blog publishing: The Bloggy bot does not work right now, and while the Madoqua bot will give you Javascript embed code to add to your blog, ONLY people who are signed into Wave will be able to see your wave (and it has to be public, which makes it editable by anyone). So, while publishing waves on any web page with proper permissions and access by anyone on the web will happen, it’s not working right now.

Overall, Wave is a rich platform with a huge community of people discovering more of its ins and outs and quirks and workarounds every day. Wave users, what are your favorite tricks and tips for getting more out of Wave? Post up your comments below or in this public wave.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, really hopes to meet Dr. Wave someday to tell him just how shiny everything is. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

In this case, non-intrusive means the advertisements aren’t watermarked or otherwise touching your actual photos. They’re inserted between the pages, and can be pulled out, kind of like magazine subscription cards. You’d also have to be comfortable with HotPrints using “contextual” data from Facebook to target some ads at you. That means the album style you choose, the content of your profile, and region information from your Facebook account are used to target the ads, but the company claims that no identifying information is given out to its sponsoring partners. You can read more about HotPrints’ do’s and don’ts at their privacy policy.

If you’re cool with that at the cost of free, even free shipping, HotPrints’ Facebook app makes it fairly easy to pull in tagged photos of yourself or any Facebook contacts for a quickie album, with a limit of one per month. It’s a free service, requires a Facebook account (and app authorization) to use.

Joen Asmussen coded the one-click bookmarklet converter because he himself was tired of waiting to see whether Adobe or another PDF plug-in would bring up a document, or force him to use his browser’s session restore feature.

It’s just as simple to use as any bookmarklet: drag it into your browser’s bookmarks or bookmark toolbar, click it on a page with any PDF links, and they’ll be converted to show you the document in Google’s own online document viewer, which then offers download and printing links. As Philipp at Blogoscoped notes, this would be a great candidate for a simple Greasemonkey script. Any takers?

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

STDU has a nice browser-style tabbed interface for viewing multiple documents in one window, supports most electronic document formats you would want (including TXT, TIFF, PDF, DjVu, Comic Book Archive, and XPS), displays thumbnails of pages in the sidebar, and allows for bookmarking in documents. As FreewareGenius points out, it also has a really nice text search tool that displays all the results in a list rather than requiring you to jump all over the document.

It may not have been one of the favorites on our readers’ list of the five best PDF readers, but it supports a lot more than just PDFs, and it’s a formidable viewer if you’re just looking for a change in your default reader.

STDU Viewer is freeware for non-commercial use, Windows only.

It’s not a new trick by any means, but conditional call forwarding isn’t a trick that cell phone carriers go out of their way to explain to new customers. Put simply, there are codes you can punch into nearly any cell phone to make it forward calls that you don’t pick up because you’re busy, out of range or powered off, or simply not answering, to another number. Make that second number your Google Voice number and set Google Voice to “Do Not Disturb,” and it’ll pick up the call forward instantly, just like your primary voicemail.

T-Mobile and AT&T (known as "GSM carriers") follow a fairly standard forwading scheme outlined at Wikipedia's helpful call forwarding page, linked below. The Howard Forums site is a great resource for discovering other forwarding codes, including those for Verizon and Sprint. Take heed, however, as not all call forwarding is free. T-Mobile users get 500 minutes of forwarding free with most plans, for example, while Sprint users report forwarding fees of $0.10-$0.20 per minute, so it may not be worth the voicemail switch-over.

Got another helpful call forwarding trick you’ve used? Tell us about it in the comments. Thanks Alexander!

The secret sauce in this DIY project? Paint sample chips—lots and lots of paint sample chips. You'll need to run a raid on your local big-box hardware store and round up some sample chips.

You'll need a source image, an image editor—we recommend checking out the Hive Five about image editors if you need one—and of course a razor to cut the paint chips up. From there all you need to do is toy with the resolution of the image in your image editor to pixelize it and then transfer it, paint chip-by-paint chip, onto your wall.

How many colors and how many pixels you want to use is limited by your patience and whether or not you get kicked out of Home Depot before filling your entire shopping cart with paint chips.

Photo by woodleywonderworks.

10. Cc:Betty

This email-organizing service is openly pitching itself to those left out of the first round of Wave preview accounts, and not entirely without reason. It doesn’t do half the things that Wave claims to do, but it does free your coworkers from having to read through freakishly long “RE: FWD: FWD:” letters just to understand what the original question or discussion was. Add CC:Betty to your cc: list on a topic you want to get started, and the webapp does the work of organizing each person’s contributions, different attachment types, chronology, and who’s been left out of the chain. Even if everybody doesn’t bother to check in at the Betty page for the discussion, the person trying to make sense of it all will be glad they can do so. (Original post)

9. MediaWiki

It is, of course, the software that powers Wikipedia, and might seem a bit dated in the light-speed-paced world of webapps. Still, MediaWiki’s power lies in how easy it is for multiple people to make and commit changes to a document, link inside and out of other pages, create page structures and hierarchies on the fly, and work from pretty much any browser on Earth. Nobody needs to sign into any account unless mandated by the administrator, and everybody gets the information they need without having to fiddle any knobs. (Original post)

8. TimeBridge

This meeting facilitator aims to eliminate the mess of emails and mass confusion over whether it was meeting room 130 at 2pm, or room 230 at 1pm. Create an account, plug in your coworkers’ emails or SMS numbers, plug in a few times that work for you, and TimeBridge takes on the work of contacting them all and asking which of those times work, then presenting the results for your consideration. The webapp also reminds participants of the details by email or SMS, and a just-released iPhone app helps you keep things moving along with an agenda and details view. (Original post)

7. Google Groups

“Isn’t that the thing that Google turned Usenet into?” Yes, but Groups lets a, um, group of like-minded folks hash out arguments, answer questions, and point to helpful resources without software or constraints. Users of a group can rate posts for helpfulness, search out answers across their own groups or other similar-themed topics, and get their answers and responses delivered from an easily filtered email source. It’s an oft-overlooked tool in an age of fancy-pants social tools, but it gets everyone hooked up and talking pretty quickly. (Original post)

6. TextFlow

It’s easy to ask everyone’s take on a piece of text, but much harder to actually incorporate their ideas, revisions, and word choices without spending twice as much time as on the original. TextFlow, a free Adobe Air app that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, takes in all the documents spawned from an original, analyzes the changes, and presents them to you to show what’s different, accept what you want to change, and make it easy to see how far you’ve moved off the original draft. For a certain kind of work, it’s a real time saver, and it makes it easy to respond when your collaborators ask why their masterful lead-in sentence didn’t make the cut. (Original post)

5. DimDim

Makers of “webinar” software are feverishly pitching the idea of at-your-desk conferences as a money-saving alternative to travel these days. DimDim, an open-source meeting platform, offers web users a truly money-saving experience, with up to 20 users able to view a presentation, three of them with microphone access, with no software installations required. It’s a nice step up if you need something a little more professional than a social video chat room, and is surprisingly responsive on freehand drawing, text, audio, and even screencasting across a variety of connection speeds. (Original post)

4. MindMeister

How many 10-minute verbal explanations would have worked much better as a one-minute cocktail napkin sketch? Plenty of them, we’d suspect. For ideas and projects where drawing a line through your thoughts helps keep them together, MindMeister is a great helper. Not only does their web-based design tool allow for easy branching, notating, and organization, but if you just want to jam in a few ideas to be molded into shape later, it allows for email additions. You can, of course, share, publish, and collaborate on your mental diagrams, and doing so might just save you a really unnecessary phone call or stop-and-chat. (Original post)

3. present.io

File-sharing service Drop.io is really convenient because it lets you store up to 100 MB of files without a sign-up, password, or software. Present.io, a group-focused tangent, lets you gather a team of chatters around a set of images, text, audio, or even video files and let them tell you what rocks and what stinks about them. Those away from a computer can call in mid-stream and leave MP3 voicemails for all to hear or join in a phone conference call. Meanwhile, the "drop" administrator keeps the show moving by queuing up new files on viewers' screens, and nobody has to log in or be accepted to join in—they just need the right URL. (Original post)

2. Campfire

Not that we aren’t at least thinking of holding our Lifehacker chat and brainstorming sessions in Wave, but for the time being, Campfire does a remarkably good job of letting multiple people yak it out and learn from each other. It’s searchable, it makes uploading files to everyone easy, it can be a walled garden or open to those you link in, and it sits nicely in a browser tab, changing its page title when new chats arrive. There’s a fair number of third-party clients and input tools available for 37Signals’ collaborative chat platform, but it works just fine as a quiet spot to talk. (Original post)

1. Zoho

It’s hard to jump in and describe the best features about Zoho’s vast suite of online editing and group organization tools, because so much changes on a week-to-week basis. That said, if you find Google Docs to be impressive for a single user, but not a great back-and-forth facilitator, Zoho is where you should look next. It’s able to handle both the lower-level tasks of group editing, document sharing, and other work, as well as the milestone tracking, group chat, invoice creation, and other tasks needed by teams that aren’t sitting right next to each other. It’s good stuff, and it’s free. (Original post)

Sidewiki installs alongside the Google Toolbar, so it works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Google also says that they’re “working on making it available in Google Chrome and elsewhere too.” (Hopefully they’ll make it an extension for Chrome, too, rather than forcing it down user’s throats.)

After you install Google Toolbar with Sidewiki and restart your browser, you'll end up on a landing page that illustrates how the tool works and encourages you to write your first entry. (Incidentally, when you comment on a page using Sidewiki, that comment will show up in your Google Profile page as well—like this.) Comments on the internet aren’t exactly known for their quality (Google-owned YouTube is notorious for having some of the worst, most inane comments on the internet), but Google’s aiming to address that with Sidewiki:

We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which [entries] should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed.

The universal comment system isn’t new by any means, but if anyone’s popular enough to get more widespread adoption for the idea, it’s Google.

Bundling Sidewiki with Google Toolbar is strike one in my book, but I’ve never liked clunky toolbars and never really understood why I’d want to install Google Toolbar in the first place. Some people obviously like the toolbar, though, and for others, maybe Sidewiki is reason enough to install it. Google Toolbar with Sidewiki is a free download for Internet Explorer or Firefox. If you give it a try, let’s hear what you think in the comments.

Photo by judepic.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite time-tracking tool, and now we’re back with the five most popular time-tracking applications to help you track the time you spend on projects and tasks of every size. Whether you’re an old veteran of time tracking and are curious to see alternatives to your current system, or you’re new to the premise and curious to see what kind of apps people use, we’ve got five solid tools to showcase.

Klok (All platforms with Adobe AIR, Free)

Built with Adobe AIR, Klok is a lightweight and cross-platform tracking solution. You can create a hierarchy of projects and sub-projects in the task-management sidebar and then track the time spent on each by dragging and dropping them into the workflow for the day. While you can delve into the details of each block of time, simple adjustments like expanding the amount of time you’ve worked on a project is as easy as grabbing the edge of the block with your mouse and tugging it down.

Manic Time (Windows, Free)

One area of resistance many people have to using time tracking software is a fear that they’ll waste too much time actually plugging information into the system. Manic Time alleviates that fear by actively tracking what you’re doing on your computer to make tagging and analyzing your daily work flow simple. Your day is represented by three time lines: Activity (either on the computer or off), Applications (which were open), and Tags (your personal annotations to your work flow). Mousing over any of the three time lines gives you additional data about that moment on the time line and you can always pull up the statistics window to see your work patterns over time. Check out their video tutorials to see Manic Time in action.

SlimTimer (Web-Based, Free)

SlimTimer is a web-based tracking solution. Once you’ve signed up for a free account, you can begin creating new tasks you want to track. You track those tasks by flagging time you spend on them in the little pop-out time manager you see in the screenshot above or by keeping the SlimTimer web site open. You can add tags to your tasks in the management section of the SlimTimer site as well as share tasks with coworkers. If you’re concerned about using a web-based tracker and losing control of or flat out losing your data, you can export your time-tracking data or even have SlimTimer email you a backup once a week.

RescueTime (Windows/Mac, Free)

RescueTime aims to be the least intrusive time-tracker you’ll use. Rather than have you log each individual activity you do in a journal-style system, RescueTime monitors the web sites you visit and the applications you use. You can set goals in RescueTime based on a variety of factors, like how much time you want to spend doing certain tasks or how much time you want to dedicate to certain projects. RescueTime analyzes your computer usage and reports back to you on whether or not you’re meeting those goals. RescueTime takes a different approach from most time-tracking tools, so we’d definitely recommend reading their FAQ file for additional insight into how they handle time tracking.

Project Hamster (Linux, Free)

Hamster is a simple time-tracking tool for Linux-based systems. You enter tasks as they occur, and then you can categorize and sort them. When you’re done with a given task, you simply tell Hamster to stop tracking it. You can also set up a reminder system that will remind you to record what your current activity is every X number of minutes. One of the more interesting features of Hamster is the ability to shift how your day is defined. If you’re a night owl and do most of your work after hours, Hamster won’t slice your “day” in half at midnight just because the clock says it’s a new day.

Now that you’ve had a chance to look over the candidates for best time-tracking application, it’s time to log your vote:

Which Time-Tracking Application is Best?(answers)

Have experience with some of the applications in this week’s Hive? Can’t believe your favorite wasn’t included? Sound off in the comments.

Photo by thievingjoker.

10. Freckle

Like previous underhyped champ Remember the Milk, Freckle doesn’t require you to learn a new set of rules or input methods to track how you spend your time working for clients. If you type “Writing copy for Benderson Corp. 1h45m,” it assigns a 1-hour-and-45-minute billing for Benderson. Want to make something non-billable, but still tracked? Add an asterisk after it. Freckle offers visually appealing reports about how you’re spending time for clients, but also how you’re spending your own time, giving you the chance to assess how you’re spending your time. A plan with one account and one project is free, and any of Freckle’s other plans can be tried for 30 days free, so if you don’t find yourself addicted to its charts and graphs, you can return to your spreadsheet. (Original post)

9. TinyChat

Setting up a live video, audio, and screen-sharing chatroom for up to 12 people at once seems like something that might require a dozen software installations and point-by-point walkthroughs. If you aren’t pitching a client so much as just trying to get folks talking, TinyChat handles the task admirably, and nobody has to do a thing but follow a link and turn on a mic or webcam. The rooms aren’t password-protected unless the chat owner has a paid account, but you can require chatters to sign in with a Twitter handle to verify identity, and control just who gets to jump in with their video or audio feeds. Pretty impressive stuff for a free web service. (Original post)

8. ScreenToaster

Your boss asks you to demonstrate exactly how “that thing you do with that program works,” but you’re at work without screen recording software installed. Fire up ScreenToaster’s site, load its Java-based applet, and you can record surprisingly decent quality screencasts and demonstrations, with audio voice-overs, at the push of a single button. When you’re done recording part of your desktop or the whole thing, you can have ScreenToaster upload the finished product to YouTube or ScreenToaster’s own site, download your screencast as a QuickTime or Flash file, and re-record audio if you didn’t hit it the first time. Here’s our own quick ScreenToaster test. Tell your viewers to hit the full-screen button for your screencasts and it’s like you’re hovering right over their shoulder, semi-patiently showing them just how it’s done. (Original post)

7. Lovely Charts

Sure, it’s a pretty presumptuous name, but Lovely Charts succeeds at what it promises. The Flash-based webapp produces very clean-looking charts for all kinds of purposes, be it a flowchart to describe a process, a diagram describing a network setup, conference seating, or whatever you might want to sketch out on the back of a napkin. You only get to save one chart at a time to edit later with a free account, but you can export any number of charts to JPG or PNG as often as you’d like. (Original post)

6. Instapaper & Read It Later

It's a really cool article or blog post you just stumbled across, but at the moment—right this second—you don't have time to read it. If you had a bookmarklet or browser plug-in for either the Instapaper or Read It Later service, you'd be able to quickly send that web page to your account for bookmarking. Once there, it can be stripped of all but essential text for reading, saved for offline reading in your iPhone, marked as read when you're done with it, shared with others—you get the idea. Read It Later offers a Firefox extension for offline reading, easy saving, and a lot more functionality in general, but Instapaper keeps it clean and simple on purpose. Both are great services that quietly do similar, and extremely useful, things. (Original posts: Read It Later & Instapaper)

5. YouMail

Not everybody can swing a smartphone, many smartphones don’t offer visual voicemail, and very few people (at the moment) get to play with Google Voice and its transcribed voicemails. For those feeling like their phones are under-powered, there’s YouMail. Sign up, follow YouMail’s instructions on setting up your phone to hand over your phone’s voicemail duties to its service, and you’ll be able to listen to or download voicemails from its web site or smartphone apps. With the limited free or paid unlimited transcription plans, the halfway decent speech-to-text versions of your messages are emailed or sent by SMS right away. If you want different voicemail greetings for different contacts, YouMail can do that, too. Whether you’re rocking the cheapest phone they had at the store or an iPhone, YouMail’s a great add-on. (Original post)

4. PDF to Word

If you need to grab elements from a PDF, edit part of its text, or cut down its size, you might try converting it to a Microsoft Word file. For doing that task, PDF to Word is more than just adequate—it's darned impressive. We were kind of amazed at how well even the most complex of PDFs we had access to (an invitation to a snooty art installation opening) were flipped into almost exact facsimiles in Word format. Simply upload a PDF, provide an email address, and your document is on its way to you. Maker NitroPDF has other free PDF tools worth checking out, and paid software to entice you with, but PDF to Word is a webapp that does exactly what it says, no catches or gimmicks. (Original post)

3. drop.io

It’s hard to say that drop.io doesn’t have a fairly persistent marketing push behind it, but for all the helpful functions it offers, the service doesn’t get enough notice. Besides giving anyone 100MB of temporary file-sharing space without any sign-up required, drop.io can handle the rare faxing job, record voice memos by telephone, set up quick multimedia presentations, and more as developers hack on the open API. Having recently been assigned as Yahoo Mail’s default large attachment handler should bring drop.io out of semi-obscurity, though its deeper functionality still deserves a bit more attention.

2. Fonolo

If calling a company’s customer service line and dealing with automated answering systems fills you with a certain kind of dread, you need a Fonolo account. The free service has diagrammed the customer service phone trees of more than 500 major firms, letting you click the point in the call you want to be at (”Press 4 to cancel an account …”), then taking care of the tedious number-punching up to that point, calling you to connect exactly where you want to come in. With its latest update, Fonolo can even record your call, giving you the power to get better customer service with detailed records. (Original post)

1. The Aviary suite

Aviary is a webapp maker that specializes in fully-featured Flash apps, and they’re seemingly engaged in a dare to see how much users can get done entirely in a browser. Jackson West called Phoenix the best online image editor, and our readers agree. They’ve got a lighter, faster version dubbed Falcon, and if you want to annotate an image that’s already on someone’s server, you can paste its URL after http://aviary.com and it’ll quickly import the image for your editing pleasure. Most recently, and most impressively, they’ve launched a full-featured audio editor that we totally geeked out over. If you can remember their name, you can benefit from Aviary’s host of impressive in-a-pinch tools.

For instance, you can see who my favorite Twitter users are here.

But what I’m learning goes well beyond that. It tells me that Twitter isn’t lame anymore. Remember those days when Twitter was for telling all your friends you were having a tuna sandwich at Subway in Half Moon Bay?

I do.

Those days are mere memories anymore.

Today Twitter is used for professional networking. Well, OK, and a few of us still use it to tell you where we’re eating for lunch, but those tweets are easy to skip over.

So, what have I learned by reading hundreds of thousands of tweets in the past month and favoriting 3,571?

1. If it moves in the tech industry it moves on Twitter first. I’m very active on Facebook, Google Reader, FriendFeed, and quite a few other services, and, sorry to those services, but stuff moves on Twitter first. If TechCrunch breaks a story I always see it on Twitter first.

2. More executives and influentials are on Twitter and far more are ACCESSIBLE on Twitter. There are lots on Facebook, almost everyone in the industry is, but very few people on Facebook will give you access to what they are writing and sharing.

3. Facebook is increasingly being seen as “for ‘real friends’ and family” or a rolodex of contacts, while Twitter is for telling us what they are working on. In many cases people just import their tweets into their Facebook accounts. (A practice that really bugs me but I’m not going to be able to stop it).

4. Twitter is a better news reader than Google Reader. And a worse one too. Google Reader is awesome if you really limit the number of feeds you follow (and the number of friends). Unfortunately I don’t follow that advice. Google Reader has become useless to me and VERY SLOW. I sure wish the team would use my account and figure out how to make it rocking fast for friend management. It’s gotten so bad I hate even going in there and use Feedly, except for the fact that the world is moving to mobile and Feedly only plays well on desktops with Firefox loaded.

5. Mobile is why Twitter is winning. I have moved probably 80% of my reading over to iPhone. On Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter. And I can tell that my favorite Twitterers have done the same. My favorite app? SimplyTweet. I’ve tried them all. Twitterrific. TweetDeck. Tweetie. And many others and SimplyTweet is the best — by far. It never crashes and hasn’t pissed me off once. All the others have. Reading behavior shifting to mobile has DEEP implications for all sorts of startups. If you don’t have a mobile strategy you will fail in this new world. It will be a lot harder to get adoption than if you have an iPhone app (and a Palm Pre one, an Android one, a Blackberry one, etc).

6. A large percentage of great tweets have a link. It’s very hard to say anything useful in 140 characters. Believe me, I’ve tried to spend most of 2009 saying stuff in 140 character bites. It isn’t satisfying most of the time. Long blogging has its place and those who get lots of retweets use long blogs a lot.

7. You only need to follow about 2,000 people to hit about 85% of the tech conversations out there. Why is that? Because of retweeting. Let’s say I didn’t follow Jeremiah Owyang. Let’s say he got an exclusive interview with Steve Jobs. How many minutes would it be before I heard about it? I’ve found usually about 30 seconds. In fact, within 30 minutes you will be sick and tired of hearing about it. Just tonight we had an example when Seesmic released a cool new desktop client. I wanted out I heard about it so much!

8. If you don’t read tweets for eight hours, don’t worry, all the big stuff you missed will be on TechMeme. When I was the first to talk about Yelp’s augmented reality feature on Twitter and on FriendFeed it was quickly blogged by EVERYONE and was on TechMeme within a few minutes and stayed there for about a day. The same is true of ALL news. I have not found an example yet where something important is discussed on Twitter about a tech company or tech news and doesn’t show up on TechMeme within a few hours. What doesn’t show up? Small stuff like birthdays or launches of obscure technology that only a very small audience will use.

9. Pushing Favorites over to FriendFeed via RSS makes them more searchable. I can find all sorts of stuff over on FriendFeed that I can’t find on Twitter. Why? Twitter’s search sucks and only shows you the last few days of results. Looking for something twittered about months ago? I can find it on my account, but you won’t be able to on just Twitter search. It’s not perfect, though. I wish search engines were better and I wish FriendFeed were better at letting me search just Twitter Favorites.

10. There is an 80/20 rule. The best Twitterers are a LOT better at Tweeting than even those just a few notches down. This is why some people get lots of followers on FriendFeed/Facebook/Twitter while others don’t, even after discounting the power of the suggested user lists on those services.

11. There is a LOT of noise on Twitter. It’s true. But that’s why human curation is going to be more and more important and why services like TweetMeme and others (I need to do a post on those) will be more and more important over time. Also, why when I unfollowed everyone that got a lot of discussion going. People are looking for ways to reduce noise in their lives and people and companies that help do that will get attention.

Anyway, I’ve gotta get back to reading tweets. Anything else you’re learning from reading all these tweets?

Oh, and I love that the Wall Street Journal made a case today that Twitter is worth 2.6 billion. I made the case a couple weeks back after reading so many Tweets that Twitter is worth $5 billion. Yesterday it was announced that Twitter raised another round of funding where investors poured in cash at a billion dollar valuation, which means that the investors can see a case for it being worth 10x that. Now you know why Ron Conway, investor in Twitter, was nice to me the other day at TechCrunch50.

FINIS just brought out a sleeker second generation of its SwiMP3 player, which uses bone conduction to deliver clearer sound underwater. The unit still clips onto a pair of goggles, and we’re glad to see that FINIS ditched the bulky control unit that used to sit at the read of the head. Instead, you’ve just got the two units flanking your noggin.

All the control is handled through buttons on one of the earpieces, which are really more like side-of-the-head pieces. You've all the functionality you'd expect &8212; play/pause, moving between songs, shuffle — though, as this is a specialty player, only 1GB of storage. At $150 for the SwiMP3 you'd be able to find players with larger drives, but you probably wouldn't want to take those in the pool with you.

The stand works as both a dock and a regular stand (say for when you want to lay your device on its side and enjoy some video on the plane). Check out the video below for a quick walkthrough of the creation, start to finish.

You can see the printable PDF below:

The author recommends using 270 g/m cardpaper, which most of us don't necessarily have on hand, but even some thick-ish paper could probably do the trick in a pinch. (You could even double up or triple a few layers of paper—at least until you find some good cardpaper.)

We’ve seen all kinds of fun and clever DIY iPhone docks (we’ve even highlighted another solid print-and-fold dock), but this looks like the most attractive, well thought-out dock of the bunch. If you print it off and give it a go, let’s hear how it turns out for you in the comments.

Tech analysis web site AnandTech ran a “browser face-off” to see which browser, among those tested, fared better in the battery preservation department. Specifically, they continually loaded three web sites (AnandTech and two unnamed sites) on three laptops (a Gateway NV52 and NV58, and an ASUS Eee PC 1005HA), testing each computer’s battery life using Safari (version 4.0.3), Chrome (version 2.0.172.43), Firefox (version 3.5.2), Internet Explorer (version 8.0.6001.18813), and Opera (versions 9.6.4 and 10 Beta 3) browsers.

The results? The inevitable margin of error (e.g., network issues, notebook brands, and so on) aside, their tests showed that in some cases, there was a 30% difference between the worst browser, Safari, and the best one, (um) Internet Explorer 8. In fact, IE8 even beat out Firefox with AdBlock installed.

This battery test isn’t the ultimate measure of a browser, but if you’re really desperate to get the most from your laptop battery, it offers some interesting insights. (For our part, we can’t imagine using IE8 just for the battery boost.) If you want to see how the various browsers match up on more substantive tests, check out our most recent browser performance tests.

Browse the full post for all the relevant details. If you’re looking for more ways to extend your battery life, check out previously mentioned system monitoring software BatteryCare for more detailed battery information and one-click battery savers.

What are some of the enhancements provided by PBTweet? You can thread conversations, PBTweet puts quick-response buttons directly under each tweet so you can translate the text, re-tweet, and use a via @ tag.

URLs shortened using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, ff.im, twurl.il and is.gd can be expanded with a mouse-over. Pictures shared with twitPic.com, tumblr.com, brightkite.com ,MovaPic.com, 12seconds and bcphotoshare.com are thumbnailed. You’ll never have to click through to keep reading, PBTweet enabled infinite-scrolling on your Twitter feed. Check out the video below to see it in action.

Safari/Chrome users can take advantage of PBTweet via bookmarklet or GreaseKit script. Firefox users don’t get a bookmarklet, but there is a Greasemonkey script available.

Photo by dcJohn.

Last week we asked you to share your favorite virtual-desktop manager. You threw in your nominations, and now we’re back to share the top five contenders, covering a nice spread of Windows, Mac, and Linux virtual-desktop tools.

Taking a screenshot of a virtual-desktop manager is particularly tricky and we’ve done our best to select images that represent the tool in question. Since virtual-desktop managers are such dynamic tools and difficult to capture in a single moment of use, each tool in this week’s Hive Five also includes a link to a video demonstrating the application in action. The quality of the videos varies but all of them do a vastly better job showing off the application than a static screenshot.

Compiz (Linux, Free)

If you like your virtual-desktop managers to come with some flair and eye candy, Compiz is definitely worth a look. Linux users who just want simple workspace switching might be better served by Gnome Workspaces, but if you're on a rig with a nice graphics card—and you want to live it up with fancy graphic-intensive transitions between virtual desktops—Compiz's more advanced effects are pretty nifty. Compiz comes with a core of plug-ins that cover all sorts of 3D effects which can be further supplemented by using Compiz Fusion, a version of Compiz that sports additional plug-ins and enhanced graphics. Check out Compiz in action here:

VirtuaWin (Windows, Free)

VirtuaWin is a simple virtual-desktop manager that a power user can quickly turn into a highly customized tool thanks to a large library of plug-ins. Out of the box VirtuaWin does a great job with simple window switching and management, but VirtuaWin users have contributed a variety of useful plug-ins to the project that do everything from change wallpaper based on your current desktop to selectively enabling and disabling icons on each individual desktop. If you’re using VirtuaWin to separate work from play or to separate individual projects, you’ll even find a plug-in for tracking how much time you spend in each virtual space. You can check out the windows switching and wallpaper changing in VirtuaWin here:

Spaces (Mac, Free)

Spaces is the virtual-desktop tool built right into Mac OS (starting in Leopard). You can create up to 16 virtual workspaces and access them via keyboard shortcuts or a fullscreen preview. Spaces also integrates with Exposé, and you can designate a corner of the screen which will pull up a mini-thumbnail preview of your Spaces grid for easy drag and drop arranging of application windows. Spaces supports window assignment, meaning you can assign specific applications to display on designated spaces. You can see Spaces in action here:

Dexpot (Windows, Free)

Dexpot is a feature rich desktop manager for Windows. You can setup Dexpot to simply enable extra workspaces—up to 20 total workspaces—just to have a little extra space to spread out your work. If you delve into the more advanced features you can set up rules for where applications will end up when launched and customize each virtual desktop to have its own wallpaper and resolution. Dexpot has multiple ways of navigating your virtual desktops including keyboard shortcuts, a small thumbnail catalog of your active desktops, and a full screen Exposé-like preview of all desktops. See Dexpot in action here:

Gnome Workspaces, (Linux, Free)

The Gnome Linux desktop environment sports its own virtual-desktop system called Workspaces. By default it is set to two virtual desktops, but you can increase it up to 36 virtual desktops. Windows can be easily moved from one workspace to another by drag and drop or keyboard shortcuts. Gnome Workspaces is, by comparison to other virtual-desktop managers, very spartan but many users favor it specifically for its spartan and snappy user interface. If you’re using Linux and you just want speedy switching between multiple workspaces without the bother of further customization, Gnome Workspaces is a solid option. The screenshot here is taken from a demonstration video, which you can watch here:

Which Virtual-Desktop Manager is Best?(trends)

We realize that, considering none of the virtual-desktop managers listed here are cross-platform, it may be tough to judge the virtual desktop tools that are unavailable on your machine. We’d recommend voting for the one you wish you could use most, regardless of whether or not it supports your platform.

Have a virtual-desktop trick of your own? Can’t believe your favorite wasn’t featured? Think everyone should just buy 8 physical monitors and forget this virtual-desktop nonsense? Tell us about it in the comments.

Shared by renee

the harder i try to keep a plant alive the more likely it is to die at my hands. i will be trying these :)

Plants can transform your home or workspace into a more peaceful, tranquil, and beautiful place, but if you’re not good with them, your improved space can quickly turn into a depressing chamber of death. The solution: Get some more resilient plants.

All-things-home weblog Apartment Therapy rounds up five hard-to-kill houseplants that will keep your peaceful, plant-adorned space alive even if you’ve got the brownest of thumbs. Those five:

• Dracaena marginata
• Sansevieria
• Ficus
• Philodendron
• Bromeliad

Click on any of the images below to see a closer look at the plants.

Note that some of the plants aren’t pet-friendly (actually, all but the Bromeliad is listed as toxic to cats and dogs by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), so you’ll want to either avoid those if you’ve got a pet or make sure your pet isn’t a plant-eater.

We’ve also covered plenty of other methods for helping keep your plants alive and kicking, like the previously mentioned wine bottle plant nanny and the self-watering garden. We’ve also highlighted plants that give you better air and plants that don’t need much water, so between all those posts, you should be able to find a plant that works for you.

If you’ve had good luck with any particular plants despite your lack of a green thumb, let’s hear what resilient plants you’ve had luck with in the comments.

Shared by renee

I like the idea, but while everything appears to be set up correctly, I don’t have any data in my calendar. I’ll give it a while, but still, i think it’s good idea

Twistory is yet another free tool to back up online accounts, specifically Twitter posts. It goes beyond a simple data dump, though, by plotting your tweets in an easy-to-import iCal feed.

Twistory is really simple to use, and doesn’t require authentication. Just feed it your Twitter username—or any Twitter name, really—and it kicks back an iCal feed link that you can push into iCal, Google Calendar, or any calendar app that accepts the .ics format. Start using it with Google Calendar before you reach Twitter’s 3,200 tweet backup limit, and you’ll have a search-ready, exportable database of your tweets.

Twistory is a free service, doesn’t require a sign-up to use. Calendar geeks, feel free to share any neat hacks you can pull off with tweets in an iCal feed in the comments.

Click on the above image for a bigger view.

Netbooks are smaller than regular laptops, have lightweight processors—no dual cores, that's for sure!—and smaller screens. Easy Peasy is a distribution of Ubuntu Linux that works within those constraints. By default, it boots into a customized menu with large icons and easy to navigate menus. Those menus definitely have more of a computer-as-appliance feel to it than a normal desktop does. Luckily, if you're not into the extra-large icons and the simplified menu, you can always switch to a regular GNOME-style desktop.

Easy Peasy aims to require little or no additional tweaking or app installation beyond what you first get. Right out of the box, you can browse the web, organize media, watch flash video, and more. Easy Peasy includes Firefox, Pidgin, Skype, Transmission BitTorrent Client, Open Office, Banshee Media Player, Picasa, Cheese Webcam Booth, and the Open Office Suite, among other free and open-source tools.

Easy Peasy can be installed from both a disc or from a USB drive. Both methods of installation have a LiveCD component included so you can take EasyPeasy for a spin before committing to an installation.

Have a netbook OS or set of netbook tweaks to share? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

What motivates you?  That’s the question I’d like to ask in this inaugural column on motivation.  Are you motivated by fame, fortune or fear.  Or is it something deeper that fans the flames inside of you.  Perhaps you are like Jeanne Louise Calment whose burning desire enabled her to do something that no other human being has done before.  A feat so spectacular that it generated headlines around the globe, got her a role in a motion picture, and landed her in the Guinness Book of World Records.  A record that has yet to be beaten.

Jeanne Louise, however, did not initially motivate herself.  It was someone else who drew the line in the sand.  But, it became a line she was determined to cross. 

In motivation we talk about getting outside of one’s comfort zone.  It is only when we are uncomfortable that we begin to get motivated. Usually to get back into our comfort zone as quickly as possible.

Born into the family of a middle-class store owner, Calment was firmly entrenched in her comfort zone.  At age 21 she married a wealthy store owner and lived a life of leisure.  She pursued her hobbies of tennis, the opera, and sampling France’s famous wines.  Over the years she met Impressionist painter Van Gogh; watched the erection of the Eiffel Tower; and attended the funeral of Hunchback of Notre Dame, author, Victor Hugo.

Twenty years after her husband passed away, she had reached a stage in life where she had pretty much achieved everything that she was going to achieve.  Then along came a lawyer.  The lawyer made Jeanne Louise a proposition.  She accepted it.  He thought he was simply making a smart business deal.  Inadvertently he gave her a goal.  It took her 30 years to achieve it, but achieve it she did.

Are you willing to keep your goals alive for 30 years?  At what point do you give up?  Thomas Edison never gave up, instead he said,  "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."  Winston Churchill during the bleakest hours of World War II kept an entire country motivated with this die-hard conviction:  “We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches… in the fields and in the streets… we shall never surrender.”

Many of us give up too soon because we set limits on our goals.  Achieving a goal begins with determination.  Then it’s just a matter of our giving them attention and energy. 

When Jeanne Louise was 92 years old, attorney François Raffray, age 47, offered to pay her $500 per month (a fortune in 1967) for the rest of her life, if she would leave her house to him in her will.  According to the actuarial tables it was a great deal.  Here was an heir-less woman who had survived her husband, children, and grandchildren.  A woman who was just biding her time with nothing to live for.  That is until Raffray came along and offered up the “sucker-bet” that she would soon die.  It was motivation enough for Jeanne, who was determined to beat the lawyer.  Thirty years later, Raffray became the “sucker” when he passed away first at age 77.

When asked about this by the press, Calment simply said, “In life, one sometimes make bad deals.”  Having met her goal, Jeanne passed away five months later.  But on her way to this end, she achieved something else: at 122 years old, she became the oldest person to have ever lived.

In future columns we’ll examine further the ways in which motivation works.  How to motivate ourselves, our employees, customers, friends, loved ones and children.  I would like to get your feedback on which of these areas of motivation are of most interest to you.

Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. is an author, humorist, and coach. He works with people who want to achieve more without sacrificing life balance. Contact Robert at www.jumpstartyourmeeting.com.

Shared by renee

I’ve been happy with SugarSync. No mountable disk, but works well, easy web and iPhone access to files, and keeps my important documents in sync between all my computers

Glenn Fleishman looks at eight Web services that let you back up your files over the Internet.

Many people today think for a living. If you are one of these people, then like me you’ve probably noticed just how much better you are able to think after a break of some sort, especially a break where you haven’t thought about work for a while.

It turns out there is now some very good science that explains the value, importance and function of a mental rest. In particular the research relates to our ability to have insights, the ‘aha’ moment when something that didn’t make sense suddenly changes. (There is also the idea of just giving overused circuits a rest, but I think the more interesting issue is around how we solve complex problems.)

The research points to the idea of valuing a fresh mind more than we tend to, as this is the time we are more likely to be able to solve tough problems. Instead of valuing a quiet mind, we tend to automatically fill it up with emails or every day challenges, and waste a precious commodity.

Research in the lab by Mark Beeman, one of the fathers of neuroscience research into insight, shows that we tend to solve about 60% of problems with the ‘aha’ phenomenon. No one has studied complex real world problems yet, but the figure is likely to be higher than 60% when there is no linear or obvious solution.

The insight phenomenon involves finding a sudden solution, that you can’t really explain. It’s non-linear problem solving, and it’s the way we solve a lot of complex problems. There are several aspects to this research that are worth noting.

A rested mind isn’t stuck in the wrong answers

One aspect of the research on insight is work by Stellan Ohlsson. Ohlsson explores how we need to stop thinking about a problem one way before a new solution can emerge. I explain this in detail in a chapter in my forthcoming book, ‘Your Brain at Work’. Here’s an excerpt:

Ohlsson explains how when facing a new problem, people apply strategies that worked in prior experiences. That works well if a new problem is similar to an old problem. However, in many situations this is not the case, and the solution from the past gets in the way, stopping better solutions arising. The incorrect strategy creates an impasse.

“The projection of prior experience has to be actively suppressed and inhibited,” Ohlsson explains. “This is surprising, as we tend to think that inhibition is a bad thing, that it will lower your creativity. But as long as your prior approach has the highest level of activation, you will get more refined variations of the same approach but nothing genuinely new comes to the fore.”

So it turns out that the ability to stop oneself from thinking something is central to creativity. For example, if you are trying to solve the 6 letter anagram ‘Bmusic’ you would have to stop thinking about the word ‘music’ to get the correct word (which is ‘cubism’.)

After a vacation, this happens all by itself as your circuits for solving a problem one way have become less dominant. This idea also explains why I like playing pieces I have written on the piano after a long break. I tend to naturally do things differently, because the circuits are not held as tightly, and I stumble upon happy musical accidents along the way.

What this means at work is that new answers to tough problems are more likely to emerge into mind when you haven’t thought about a problem for a while. So use this resource, use your fresh mind, to tackle big challenges, not little things you could do anytime.

A quiet mind notices subtle signals

Another discovery about insight is that just before the moment when an ‘aha’ occurs, there tends to be alpha waves in various regions of the brain, connoting the audiory and visual cortices shutting down. Here’s how I describe this in Your Brain at Work:

Beeman has found that people experiencing insights have an intriguing brain signal just before the insight occurs. The brain in some regions goes quiet, like a car going into idle. According to Beeman, “About a second and a half before people solved the problem with insight they had this sudden and prolonged increase in alpha band activity over the right occipital lobe (the region that processes visual information coming into the brain).” The alpha activity disappeared exactly at the moment of insight. Beeman continues, “We think the alpha activity signifies people sort of had an inkling that they were getting close to solving the problem, that they had some fragile weak activation that was hinting at the solution somewhere in the brain. They wanted to shut down or attenuate the visual input so they could decrease the noise in their brain, in order to allow them to see the solution better. Kind of like saying, ‘Shut up, I am thinking about something.’” You all do this all the time, probably without noticing. You are talking to someone then just for a moment you avert your eyes, perhaps looking up, to be less distracted. It’s the brain’s way of shutting down inputs to focus on subtle internal signals. If you don’t do this, insight is unlikely to occur.

In another paper in the NeuroLeadership Journal, Beeman says that ‘…variables that improve the ability to detect weak associations may improve insight solving‘. So if we want to solve tough problems, it’s useful to tackle things where our mind is quieter, with less overall activation. Like after a vacation.

A happy mind is an open mind

Another study by Subramniam et al in 2009 explored the mechanics involved in how positive mood increases the likelihood of insight, a fact that has been established in other studies since 1987. The findings are that positive emotions open up a broader awareness of internal information, allowing us to access those more subtle signals I mentioned above. This has been recently fleshed in research that shows that our field of vision literally opens up with a positive mood. The opposite can be true as well, negative emotions like anxiety make it harder to distinguish subtle signals amidst greater ambient neural activity. That happy feeling left over from your vacation is not just a good feeling, it can be an asset for tough problem solving.

The Clarity of Distance

What all this means is don’t use up a precious quiet mind to answer pointless emails. Use a fresh, rested mind to do the harder thinking, that would normally be too difficult any other time of the year. Like what your goals are for the next quarter, what you should do about that tough problem, or what the next step in your career might be. The more subtle a problem, the more helpful it can be to tackle it with a quiet mind, when you have some distance from a problem. When we are too ‘close’ to an idea, either by knowing too much, having an agenda or experiencing strong emotions, it’s hard to see an idea completely. A recent study on creativity showed that distance literally makes you more creative.

Think of a mountain. If you are a foot away you only see grass and shrubs. Twenty feet away you see a slope. 100 feet away you see the contours. A thousand feet away you see that it’s the biggest mountain in a set. Even further you see the way the mountain creates the weather. The further away from an idea, the less details you hold in mind, and the more context you can perceive. Seeing the big picture, the connections between information, is also more likely to active the right hemisphere, which appears important for insight.

For those just coming back from vacation, think carefully about what you are going to put your fresh, valuable mind to in your first few days. Value this resource highly. It may be your only chance to see the mountain you are on, to decide if you’re taking the right path up, or even if it’s the right mountain to be climbing at all.