While distractions are a terrible burden on logical thinking, they may be useful when you're trying to solve insight problems or conjure up creative ideas. A recent study found that your optimal productivity times are actually suboptimal when you need to use your brain in new and different ways. Scientific American's Cindi May explains:

Insight problems involve thinking outside the box. This is where susceptibility to "distraction" can be of benefit. At off-peak times we are less focused, and may consider a broader range of information. This wider scope gives us access to more alternatives and diverse interpretations, thus fostering innovation and insight. Indeed, [the study] found that participants were more successful in solving insight problems when tested at their non-optimal times.

To be clear, this doesn't mean you should procrastinate and jump on Facebook for a few hours to avoid your work, but rather put on some music or go somewhere you don't necessarily work well. Put distractions around you so your mind could be drawn elsewhere at any moment. It may lead to some good ideas.

The Inspiration Paradox: Your Best Creative Time Is Not When You Think | Scientific American

Mac OS X's Archive Utility is a handy built-in tool, but it has some annoying quirks—like the fact that it automatically unzips files but leaves the original archive in place. Here's how to tweak its preferences more to your liking.

On the surface, Archive Utility doesn't look like it has any tweakable settings, because it doesn't stay open when it unzips a file. However, if you open it directly, you can tweak its preferences just like any other app. It's a little hidden, so if you want to edit them, you'll have to navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility to find it (or, if you're using something like Quicksilver, just launch it like a normal app). Once it opens up, you'll be able to open its preferences from the menu bar as normal, and it has quite a few things you can tweak.

For example, you can check the box that says "Move Archive to the Trash" to delete a zip file automatically when you extract it in the Finder, which is helpful. You can also expand them to a different directory by default, or move a set of files to the trash when you compress them. It seems obvious, but many of you may not have realized it because of Archive Utility's odd opening and closing behavior.

Get Rid of .Zip Files Once They're Expanded | Macworld

Mac OS X: While it isn't that hard to get to your Mac OS X System Preferences, they're not all that handy either. MenuPrefs is a free menubar app that adds a list of all your system preferences to your menubar for easy access.

Installation is very simple. Once you download the app, drag it into your Applications folder and launch it. You'll quickly see a monotone control panel icon in your menubar. Clicking it will provide you with a list of all the System Preference options as well as preferences for the app itself. In MenuPref's preferences, you can customize the list of system preferences to change the order or omit anything you don't want. You'll also find a checkbox to let you start MenuPrefs at startup, which is something you should enable if you want to keep using it.

MenuPrefs is free, although when you launch you'll be prompted for a license. The free license is available on the MenuPrefs home page so registering just requires a little bit of copy and paste.

While I'm a big fan of menubar apps (which you can probably tell since they don't all fit in the above screenshot), I prefer launching things with the keyboard. I think MenuPrefs would be a lot more useful with a keyboard shortcut, but Quicksilver provides quick keyboard access. So if you'd rather launch individual system preferences (or anything else, for that matter) with the keyboard, you may prefer just using Quicksilver.

MenuPrefs | iThink Software via AppStorm

If you're using a Google Apps account with your own domain (which we recommend doing rather than, for example, using a straight-up @gmail account), you know that sometimes new feature releases are delayed. Unfortunately Google hasn't changed anything on that front, but they have added a new feature release process for Google Apps, and depending on your account, it may be set to the slower release cycle—which you probably don't want. Here's how it works:

From the Google Enterprise blog:

Our new process has two release tracks that Google Apps administrators can choose from:

• Rapid Release: Customers on the Rapid Release track have access to new features as soon as the features have completed testing and quality assurance, and are ready to roll out.
• Scheduled Release: Customers on the Scheduled Release track gain access to new features on a regular, weekly release schedule following the initial release of those features. This delay allows time for administrators to familiarize themselves with new features using a test domain, educate support staff, and communicate any changes to their users. New features will be released on the Scheduled Release track each Tuesday, with at least a one-week notice following the initial feature launch.

By default Google sets your release track to Scheduled releases (the slow one) unless you'd previously had Pre-release features enabled, in which case you're placed on the Rapid release track. Most individual users like you and me don't need to worry about training users, so the delayed weekly schedule really isn't necessary. To switch to the Rapid release cycle (or verify that you're already on it), point your browser to https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/ example.com/DomainSettings (replacing example.com with your domain name), untick the checkbox next to Enable scheduled releases, and click Save Changes. (While you're there, you should also make sure you've enabled SSL right above the release settings.)

Google has also created a page detailing the current Rapid release features to give you an idea of the kind of features that would be affected.

New Google Apps feature release process | Google Enterprise Blog

You can contact Adam Pash, the author of this post, at tips+adam@lifehacker.com.  You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.