Right now I'm really into staying focused on the things I need to accomplish. Most of my work time I spend at my computer and as you might have noticed from my recent posts I try to make it more rewarding experience.

If you are also interested in that you may benefit from rebooted 43 folders podcast by Merlin Mann. Merlin gives solid advice on getting some time to focus and produce. This advice basically consists of two messages:

• Have some kind of a "box" to put there some stuff to get back to later.
• Go offline to concentrate.

I'm absolutely aligned with the second message and kind of advocate the same approach. The first one is little bit more tricky. Not only should you have a box to put ideas, tasks and todo items but you need to actually get back to this box.

Getting back to stuff is not easy. Especially if what you need to get back to is not the most pleasant activity. Your need to have guts and discipline to regularly go through items in the box and cleanup it. At first it was not easy for me, but over time I get better and better at this.

Happy cleaning!

On the average I receive from 50 to 200 e-mails in my corporate Inbox which I believe is not high number at all. Still despite of the techniques I use to keep my Inbox clean some e-mails need to be stored for reference for months in archive. As you might expect it is difficult to find required e-mails in archive although I try to keep them in logical structure. Right now I use Windows Desktop Search and this tool is really good in full-text search when you need to find single e-mail. It also has some basic capabilities in handling e-mail threads. But unfortunately nothing more.

A friend of mine told about Xobni. An Outlook plug-in which Bill Gates refers to as "the next generation of social networking". I hope to allocate time and give this tool a try as I see no way how my e-mail counts may drop.

With growing number of staff in my department I found my self being interrupted more often than I would like to efficiently do what I have to. As e-mail is the main source of information that requires attention for time enough to completely get you away from what you were currently doing I decided to deal with that first. The first thing (probably, not the most obvious one) I did I visited ToDoOrElse blog by Bob Walsh. I came to know about this blog through his another blog and book ClearBlogging. I found his recommendations for bloggers very valuable so it was natural to assay his ideas on Getting Things Done. And I was rewarded for that by link to “Clearing Your Inbox with Minimal Pain” at Web Worker Daily. Going to try this approach in practice.