Fixing Gmail

In the left sidebar of Gmail, click “create new label”:

Screen Shot 2013-03-28 at 12.35.53 PM

Name the label “Robots”, or something similar:

Screen Shot 2013-03-28 at 12.34.38 PM

Search for the word “unsubscribe”. Click the triangle at the right of the search box for search options, then click “Create filter with this search >>” at the bottom right of the pop-up:

Screen Shot 2013-03-29 at 12.03.22 PM

Select “Skip the Inbox (Archive It)” and “Apply the label” and choose the Robots label. Click “Create filter”:

Screen Shot 2013-03-28 at 12.35.14 PM

Voila.

Now, [Bacn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn) ends up in the Robots folder, rather than clogging up your inbox.

With the wheat separated from the chaff, you can respond to real, inbox email on the fly (I heartily recommend the new [Mailbox app](http://www.mailboxapp.com), which Dropbox just acquired) while skimming through the other crap only once or twice a day.

Do this now, and thank me later, once you realize how much this little change improves your digital life.

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Stached

Recently, I was tapped as the celebrity trainer for an upcoming issue of Seventeen magazine.

As that’s already slightly creepy, I figured I might as well go full out. For the requisite headshot, I grew a child-molester mustache:

joshnewman

Great success!

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“We found in all of our research studies that the signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change; the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.”
– Jim Collins, Great by Choice

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Men’s Fitness names CFNYC [one of the top 10 CrossFit gyms in America](http://www.mensfitness.com/leisure/travel/top-10-crossfit-gyms-in-america?page=5).

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Recently [a few](http://queserasera.org) [friends](http://w-uh.com) returned to their blogs after long hiatus. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. While I know the cool kids have moved on, I can’t help but still think there’s something special about blogging and its focus on wordier content. Sure, Facebook is a great window into what my friends are doing, Tumblr an equally good view of what they’re looking at. But blogging seems to me unique in sharing what they’re *thinking*. And, at least for my more interesting friends, I kind of miss that peek inside their brains.

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Holiday Reading

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.

\- [“Letter from a Birmingham Jail”](http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html), Martin Luther King, Jr.

When I was in eleventh grade, AP History fell the same period as jazz band. So though I play jazz trumpet fairly well, my American history knowledge is woefully incomplete. In the years since, I’ve tried to piece things together on my own. But until today, I really knew MLK’s writing only through various heard snippets of his “I Have a Dream” speech.

This morning, however, I read through his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’. If you haven’t read the piece in its entirety yourself, take ten minutes on this holiday day to do so. It’s a great window into King’s mind, an excellent snapshot of America at the time, and a clear reminder of why he very much deserves a national holiday in his honor.

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Wiry

A former colleague was engaged in an ugly and contentious negotiation. The counter-party started making personal attacks, but my old colleague needed to close the deal nonetheless; he couldn’t walk away.

So he inked the contract. And he wired the contractually stipulated $100,000. But, in the memo field for the wire, he wrote: “Declare the diamonds at the port.”

For the next year, the recipient was hounded and audited by essentially every finance, banking and customs body in the US government.

Touché.

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