I am stealing the below liberally from The Best of Lifehacker in Upgrade Your Life. But here is what I found to be their best tips:
Hack 4: Highlight Messages Sent Directly to You
"When faced with an inbox full of new, unread email, it's nearly impossible to determine which messages need to be dealt with right away, and which can be put off until later."
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Hack 11: Organize Your Documents Folder
"If you frequently find yourself letting files clutter your computer's desktop, or if you spend time arranging files in a deep, complicated hierarchy of folders, it's time for a revamp."
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Hack 13: Overhaul Your Filing Cabinet
"One of the main clutter culprits in most offices is the To File pile. Often this heap spontaneously appears right on top of or next to the filing cabinet, which is pretty silly. Instead of adding stuff to the pile, why wouldn't you just file it? The reason is generally an unworkable, messy, overflowing file cabinet."
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Hack 33: Take Great Notes
"Taking effective notes is a critical skill that moves your projects, your career, and your education forward. This hack covers three practical note-taking methods, as well as how to make your own custom notepaper."
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Hack 34: Organize Your Life with Remember the Milk (New in 2nd Edition!)
"Now it's more important than ever to consolidate your lists into one, always-accessible place. There are dozens of robust, free online organizers out there, but one of the most stable and mature in the bunch is a web application called
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Get Organized with Remember the Milk
Hack 42: Make Your House a Usable Home
"Your home should be a tool that helps you get things done, a space that's a pleasure to be in and a launch pad for daily tasks as well as your life goals."
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Hack 51: Batch Resize Photos
"Everyone likes to email digital photos, but no one likes to receive pictures that are so huge they take forever to download and require you to scroll left and right and up and down to see the entire image."
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Hack 54: Speed Up Web Pages on a Slow Internet Connection
"When you're surfing the Web on a slow connection, it can seem like grass grows faster than the download progress meter on your web browser turns."
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Hack 56: Become a Scheduling Black Belt with Google Calendar
"This hack covers more advanced uses for GCal, such as adding and getting events from anywhere, subscribing to multiple calendars, sharing calendars, booking inanimate objects such as a conference room, and inviting multiple people to events."
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Hack 57: Scan Text to PDF with Your Camera Phone (New in 2nd Edition!)
"You're looking at a whiteboard full of notes or a paper document you want to copy quickly. Instead of manually transcribing the text, you can "scan" the information using a digital camera, including the one built in to your cell phone. Web application
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Turn Your Digital Camera into a Scanner with Qipit
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Hack 59: Automatically Back Up Your Files to an External Hard Drive (PC)
"Backing up your data could possibly be the dullest — yet most indispensable — thing you do on your computer. But who remembers to do it? You don't have to."
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Hack 61: Automatically Back Up Your Files Online (New in 2nd Edition!)
"Hurricane Katrina victims can tell you that no matter how diligently you back up your computer to a local hard drive—as detailed in Hacks 59 and 60—you will still lose your photos, documents, and other important files if you don't keep a copy off-site, preferably out of state. "
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Hack 68: Automatically Update a Spreadsheet
"A spreadsheet is a great way to track progress on any type of undertaking that involves numbers—like how much weight you've lost, how many widgets you made, how many miles you ran, or how many cigarettes you smoked. But who remembers to update his spreadsheet by hand?"
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Hack 71: Carry Your Life on a Flash Drive
"Instead of lugging around your laptop, or emailing yourself files, store your favorite software applications and important data on a thumb (flash) drive about the size of a car key."
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Hack 79: Turn Your Cell Phone into a Modem
"You're stuck with the laptop in the land of no internet, but you have unlimited minutes or a great data plan on your cell phone. What to do? Plug that phone into your laptop, of course, and get surfing!"
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Hack 82: Subscribe to Web Sites with RSS
"Like a magazine subscription that automatically brings each new issue to your door, you can subscribe to web site feeds that push information to your door."
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Hack 85: Extend Your Web Browser
"The best feature of popular open-source web browser Firefox is its openness: the browser was built so that anyone can write a feature-adding extension for it."
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Hack 87: Get Ten Must-Have Bookmarklets
"Bookmarklets can enhance web pages, add special functionality, and make your browsing experience a lot more efficient by offering one-click access to useful tools."
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Hack 92: Take Your Browser Configuration with You
"Now that you've tricked out your copy of Firefox with extensions, bookmarklets, sets of bookmarks, and Quick Searches, the last thing you want to do is have to set it all up again at another computer. If you get a new computer, or want to transport your settings at home to the office, a handy utility called MozBackup can help."
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Hack 98: Clean Up Your Startup
"When it comes to computer slowdowns that get worse over time, one of the biggest culprits is software installations that plant themselves in your PC's login sequence and start up automatically with your computer."
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Hack 100: Truly Delete Data from Your Hard Drive
"The only sure way to securely and permanently delete sensitive files—like a customer database, secret company documents, or personal photos you don't want the guy who buys your hard drive on Ebay to see—is to overwrite them several times with new data."
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