How we handle our digital lives, both in and outside the office, has come to represent how well we’re living and where we’re at in the game of life. It’s with mixed feelings, therefore, that we at GQ are letting Ankit Fadia, whizkid author of Faster and Social, give away some of our favourite app moves and online tricks. Here’s your essential 10 step programme to get smart, get ahead and master your digital universe 

When you’re at work and want to look at something you shouldn’t, it’s important to understand how your local network administrator blocks access. Typically, all networks will maintain a list or a database of blocked websites. Whenever you type a website address, it’ll be compared with the list of blocked websites. If what you typed is on the verboten list, you are blocked and shown an “access denied” error message. This is where a proxy server can help. 

One of the most popular is anonymizer. As the name suggests, this is a Russian website. But most Russian websites are free and, more importantly, completely anonymous and do not maintain any records of their users’ activities. Once you have connected to Anonymizer, you won’t be able to read shit, but just type the address of the website you need in the space provided on the top right corner of the screen. 

For example, if you type google.com, Anonymizer will connect to the Google website, fetch the web page and display it on your screen. Google will record that someone from Russia is connecting to it, but not your IP address. From the other side, your local network administrator will record that you are merely connecting to the Anonymizer website, and not to Google.

If you use Anonymizer from www.anonymizer.com and www.anonymizer.ru frequently enough, sooner or later your network administrator will block them as well. But the good news is that there are thousands of such web proxies. Some of the most popular and reliable ones are:

hidemyass.com 
cooltunnel.com 
bypassthat.com 
ztunnel.com 
anonymouse.org 
thexite.com 
getus.in 
anonsurf.org 

If your office’s IT crew has blocked any or most of these, maybe you can just wait to get home, or buy your IT guy a beer for doing his job well.  

Think of Gmail’s Undo Send feature as giving you a window of opportunity to fix your email sins of the recent past. Once you enable the option (found in the Labs section), Gmail will hold back the email on its server for a few seconds, allowing you to change your mind, retrieve and modify the email if you wish. We’ve all been there, dude.  

Streak is a Google Chrome browser app that allows Gmail users to easily track when and where their email was opened. Once installed in your browser, you can send emails using Gmail like you normally do and let the Streak app track them for you. You don’t need to do anything differently while composing the email, nor will your email look any different to the recipient. As soon as your email is opened, Streak will automatically show you a notification message in the bottom right corner of your screen. The notification will not only tell you that your email has been opened, it will also show you the exact location of the recipient and how the email was opened (through the web, mobile or tablet).  

If you’re really paranoid about stringent airport security searching your filthy, filthy hard drive, check out this free app called Eraser. Once you’ve downloaded the app, all you need to do is to select the files or folders that you wish to permanently delete, and then let Eraser shred the last remains of deleted files by overwriting them with sophisticated patterns of useless data, making it impossible for anyone else to recover.  

If you’ve found a VPN your IT crew hasn’t, make sure your next step is the PanicButton app for the Chrome browser, which will add an actual panic button next to the URL of your address bar. The Settings page of this app will also allow you to set up a keyboard shortcut so whenever you see your boss walking towards your desk, you can hide all the open tabs in your browser. You can even set it up in such a way that it will also open a safe page instead of your already open tabs. Once the coast is clear, you can reopen all the hidden tabs with a single click of the mouse and carry on being a dirty dawg.  

Easy. Truecaller. It’s a free global directory containing millions of phone numbers that have been sourced from public directories, yellow pages and crowd-sourcing techniques. You will be one of these crowd-sourced techniques when you sign up, but the upside is you’ve got a caller ID for people with hidden numbers that might still go for a prank call in the 21st century.

With the Call Control app on your mobile – Android or iPhone – you can control which calls you want to receive and which ones to block. Pretty simple play for some peace of mind.  

Research and common sense will tell you that a large number of road accidents occur due to driving while messaging, emailing and chatting on smartphones. In some countries, you’ll be fined for it, but in India, we’re more or less operating on the honour system. And if you’re the petulant sop we think you are, we’re probably not going to dissuade you from texting and driving. But there is a good tool that will make driving safer for you and everybody else just trying to get home. DriveSafe.ly is a free mobile app that you can switch on and off as required. If you receive an email or text message while driving, DriveSafe.ly will read it aloud, and in a voice of your choice. Who knows, if you find a voice you like, you might keep the feature on even when you’re not behind the wheel.  

Download Fake SMS & Call on your phone and enter all the details of the fake SMS you want, including the sender’s number, time, date and the actual message. You can even choose whether you want the fake SMS to appear as a received message or a sent message. Once you have entered all the relevant details, press the Create Message button. If you now go to the inbox on your phone, you will be able to see the fake SMS in it. For a fake call, simply tap the Call tab on the top right corner of the app and enter all the details you wish to add to the call logs of your phone. “No really, I have to go now. Look.”

You’ve had a few too many margaritas with your steak dinner, your colleague has had a lime soda. What to do? There’s a good iOS app called Billr that makes it easy, fair and quick. First, enter the number of people at the table. Next, enter the prices of the items ordered by specific people. Then enter the prices of all the shared items and select all the people who shared each item. Enter the tax and tip, and Billr will proportionally split those among everyone based on the total value of items individually ordered. Now that’s splitting the bill like the bigger man.  

Words: From Faster and Social, Published By Penguin Random House India