Look at your emails, how many do you have that require your immediate attention? If you answered zero, you should be commended. If you answered too many to count, you’re among the majority. While it would be nice to reach and maintain the near mythical zero, you should first aim to ensure that your inbox is organized so you can leverage it to increase your productivity.

Here are four tips on how you can gain control of your inbox, and become more productive with your email:

1. Schedule time to check email. Many managers rush to check their email as soon as a new one comes in, they have this feeling that they’re going to miss something important. Barring a massive meltdown of your system, that’s not going to happen. Instead, all that happens is you break your concentration and end up wasting time. What you should do is schedule 3-4 times a day to check and reply to emails.
2. Filters. Your standard inbox is a dumping ground, all emails important and otherwise go to the same place. Through the use of filters, you can ensure similar emails are grouped together into folders that will make it easier for you to pick and choose which are most important. Creating a filter can be done in many email programs with the press of a button.
3. R&R. This stands for Read and Respond, which is what you should be doing with every email. When you look at your email, read through it and take necessary action. If it’s an email that someone else can reply to, forward it right away. If it’s an email that will take time to reply to, mark it as important, send an acknowledgement and take the necessary actions. Basically don’t collect emails you will forget about eventually.
4. Subject lines, use them. Time and time again, the subject line is neglected, or used improperly. How many emails have you gotten that have a subject that doesn’t make sense? Remember the purpose of the subject line is to inform the recipient what to expect in the body of the email. As such, subjects should be clear and informative and convey the main point of your message.

Through the efficient use of subject lines, the R&R method and filters you should find that you’re not only more productive due to less interruptions, but you will be able to quickly assess and act on the most important emails. With a good system, you should, in the long run, spend less time focusing on your email, and more time focusing on work. If you have any other questions about how to conquer your inbox, please contact us.

There are times when you may want to capture what is currently being shown on your iPad's screen. That’s easy to do on an iPad.

Simply press the Home button and then the Sleep/Wake button simultaneously. When you hear a click, the screenshot has been taken. You can then go to the photos gallery to see all of your captured screenshots.

The big difference between Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS is the fact that, on an Android device, you can play Flash videos. There are times however when this seeming advantage can be a disadvantage as Flash (such as Flash ads) can slow down your browsing experience or even crash your browser. There is a solution.

You can turn off Flash if you choose to. Simply go to your Browser’s Settings by pressing on the Menu/Options button, then go to Advanced and change ‘Enable plug-ins’ setting from “Always on” to “On demand.” Flash applications will now appear as an arrow that you must touch to start.

If you own an Android phone, you can use it as a substitute for an external drive or a USB key. You can load files into your phone simply by plugging it in to a PC with a USB cable, then tapping on “Mount” when you are prompted by the system.

This mounts the internal storage of the device as an external drive relative to the PC, and you can easily drag and drop files or create folders on the device as you see fit. Of course, it is recommended you do this on the SDCard that likely came with the device, or one that you buy for your phone.

If you are using Windows Gadgets (or those small mini-applications that are embedded on your desktop that show interesting things like the latest news, weather updates, or sports scores), you may sometimes wish you can just quickly hide them to declutter your workspace.

In Windows 7, you can do just that. Simply right-click on the desktop, go to View, and then clear the check mark on Show desktop gadgets. This will hide the gadgets. If you want to bring them back, just restore the check mark again.

Have you ever sent an email and then immediately regretted sending it? If you are using Gmail as your mail client, you can do just that with an interesting but buried option in Gmail settings.

To enable this feature, go to Mail Settings in Gmail (upper right corner, under the gear icon). Navigate to the "Labs" tab. In the labs search box, look for "Undo Send" and choose Enable, then save. Now in Mail Settings you will see an option to "Undo Send: Send cancellation period: __ seconds." Enter the number of seconds that Gmail will allow you to change your mind in the future (try 10 seconds).

With this enabled, the next time you send an email, you’ll be able to “Cancel” it from being sent out, as long as it is within the time frame you specified.

Do you prefer Bing over Google but like Google's sparse but fast loading page better? With this tip you can get the best of both worlds.

As users of Bing know, when you visit the home page of Bing, a page with a featured photo as the background is displayed by default, which increases the load time of the page. This can be distracting or annoying—especially if you have a slow connection. Disable this photo from loading by simply bookmarking this URL (http://www.bing.com/?rb=0). The next time you visit Bing, the photo will not appear.

Ever surfed for the number of a pizza place on your iPhone and just wanted to dial the phone number straight from the webpage? If you are using the default browser on your iPhone, which is Safari, that's no problem at all.

Safari automatically converts numbers that look like phone numbers into links. If you press those links, a popup window will appear giving you the option to call the number from there or cancel. No need to write down or even copy and paste the numbers.

Want to do a quick currency conversion? You can use Google for that. Simply type in the amount in the original currency, then the currency you want to convert it to.

For example, type in: "100 dollars in yen" or "100 dollars in Mexican Pesos" and check out the results. If you have a mobile data plan on your mobile phone with a browser, you can use this tip for quick currency conversions on the go.

The Mac introduced the concept of using multiple "Desktops" (previously called "Spaces") using Lion's Mission Control application. Using Mission Control, you can specify which desktop applications will automatically open in which desktops by default.

To set your preferences, select and right-click (or ctrl+click or two-finger click) on an application in the Dock, then select the "Options" menu in the resulting pop-over. Inside that menu, links appear that allow you to remove the app from the Dock, open it at Login, or to have it Show in the Finder app. If you have multiple desktops active, an additional set of options will appear at the bottom. Here you can "assign" the app to "This Desktop" or the current active desktop, or to open in "All Desktops" or "None." Make your selection and your app will now open in the specific Desktop or Desktops you specify on launch.