Do you find your most productive at the very start of the day following all those lovely hours of sleep? But do you also find you spend the first hour or 2 at work reading through emails only to then discover its coming up to lunch and you haven't achieved much actual work?

This is a problem many of us face and often it can lead to having a feeling of being behind for the rest of the day, which ultimately lowers our performance for the rest of the day.

The solution is simple, Don't open your email! Ok obviously at some point you will have to, but rather than first thing, try getting an hour of worm done first. This way you've got something done that you can feel good about before trawling through all those emails followed by a break for lunch.

About a year ago I was listening to a podcast to do with work and productivity and one of the subjects being discussed was email management and not letting it take over you life.

At work we all receive a lot of emails, in-fact recent stats shows light users receive 180 emails a week, heavy users receive 2100 emails a week. Now most of these go in the trash or get picked up by spam filters, but a lot is still emails from colleges needing action, some can be deleted and some just need to be kept for the future. With the ones needed for the future a lot of us file them into folders (often organised by projects) so that they can easily be found in the future.

But when that future date occurs you discover that your folders are actually full of hundreds of emails. Worse still a lot of them were items that could probably have been deleted a couple months after reading them. Now theres no way of finding the one you wanted by looking through the list, so your only option is to use a search to find the email you wanted. This is ok though as searching emails actually works quite well now. But if searching actually works well now and we're going to do it anyway, what was the point in all that time you spent filing emails into individual folders?

So here's my recommendation. Create 2 folders one called Keep Forever and the other called Keep for 6 Months. Set a rule on the 6 month folder so that anything older than 6 months get automatically deleted (if your concerned you can always make the rule for a year). Then when emails come in if it needs actioning leave it in your inbox, if you need to keep it forever and move it to the forever folder and if it's something that might be needed over the next few weeks put it in the 6 month folder. This way you inbox is kept small with things you need to reply to, you still have all your emails to search in the future, and the crap that is only relevant for the next few months will be deleted automatically in 6 months time.

Going Further....

In Outlook you also have the ability to tag an email with categories (or multiple categories), each category is also colour coded. An extra step you can take is to choose a category for each email that comes in that your going to keep or need to action. e.g. I tag my emails with a client category.

This is much simpler than organising into folders as you can do it as you receive/read emails (not when filing), you get the benefit of being able to find emails to action in your inbox visually by colour, and when you need to search in the future you also have the power of the category filter.

Give it a try for a few months and then wonder why you spent all that time filing emails.

I often read comments stating Microsoft is approaching demise due to its over reliance on Office and the fact that because iWorks can read and save in the Office file format the need to use Office is gone. My own previous experience with iWorks wasn't great but as there's so much support I decided to give it another go and see if I really could replace Office with iWorks.

Firstly for the record although my day job is as a .net developer, im also a huge Apple fan and have been for the last decade, so im fairly unbiased towards each company.

Word vs Pages

Being a .net developer my main tool is visual studio, actually using word is not a regular thing for me, my general use is to write specs, documentation and user guides. Features like mail merge or printing labels are things I've never even needed to do once. There are a few features though that I regularly use and need. These include styling text, adding screenshots, comments, tables and using the smart object function to make illustrations.

UI

So first off the UI. Microsoft have done away with toolbars of old and tried to squeeze everything into 1 tab bar at the top of the page. Apple on the other hand have a toolbar plus an object inspector popup containing a lot of tabs.

UI is largely a personal thing but I would give this one to Microsoft. Pages toolbar is good at changing fonts and adding charts but overall I felt like they had just dumped most of the functionality into the object inspector to make the toolbar simple. The result is the object inspector contains a lot of functionality in a small space organised into tabs with cryptic icons rather than words.

Styling text

Both packages have the standard font drop down, bold, underline, colour etc that you expect from any word processor. Apple however have a button that seems to quickly fill a page with Loren ipsum text including made up headings and sub headings. I guess the idea with this is that you then replace the text with your own and the sections are already styled.

Microsoft on the other hand have added icons to there ribbon toolbar that let you select from a predefined set of styles for headings, sub headings etc. They also have a format painter tool that allows you to copy the styles on an existing section to another.

In the styling comparison I would award the category to Microsoft. I personally prefer the quick style links and they have been something I've come to rely on, but there also nicer styles than what Pages auto page fill feature creates.

Screenshots

One of my most loved features of Word is the screenshot button that lets you insert a screen clipping of any open window or select a custom clipping with the mouse. As one of my main uses is to write documentation, this is something I use a lot. As far as I could tell Pages does not have an equivalent feature. The screen grab app must be used to get the screen shot which you can then paste into the doc.

Comments

Both apps support adding comments and in both cases they highlight in nice colours. Word does have a lot more options with its comments compared to Pages which just has add and delete, but this is no real issue Pages does as much as is needed.

Tables, charts

Inserting a table or chart can be achieved daily easily in Pages as can it be in Word.

Smart Objects

For those that don't know, Words smart object feature allows you to quickly create diagrams like a higherarchy chart with very little effort and choose from a set of nice designs. The closest thing in Pages is manually drawing lines and text boxes. For me this is a big win go Word.

Excel vs Numbers

On the whole I generally use Excel for sorting data and fairly basic formulas. Numbers seemed to fulfil these needs without issue, however like with Pages I did miss the ability to quickly style my sheet using predefined styles.

One other major issue I came up against was the ability to connect to a remote data source like a database. Numbers doesn't do this at all, but the ability for me to connect an excel doc to our management systems db to automatically pull in data on current projects is something I ultimately rely upon, without it I would have to constantly copy data from exports.

Conclusion

iWorks is probably a very good set of tools for anyone doing homework or other home use but for the workplace and my needs it falls short. It also isn't the equivalent product to Office. There is a big price different but Microsoft also offer Office web apps for free which is more similar in features. In the windows world Microsoft also give away Office Starter for free which again is more equivalent in features. So rather than Apple have a product that could kill Office as its only £30, Microsoft are actually giving away something just as good for nothing.

Training Buddy is an app that I wrote for Windows Phone 7, intended for anyone who likes Running, Cycling or Walking and would like to keep a log of their workouts.

The app will monitor the route you take along with various stats like speed, pace and how many calories you are burning. During the activity you can set up audio alerts to let you know how your doing and afterwards it will store a log of all the activities you have done for review later on.

For more information on the app visit www.trainingbuddyapp.com or view the app in the Zune Marketplace.