In the spirit of inspiring a more productive workday, I've shared below a gallery of my favorite desktop backgrounds from MinimalWall. Download a your favorites and make them your backround to remind yourself everyday to focus on what's important and ship your work!

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This first requires categorizing your contacts into groups and then using Rules to associate groups with folders. For example, when someone I had categorized in my contacts as "Marketing Team" emailed me it would come into my inbox and, after I had read it or responded to it, I would hit ALT+A and the email would automatically be pulled from my inbox and filed in the "Marketing Team" folder. The Rules setup to achieve this looks something like: 

IF

1. Sender is in Group Category "Marketing Team" 
2. Message is Marked as Read

THEN

1. Move email to "Marketing Team" folder

I did leave the corporate world a few weeks back to start my own consultancy and since then have moved from Outlook to Gmail to manage my inbox, however I wanted to share the Presi I created below to help other Outlook users understand the Rules technique. If you take the upfront time to categorize your contacts and set up Rules, you will find yourself with an email system that is automatically organized to fit your needs, easy to search and much easier to manage.

Right now I'm sitting at the table in my living room and writing this post thinking OMG!

Friday was my last day as VP of Marketing at Manilla, and today marks the first day of my new adventure. I've left the full-time employee with benefits world to start two initiatives:

1. my own marketing consultancy helping brands with digital and social strategy, and 
2. launching WorkHacks, a startup business that aligns with one of my true passions- lifehacking and productivity

With the experience of helping build and launch a  startup (Manilla), and with the incredible support of friends, family and mentors, I find myself thinking about this new life and what I am going to make of it. 

I've wanted to make this leap to career independence for a few years now, but I lacked the strength, confidence and guts to pull the trigger. I finally found it within myself to believe in my own potential and, as I sit here contemplating what my to-do list for today should be, I have to embrace the excitement, fear and uncertainty I feel. I've jumped into the great unknown, where my fate no longer rests on meeting the expectations of my job title, but rather my ability to sell, (over)deliver and scale great work as a consultant and bring my vision for WorkHacks to life.  

The realization that I am now my own CEO, boss and direct report is overwhelming and a bit terrifying. Since I joined the workforce with my first job at 16 years old, I've been taught to take direction, do what I'm told and always try to overdeliver on my bosses expectations to make them look good to their boss and prove my value. That imposed structure is gone and it's my responsibility to set the business objectives and goals and of course deliver against them everyday. 

Big challenges lie ahead as I work to pave my own path, but I'm guided by a determination to shape my own future and destiny. I can't even express how excited I am to have woken up in this new world. Up, up and away...

For a long time, my voicemail message read– Hello, you have reached Julia Roy. Feel free to leave a message, but for a quicker response send a text. Nobody listened, still leaving me voice messages I would put off and often forget about. So I enabled Google voice on my mobile, which didn't really help much. Google transcribed messages were 90% of the time delivered to me as total gibberish that I could not make any sense of. GVoice did make me feel like I "got" the message, even if the transcription gave me hardly any understanding of what the voicemail actually said. During my usage of GVoice, I rarely went to go listen to the actual voicemail.

Do these feelings toward voicemail make any sense? When someone calls instead of sending an email, the message content could likely be importance and even urgent. I should make a better effort to check my voice messages, but instead I almost always put it off. Right or wrong, irresponsible or not, I continue to neglect incoming phone calls and messages like the plague. For a girl who–in high school and college loved spending hours on the phone chatting with girlfriends, boyfriends and family–now avoids the phone to no avail, makes me realize voice-to-voice communication is dead for me.

For those friends and family too far away to meetup in person–let's Skype! For those new business call pitches–let's GoToMeeting! Anyone else out there feel the same way? 

("Why I Check my Voicemail" Infographic found on digg.)

Chronicle Books, the San Francisco based publishing company, recently announced they will be coming out with Boo’s debut book this fall called Boo, The Life of the World's Cutest Dog. The mother of this pooch should of course get all the credit, and her success story started by simply sharing the love she has of this dog with the world. 

Now that's one lucky dawg!