“If your email volume is anything like mine, it’s totally insane. Thousands of messages constantly streaming in and, only a tiny fraction of those are messages you need to see. Surprising then, that only a few years ago I was literally living inside Microsoft Outlook. Rigid folders, the nightmarish rules ‘wizard’, and that annoying inbox chime that dings regardless of which folder your new distraction message ultimately wound up. I completely believe that Gmail saved my life. Okay, that’s pushing it. Gmail didn’t save my life. What Gmail (and a little bit of GTD-inspired respect for my own time) did was save my attention span. Some careful filtering and a bit of common sense returned a half hour or more of uninterrupted concentration per day. “

“You’ve gotten into the habit of stowing away information into text files. But how do you make sure your todo.txt doesn’t languish in the dark depths of your hard drive, untouched? If you keep your daily worklog, grocery shopping list, todo’s, project ideas or even your calendar in text files, you can embed that information right onto your Windows desktop automatically with free Windows system monitoring software, Samurize.”