Quite a few tasks in life require investigation and planning. Cooking dinner tonight? First you need to find a recipe, then you need to make a shopping list. Going on vacation? Before you can even begin to finalize your itinerary, you’ll probably collect reams of information on plane fares, local attractions, and places to stay.

The Internet obviously makes these types of research easier. But unfortunately, Web browsers don’t come with handy organizers where you can store and personalize all this information. Or at least, they didn’t until Springpad, the creation of Boston-based Spring Partners, came along. Springpad is a free online organizer that automatically files away the kinds of electronic information involved in planning many everyday tasks, from recipes to restaurant listings, then makes it easy for you to find that information and use it when you really need it.

But while the guys at Spring Partners are really nice (I’ve met them), they aren’t providing this service wholly out of the goodness of their hearts. The big idea behind Springpad is that giving consumers a free platform for organizing their lives can be a profitable business, if it also gives publishers and brands new ways to reach potential customers.

[Editor's Note: Every startup has a "big idea" that it thinks will catapult it to success. With this story, we inaugurate an occasional column highlighting the big ideas---and the resulting challenges---at companies in Xconomy's home cities.]

The 12-employee startup is out to prove its big idea by bringing consumers and advertisers together in two specific realms: cooking and parenting. Of course, as I detailed in a column published shortly after Springpad’s launch last November, you can collect many more types of information than that in a customized Springpad notebook, from holiday gift ideas to date-night plans to “Getting Things Done”-style to-do lists. But when it came to demonstrating how the platform can connect consumers and advertisers, explains co-founder and CEO Jeff Janer, the company had to start somewhere.

“The notion of focusing on food and moms first is that from a monetization standpoint, consumer product companies are keenly interested in moms who are running the household,” says Janer. “And food is a huge category. So if we can essentially build a beachhead in these two verticals, people will then discover that they can use this for a lot of other things as well.”

Last week, Janer walked me through Springpad’s latest features—there are quite a few new ones since I last wrote about the company—as well as the monetization mechanisms, which weren’t yet in place last November. You might think that that seeing marketing messages pop up amidst your personal data would be intrusive and annoying, but from the examples Janer showed me, Spring Partners has come up with tasteful ways to integrate brand messages that actually make the site more useful.

Say you’re planning dinner, and you find a lasagna recipe that sounds good at a cooking site like Epicurious, FoodNetwork.com, or MyRecipes.com. If the site’s publisher is a Springpad partner, you might see a “Spring It” button right alongside the recipe, allowing you to clip it into your Springpad account in one step. If the site isn’t a partner, you can do the same thing using a special browser bookmarklet. In either case, the Springpad software is smart enough to recognize that you’re saving a recipe and to grab the ingredient list, the source URL, and any images that went along with the recipe. It assembles all of this into a convenient little file, a lot like the old-fashioned 3-by-5 index cards that my mom uses to keep track of all her recipes.

But here’s the first marketing twist: say the lasagna recipe calls for Parmesan cheese. Springpad’s software will reason that you’re probably going cheese-shopping soon, so it might show … Next Page »

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I’m not one of those people who thinks you can measure a person’s power, talent, or importance by the number of e-mails or phone calls they get every day. So it’s not a boast—indeed, it’s more like an embarrassed confession—when I say that by early January, my Gmail inbox had swelled to almost 15,000 messages. And that was before we at Xconomy decided to tack our e-mail addresses at the bottom of every story so readers can contact us more easily. I don’t regret that policy—it’s brought me quite a few good story tips already. But it did mean that unanswered messages started to pile up even faster, threatening to smother me in guilt and anxiety.

It was finally time to do something about my e-mail problem. For help, I turned to two trusted sources. The first was executive coach Stever Robbins, aka the “Get It Done Guy,” who I met last July at Podcamp Boston (read the interview here). Stever records a weekly podcast full of great advice about staying sane, and even having fun, as you strive to be more productive and accomplish your goals. I remembered that in one of Stever’s early podcasts, he’d responded to a listener who was desperate for tips about dealing with his backlog of e-mail.

So I went back and listened again. For serious cases of e-mail constipation, Stever suggested the radical action of “declaring e-mail bankruptcy.” Specifically, he told the listener: “Delete it all. Then send a form letter to everyone who wrote saying, ‘My backlog was too big to manage. To cope, I’ve deleted everything. Please resend anything important.’”

Something about this idea really scared me; it seemed awfully close to thumbing your nose at everyone on your contact list. But it also seemed to offer me a way out of my personal e-mail morass. There was simply no way I was ever going to work my way through a 15,000-message backlog—not even if I devoted several weekends to the task. The idea grew on me when I found out that some pretty distinguished figures, like Stanford law professor and free-expression guru Lawrence Lessig and venture capitalist Fred Wilson, had gone through e-mail bankruptcies and survived with their careers intact.

So, 11 days ago, on January 26, I took a deep breath and sent this note to my heaviest e-mail correspondents:

I have waited far too long, but tonight I’m going to clean out my Gmail inbox—which has nearly 15,000 messages in it!!—by archiving everything (in other words, moving it into the “All Mail” folder). Apologies in advance, but if you sent me a note recently that requires some immediate response, please ping me again, because all of my old messages are going into the archive. It’s the only way I’m ever going to get my inbox cleaned out.

Then I did what I was threatening to do, and archived all 15,000 messages. Of course, as my boss, Bob, immediately pointed out, all I was really doing was changing the way these e-mails are categorized in Gmail, not truly euthanizing them. I would never just delete all that mail, because for better or worse, Gmail has become one of the main storehouses of my digital life. (Which is obviously what Google wants, or they wouldn’t be giving me 7,292 megabytes of free online storage.) The messages are still there, still searchable, if I need to reconstruct a conversation later. So, in a way, it’s all semantics.

Despite the sleight-of-hand nature of my “bankruptcy,” though, emptying out my inbox brought an immediate sensation of lightness and freedom. Safely tucked away in the archive, those messages were no longer pleading in 15,000 whiny electronic voices for me to do something about them. I’d discovered the sweetest three words in the English language: “No new mail!”

Of course, the feeling only lasted about two minutes, until the next message popped onto the screen. Clearly, declaring e-mail bankruptcy was only half of the solution. I also needed a way to keep my inbox from overflowing again. And for that, I turned to another trusted source, Mark Hurst.

Mark is the founder of Creative Good, a New York-based user interface design and consulting firm, and the author of Bit Literacy, a primer on handling information overload. I first talked with Mark a few years ago when I was writing about Web-based time management tools; he has written a particularly effective one called Gootodo. He’s an incredibly nice guy, and even offered to … Next Page »

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Seattle-based RescueTime, a maker of Web-based time management software, has announced it has closed a Series A round led by True Ventures. Several angels also participated, including Tim Ferriss, Mike Koss, Chris Sacca, and Mike Seckler. RescueTime, which got seed funding from Y Combinator, lets you monitor the amount of time you spend on various websites and applications.

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