One thing I always find common among people who use a browser all day is the shear amount of tab hoarding they do. I find this totally insane for a number of reasons. The first being that it’s completely counter-productive. You may not realize it, but each tab you open becomes a weight on your mind. The more tabs you open, the more distracted your mind becomes. The more distracted your mind, the less productive you will be in general. In this post, we will go over a few reasons why we open multiple tabs and talk about ways to minimize the impact or get rid of those tabs entirely. You can only read one thing at a time, after all.

Doing Research

One area where we may find it hard to avoid multiple tabs is doing research. Doesn’t matter what kind of research it is, the end result is a gang of tabs or windows open with stuff related to your topic. You might rationalize this as the way research is done. If you were using actual books, you might have a bunch of them open to you, possibly scribbling notes from each or comparing their contents. This is a new day and you’re not using real books. These are just web pages and you can take them with you.

The solution here is to focus on each source and find the pieces that you need. Then, use something like Evernote to clip those pieces from the page and save them for later. Then, you close that tab and move to the next.

Keeping Up With Stuff

We all like to keep up with our social networking sites and forums. The problem arises when you have Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, Myspace, Buzz, and Email all in their own tabs in the same browser that you’re trying to do work in. It can get pretty ridiculous. We have to remember that you can only read one page at a time. You can only check one site at a time. There are a couple of solutions here:

• Application Shortcuts – Instead of keeping a tab open with Facebook or whatever running in it all day, just create an Application Shortcut. This makes Facebook a separate application from your browser that you can run at any time and close at any time. Chrome makes creating these shortcuts simple. You can also use Fluid or Prism.
• Pin Tabs – Another solution which reduces the clutter a little is to pin these tabs in your browser. This reduces their size to just an icon and tucks them off to the side. Chrome does this out of the box, but there are add-ons to accomplish the same with Firefox.

The one thing you should remember here is that you shouldn’t be checking all of these places all of the time. Try to set aside intervals where you take a break from your work and just dive into social media and email for a few minutes. This will increase your productivity by giving your mind a rest, making sure you keep your “inboxes” clean, and minimizing distractions.

Remembering Important Tasks

Sometimes, you come across a website that you need to take action on. There is something specific you need to do on this website, but you’re doing something more pressing at the moment. Instead of just leaving that tab open in your browser as a reminder, create an item on your task list and get it off your mind for now. If you’re not going to do it now, it shouldn’t be in your face. Most task managers allow you to add a task description, a URL, and whatever notes you might need for later. Remember The Milk even provides you a bookmarklet for just such an occasion.

Reading Things Later

You just came across something you want to read or a site you want to explore, but you just don’t have time at the moment. Don’t just leave the tab open and hope you get back to it later. You know you don’t have time to fully examine the link, but you need to make the time to properly bookmark it for later. Use the bookmarklets provided by sites like Diigo and Delicious to bookmark and tag the site before closing that tab. Leaving it open is counter-productive and the few seconds it will take to bookmark it are well worth the time investment. You could also try ReadItLater (FFx add-on) or Instapaper for this situation.

Conclusions

Your primary concern in dealing with tab hoarding should be the same as any other area of your life where you’re trying to be productive. You have to act on each thing immediately. If you can’t read it or handle it now, save it for later. The point is to get it out of your face and off your mind until you’re ready to take care of it. Otherwise, your general productivity takes a nose dive.

Free voice command service Dial2Do has gone pro and made most of it’s features pay only. There is a free account still available, but the only thing you can do with it is listen to and record reminders. Other features like email, text messaging, using your favorite social media applications, connections to various productivity applications, and listening to news are disabled for free accounts. We actually touched on Dial2Do when we talked about Xpenser.

This is almost exactly the same move Jott made when they went pro. Both services will run you about $4/month or $40/year (Jott is actually slightly cheaper by $0.50/yr). If you’ve already been using Dial2Do, you were probably given a 12 month pro account for free. This should give you more than enough time to figure out if $4/month is a reasonable price to have almost your whole life one phone number away.

One of the most valuable benefits you can gain from using a service like Dial2Do is the ability to tweet or text hands-free while driving. I know you do it and it’s fine (I won’t tell anyone) but you know it’s dangerous. I have friends who have been in accidents because some other driver was texting. I’ve had countless near-misses because someone was paying more attention to their phone than to the road. Dial2Do, in combination with your speakerphone or headset, lets you tweet and text all you want without taking your eyes off the road.

Personally, I always prefer to type rather than talk, but there are definitely those situations where that’s either not possible, dangerous, or possibly rude. With Dial2Do, you gain the power of getting things done on the go. This frees your hands for stuff like driving, and also helps you express yourself more freely if talking out loud helps your thoughts flow better.

If you don’t already have a Dial2Do account, you can still get a free 30-day pro account and give it a try. Let us know how it goes in the comments.

Lose It or Lose It is an interesting service that helps you stay motivated in reaching your weight loss goals. You tell the site how much weight or money you want to lose each week and make an initial investment based on your selections. Each week, you check in with Lose It or Lose It to track your progress. If you fail to meet your weekly goal or fail to weigh-in entirely, you lose your money for that week. So, whether you reach your weight goals or not, you’re still going to lighten your load.

The first step is to choose how much weight you want to lose over your 10 week period, and how much money you’re willing to lose if you fail to lose the weight. As an example, we’ll take a 200lb person looking to lose 20lbs. Over 10 weeks, that’s 2lbs/week. We’ll also assume this person is willing to lose $10 per pound if they miss their weekly goal of 2lbs.

As you can see in the screenshot, this plan will cost $300 to start. There will be a $10 penalty for any skipped weigh-ins and a $20 penalty if you don’t lose your 2lbs for the week. The most important thing to remember here is that you get all your money back if you actually lose all the weight. Even if you only lose some of the weight, that still means you get some of your money back.

To help you out in your quest, Lose It or Lose It requires you to sign up two “accountability friends” to help in keeping you motivated and in reminding you about your weigh-ins. They will get emails 6hrs in advance to make sure you actually do your weigh-in and will also be notified if you start slipping. You can’t even start your plan until at least two people agree to be your accountability friends.

I think Lose It or Lose It has a genius revenue model going on here. Motivation is probably the primary reason as to why many of us fail to reach our fitness and health goals and money is a pretty huge motivator. They have taken the same revenue model that gyms use (charging you every month and hoping you don’t show up), but have flipped it into something that may actually help you succeed. The mental implications of making a monetary investment in yourself can be very powerful.

What do you think?

VideoLobby helps nonprofits, companies, media, and individuals consolidate their online video activity all in one place. You can easily create a customized and professionally-styled, live webcast in about 5 minutes according to the site. VideoLobby integrates with streaming video services like Qik, Justin.tv, Ustream and more to bring all of your video content to one central location. It also includes a bunch of features that make managing a live show as easy as running a basic blog or website.

What’s the point?

There are definitely other solutions out there that would allow you to create a page and embed all of your live video streams there. You could probably even cobble together a way to integrate comments and related status updates from your social networks. I would even wager, that there is a widget somewhere that would let you easily handle questions from viewers. The problem is that you will eventually be spending too much time tweaking your site and not enough time posting video. Also, the average person or company doesn’t have time to figure out how to do all that. VideoLobby handles all the grunt work. Set it up in just a few minutes and simply worry about creating good content.

How does it work?

To get started with VideoLobby, you will first have to set up an account on the Smibs professional network. It’s something like LinkedIn. Don’t worry, you will be automatically directed to the proper place and you won’t have to also sign up with VideoLobby. You will be signing up as a business/organization. If you’re an individual, just fill in whatever you would like here.

Once you’re all signed up, launch VideoLobby and follow the prompts to create your first show. Keep in mind that a show can contain multiple episodes, so you will probably only need to create one. Specify your show name, pick a URL, and a Twitter tag. You also have the option to enter a description and upload a logo to represent yourself.

The next step is to pick a streaming service. Your choices are Justin.tv, Qik, Ustream, and Stream API. Justin.tv comes highly recommended if you’re looking for something simple to work with. Once you’ve connected your streaming service, simply schedule your first episode and you’re good to go.

Even for someone experienced with posting video online, VideoLobby is a useful tool in cutting out most of the overhead involved. It also means you don’t have to lock yourself into any specific live streaming service. For instance, you could use Qik for your mobile broadcasts and Justin.tv when you’re actually at the computer. Check out the video overview for more. There are also video screencasts on how to create a show, create your first episode, and running a live episode.

Habitforge is a service that works on the principle that it takes 21 days to form a habit. If you choose a habit to form and stay consistent with it for 21 days straight, you have done the hard part. Habitforge gives you a place to record these goals and track your progress. It reminds you daily via email and asks you whether you were successful that day. You can also make your goals public and get positive reinforcement from the Habitforge community.

Set Up a Goal

Once you’ve created your account, the next step is to set up a goal. Give it a simple title like “Exercise for at least 20 minutes every day” or “Pack a healthy lunch daily.” Make sure to keep it realistic, simple, and attainable. You don’t want to create goals that are too complicated (“Fix my marriage”) or too big to complete in such a short time (“Lose 100 lbs”). At this stage, you will also choose what your reminder emails will say and whether this will be a public goal or not.

Check Your Email

The next step is to check your email. Habitforge will email you at the start of each day to ask you if you were successful in your new habit the day before. Simply click Yes or No. It’s really that simple. Habitforge takes care of the rest. If you miss a day, you have to start over. It’s all or nothing. You have to succeed for three weeks straight (21 days) or it’s back to square one.

Succeed for 21 Days

Habitforge takes care of everything except one thing, your willpower. It’s all up to you whether you actually succeed and form (or break) your habit. Staying consistent might be difficult, but if you take it day-by-day, step-by-step, you should reach your 21 days in no time. Whether you’re trying to lose weight, quit smoking, or write a manifesto, Habitforge can help you stay on track and hit your mark. Once you’ve succeeded, Habitforge will continue to monitor you and help you stay on the wagon.

First, everyone was waiting with baited breath for Google to release Wave. Google Wave was supposed to be the solution for all of our messaging and social media needs. It would replace FriendFeed, email, Twitter, Facebook, shrink Kanye’s ego, and solve world hunger. Once those few elite who got invites started to use it, we all realized it was no such solution. It’s a collaborative communication protocol and is not very well suited to replace your favorite social network just yet. It’s not even suitable to replace you email. Some might even go so far as to say it’s a solution looking for a problem, which would explain the many posts floating around about use cases for Google Wave.

Now, Mozilla announces the release of Raindrop. Let’s get something straight from jump: the two have just about nothing to do with each other except that they deal with communication and have names related to water. I’m not sure why everyone wants to mention them in the same breath. While Google Wave is a communications protocol, Mozilla Raindrop is actually a communications aggregator. It’s goal is two-fold:

1. To aggregate all of your messages from across all of your inboxes on various services in one place
2. To organize those messages in such a way that that email from Mom is given higher priority than your umpteenth invitation to play Mafia Wars

Currently, you need an invite to get into Google Wave and you access it via your browser. To get into Mozilla Raindrop, you have to download it, compile it, and run it on your own system. You still access it via the browser, but it’s really more of an application than a 3rd part service. Your stuff is all stored on your own computer.

To review, comparing Google Wave directly to Mozilla Raindrop is like comparing a single book (Wave) to an entire library (Raindrop). Both projects are still young, though. I’m quite positive that they will mature and converge in some way. For instance, Raindrop developers could create a module that pulls in updates to your Waves. The Google Wave team could create modules to import your social activity and email accounts (although, Wave’s interface might make this difficult to deal with).

Either way it goes, I’m hoping these projects and others like them will help to change the way we message each other online. Email and inboxes in general are inefficient and annoying to deal with. How long have you had those hundreds of emails just sitting in there because you don’t feel like dealing with them? Between Wave and Raindrop, maybe we will start seeing our inboxes work for us instead of against us.

Doit.im is an Adobe AIR application that is closely tied to the original Getting Things Done techniques. The goal is to provide one simple interface that will help you hit the main GTD principles: Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do. It’s a simple to use application with a clean interface and may be exactly what you’re looking for if other productivity solutions turned you off somehow.

When you start Doit.im, you will be prompted to login. If you don’t already have an account, simply click “Sign Up” to create your account. This account is necessary in order for your data to sync with the Doit.im servers. This lets you access your tasks from any other system running the Doit.im client. One very important factor in making sure your productivity system is successful is for it to be accessible from anywhere, so this syncing ability is definitely a step in the right direction. To actually sync your tasks, click the double-arrows at the top of your menu (looks like the refresh button on your web browser).

Collect

Your Inbox is where all new tasks will show up. You can create one by clicking the New button at the bottom, or using the input box at the top. This is the area where you will do your brain dump. Just think of all the stuff you need to do, no matter how random or unsubstantial, and add it here. This is not the step to agonize over the importance of things, just get them down.

Process

Now is the first step in making this huge list of random stuff look a little less imposing.

• Is this something that will take you less than 2 minutes to do? DO IT NOW.
• Is this something that needs to get done today? Drag it over to Today to schedule it.
• Is this something that will take more than 2 minutes, but there is otherwise no reason you can’t get started on it? Drag it to Next.
• Is this something that someone else actually needs to handle at this point? Hit Forward, put in their email address, and they’ll see it in their own Doit.im Inbox. (they will need to already have an account, which is unfortunate)
• Is this something that really isn’t pressing, but you might consider doing Someday (ie. learning Japanese or sky diving)? Drop it in Someday and don’t worry about it for now.

I won’t go too much into detail here about GTD specifically, but you can see how dragging and dropping your tasks makes it simple to get them in the right place and positioned for you to get them knocked off your list. Each task can have a specific Due Date, Tags for finer organization control, Notes to add random details, and you can set a task to Repeat.

Organize

Doit.im pretty much handles your organization step for you during the Processing stage. One thing you have to watch out for are projects masquerading as tasks. Any task that can be broken down into steps is actually a Project. Create a new project in Doit.im and add the individual steps there as tasks using your nifty drag-n-drop abilities.

Review

Periodically, you need to review your tasks to make sure everything still makes sense and is relevant. The primary places you’ll need to pay attention to are Next and Scheduled. At the end of your day, you might find it useful to drag a few tasks over to Tomorrow so that they will be in your view the next day. On a weekly basis, take a look at Someday to see if you can make these seemingly far away items a present reality.

Do

This is the area many of us fail at. You have to actually complete your tasks to get anywhere in life. Those Someday/Maybe tasks will never be feasible if you don’t handle your immediately actionable items. Another problem we run into is getting sidetracked or distracted. If it’s not on your list, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. Drag your tasks to Completed once you’ve done them, or check them off and click Complete.

Xpenser is an expense tracker that focuses on immediately recording expenses so that you can promptly forget about them. Keeping track of where your money is coming from and where it goes is the first step in making sure you start to keep more of it. It’s a simple concept and can be applied in many other areas, including tracking your diet when trying to lose weight. Keeping track of things is usually boring and tedious, which is why most of us fail at it. Losing track of those basic details ultimately puts us off target for reaching our goals.

Just as your system for being productive and organized needs to be ubiquitous, the same goes for your finances. A ledger is cool and all, but useless if you’re out doing big things and it’s at home on your desk. Xpenser provides a few simple methods for adding entries using natural language like “Airfare $458 San Francisco to Atlanta, Blogalicious” that make it one of the best solutions I’ve seen for keeping an eye on your money.

• Email – Send an email to e@xpenser.com or to r@xpenser.com if you’ve attached a photo of a receipt. Your new expense will be added, along with the image of the receipt.
• Instant Messaging – I’m not a big IM user, but I know many people who are. Simply add Xpenser as a friend on MSN or Google Talk to get started here.
• Twitter – After you have registered your Twitter account, you can submit expenses by sending a direct message to “xpn” describing what you did.
• SMS / Text Messaging – If you’re like me and you don’t have the entire Internet in your pocket at all times, the SMS option is probably for you. Add your phone to your account and you can text your expenses directly to Xpenser.

If you are the type of person that likes to actually talk on your phone, you can link your Xpenser account with Dial2Do or Jott. Then, just call in and say “expenser” followed by a brief description of your expense. For example, “taxi 34.50 from airport to Boston office.”

Xpenser also provides you with a more advanced keywords feature that allows you to do some special processing. Using the keyword “deposit” or putting a plus (+) in front of the amount will treat it as a deposit, starting balance, or some kind of positive value: “consulting +500 for client x.” Attach an expense to a specific report by including the reports unique identifier: “lunch 54.03 w jack rclientx.”

You can also use keywords to track mileage, perform currency conversions, and for time tracking. The time tracking feature is quite powerful in that you can do something like “time 25 mins contract review” if you know how much time you spent, but you can also say “time start client X” and then “time end” when you’re done. Xpenser will even calculate how much you’re owed if you specify your hourly rate.

There are probably thousands of different services and software you can use to track your expenses, but most are entirely too complicated or just don’t cover everything you need. Most are nowhere near as easily accessible as Xpenser. Providing an open API, Xpenser has opened the door for developers to create some cool stuff. Expect to see applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry and other smartphone devices in the near future.

How do you track your expenses? Is it as easy as Xpenser?

Meme is a Tumblr-like service recently launched by Yahoo. Many have called it a Twitter clone, but the similarities are pretty minimal. The only things they share are those basic features you would find with any microblogging service. Meme is basically a blog where you can post random stuff. There is no 140-character limit, but you probably wouldn’t want to use it for lengthy blog posts.

Your home page on Meme will include your posts as well as anything from the people you follow. If you have no idea who to follow and you’re tired of staring at your own posts, you have a couple of options:

• Popular – You would think that this page would show you the most popular items, but i’m not sure that’s the case as the headline on the site says, “What’s being posted recently.”
• Find – This page allows you to easily browse through existing Memes so that you can subscribe or follow new people. I’m not sure why Yahoo has chosen this terminology, but your blog on Meme is called a Meme. I’m all kinds of confused about that.

Posting to Meme is pretty self-explanatory, so allow me to explain:

• Text – This is just basic random text.
• Photo – You can upload a photo from your computer or paste a link to a photo and include an optional caption.
• Video – Post a link to a YouTube or Vimeo video to add it to your Meme. You cannot upload videos from your computer, which makes sense.
• Music – Add a link to an mp3 file here. You cannot upload an mp3 directly to the site. Meme will create a nifty embedded player for you.

Choosing not to host music and video seems to make sense if Yahoo is trying to keep this service simple. This also eliminates you having to upload your video to yet-another-service. I would like to see them support more video services, though.

Each item on Meme shows you how many times it’s been reposted. There is a focus on resharing items you find interesting into your own feed. Avid Tumblr users will find this very familiar. You can also add a comment on any item. There is no “Like” feature, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they add it later.

Meme is currently invite-only, but if you know someone with an account, they probably have a spare invite. I’m not sure where Yahoo is going with this service, though. It’s not really anything new and I don’t see any killer features. There are also many services available that provide similar functionality (FriendFeed, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.). I won’t go in on it too hard, though. It’s still private and I’m hoping they are planning to do something exciting in the near future.

Tom Rielly, partnership director of TED (Technology, Education, Design) Conferences introduced BlackWeb20.com to this amazing young man, William Kamkwamba. William is barely 20 years old, a former school dropout from a small village in Malawi, Africa, and proof positive that technology knows few boundaries. Watch this video about William and note that his next endeavor has a little, ahem, something to do with Internet access.