I was adding a few items I recently bought and enjoyed over in the right rail, and by the time I was done writing the “TITLE” tags I realized I had three shortie reviews.

After the cut, LabelWriter 400 by Dymo, Vibrating Digital Timer by Polder, and Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson.

Escape My Head: TTTk, Travel Tinker Trouble Kit

Justin has been working on a "Travel Tinker Trouble Kit" (TTTk, natch), which he conceived "to provide access to a variety of tools and supplies at a moment's notice." The initial list included:

When you find a web resource that would be helpful to a new OSX Terminal user, post it to del.cio.us with the tag, “OSXCLI”. It's a project or something.

Flowchart software for OSX?

Hey Everyone - I hope this is not spamlicious, but I figured you all would love to hear David talk about GTD. We recently interviewed him on the Precision Change Podcast, a show on personal development. Part 1 aired today, and we have two more episodes coming. Let us know what you think, and if there is another, more appropriate place to mention this, or other places to mention, please let me know:)

Thanks! Ryan Oelke www.ryanoelke.com

URLinfo beta || Fagan Finder

I’ve linked to Fagan Finder’s URLinfo Bookmarklet before (via del.icio.us), but I can’t resist sharing it again here.

Like most cool stuff, it’s easier to use than to explain, but in a nutshell, when visiting a site, you click the bookmarklet and it gives you instant access to a bunch of popular, very useful web-based tools. Virtually any kind of information you might want about a site or a domain is presented in a well-structured, easy-to-navigate frameset using some smart javascript. Some of the highlights include:

Using gmail I always missed a decent tagging feature. The labels provided are fine to mark general categories, e.g. @home, @work or @@waiting_for

If you are not working on more then a dozen projects you might use labels as well to sort your mails into projects. But when it comes to more granular tagging, labels definitely are no longer a solution.

Rethinking Email

Good insight from Chairman Gruber, related to the email system he's started employing since moving to Mail.app

...I can classify all incoming personal email into three broad categories: (a) messages that are either very important or very interesting; (b) messages that are utterly non-interesting; and (c) those which fall somewhere in-between.

The vast majority of my email falls into the latter category. Under my previous “system”, I let them pile up in my inboxes, under the assumption that some day I’d get around to answering many of them. Under the new system, if I don’t respond immediately after reading them, they go right into my archive. Out of sight, out of mind.

For folks who haven't crossed the line to where this realization really clicks, I understand that this can sound harsh, even uncaring. But once you have gotten into the habit, you realize the amount of bullshit you had been shoveling to yourself -- hoping that all that stuff in your inbox, which you knew in your heart you'd never do anything about, would just...what?...grow wings and fly a response back to its sender? It's daft.

It's so tough to be honest with yourself about your real situation with email, but once you've made the admission, you're weirdly freed up to communicate more authentically, and, in my experience, with a renewed enthusiasm.

DIY Planner: Binder?