How to make sure you take regular breaks and give your eyes some rest at work

We are all working tirelessly and we know it's important for us to give our eyes a break. Sometimes we only realize how good it feels once you actually take the break.

20-20-20 rule

A simple rule is to give your eyes a 20 second break every 20 minutes by focusing on something 20 feet away.

How do you remember to do this?

Let your work remind you.. I'm guessing you work with computers and browsers.. Open protectyourvision.org and set it up to pop up a reminder to take a short eye break.

I personally like to take few more seconds and just keep my eyes closed.

Finally you can also set up a 5 minute break every 60 minutes rule or try a customized one.

Keep this tab open in a new window if you use Chrome browser and already have several other tabs open because Chrome like to refresh the tab in such cases. A new window dedicated to a site prevents that.

How to send emails using Gmail with your work ID

With over 1b people using Gmail, I'm guessing a ton of people use the platform to send work mails. You can buy Google for work and get a yourname@yourcompany.com address but this is for connecting your ID to Gmail without any purchases and send emails using your work ID.

When I joined a start-up, we made this default after setting it up for a couple of ourselves.

To make this useful we wanted to achieve 2 goals
1. Get emails to sent to our work ID come into our Gmail inbox
2. To be able to send emails from Gmail with the sender showing your work ID.

Steps:
1. Get emails to sent to our work ID come into our Gmail inbox
- Open your work email inbox. This depends from provider to provider.
- Find general options or forwarding options
- Find an option 'Add a forwarding email address' or similar.
- Enter your Gmail ID and save.

2. To be able to send emails from Gmail with the sender showing your work ID.
- Go to your Gmail and click on the settings icon on the top right usually.
- Under accounts and import option choose 'Add another email address you own'.
- Add your work ID and follow the steps. I have unchecked 'treat as an alias' option during the set up. Anyone knows more about this?
- You will be asked to verify the address and after that you must save the settings.

Result:
Now you get your work emails inside your Gmail inbox + can send mails to other people from your work ID once again without leaving Gmail. Neat.

Testing it:
1. Ask someone to mail to your work ID, you should receive it in Gmail.
2. Send a mail from Gmail with your work ID, you can choose this ID in the compose window. Check if the person receives it the way you wanted it to be.

Let me know if you have anything to add or need help.

Also you may come across line spacing issues, check out my other post.

Gmail formatting issues with line spacing

I send a lot of emails using Gmail and while it's probably one of the best email services out there, I came across a small but really annoying issue.

People who use MS word can relate... When you just can't figure out what's causing a particular change in the format of text size or spacing and you want to burn the house down.

When pasting text from another app and adding new lines (using bullets or enter), sometimes you notice an inconsistency with the line spacing between the pasted text (or text from an out-of-gmail source) and the text typed out inside of Gmail, and while you may try to use the formatting options in the email client but it doesn't help.

Here's a small thing that did after a lot of different things: It's to paste with a supposedly no formatting option.

You can do this using the shift command while pasting text. Shift+ctrl+v and not just a ctrl+v.

This works similar to the plain text option inside Gmail in one way. Atleast I found the line spacing was consistent.

Anything else works?

How to take notes quickly when at work?

Hey,

Most of us today spend a lot of time on the internet for work and its not uncommon for us to have to make a list or jot down some reminders or paste paragraphs.

What's an easy way to do this?

We could use any text program like notepad or word but then for those who spend a lot of time using a browser it is inconvenient to switch between apps (yes even with keyboard shortcuts).

A very simple and amazing tool I've come across is actually a web clipboard. 

Open in a new tab "Zenpen.io".

You will get a very clean and user friendly online notepad. You can do more than the windows notepad in this.

Notes:

Text is stored in your cache so be careful, you may lose this if you clear the same. Just in case you may want to ctrl a + c (select all and copy) then save the text in a notepad file in your computer 

Or go a step ahead and keep that file synced to the cloud.