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Productivity Tools

We're always been fond of the subject of Productivity and the tools that help us get more personally productive. We've just started collecting articles and resources to share with others. Here are the first few. More to follow. Send us your favorite resources or information on your favorite productivity tools. This list is still pretty rough but chock full of useful information.

Some of our favorite tools

Standard Internet Time

Have a lot of conference calls or just phone calls with people in other time zones, especially international? Tired of figuring out what time it will be in each place to schedule the call? Frustrated with someone always missing the conference call because they thought it was at a different hour? Try using this Standard Internet Time (SIT) for these purposes. It simply divides the 24 hour day into 1000 beats, starts at zero at midnight Grenich Mean Time. Wayne has made this his standard way of setting up the time for all conference calls and meetings. Watch out for the date change if you cross lots of time zones, but otherwise it makes life much easier and removes all doubt about the time of your call. There is also niftly little utility called "Show Internet Time" that installs on your PC toolbar and your PDA to let you know what time it is in SIT and to convert from regular time to SIT. This wonderful tool is available for free from: http://www.lss.comau/lss/windows/sit/sit.htm

Text Cleanup

Do you find yourself spending a lot of non productive time copying text from Emails or from the Web and then having to clean up all the hash marks or the mess that pastes into an Email from a web page? I sure do, so I found this nifty little utility called Text Cleanup and it has made getting clean text  all automatic. E-mail messages containing forwarded or replied-to text. These typically have reply marks (> symbols) and unwanted line breaks in them, sometimes making them difficult to read. Text copied from a web browser, and pasted into other programs, such as word processors or e-mail programs. This text often has unwanted indentations and line breaks, along with other formatting problems. (This is especially true for Netscape Navigator users.) Text copied from Adobe Acrobat Reader (the program used to view PDF files from the web and other sources). This text often has unwanted line breaks. Try using Text Cleanup, you can save a great deal of time over fixing the formatting yourself. Trial version available for download at http://www.comp4learn.com/cleaner/.

FinePrint 2000

Best printer device ever. Let's you print multi page folded booklets, print multiple pages of a document on one piece of paper. By printing on both sides and with four pages per page you cut your paper count for printing a document by a factor of EIGHT! Nifty little "watermarks" can be custom make to print out "Confidential" or the date or anything you want on every page. Headers, footers, etc. Try it for free, buy it for ~$20 if you like it. www.fineprint.com

KeyText 2000

One of my most indispensable little utilities. Do you find yourself typing the same texts, pressing the same buttons, or carrying out the same procedures on your computer again and again? How many times do you reply to an e-mail with a response you've typed dozens of times before? KeyText 2000 makes life easier by automating repetitive tasks like these. I have mine set up with such things as all my phone numbers, FAX, credit cards, common response sentences, my bio information, etc.   All of this gets filled in with one quick key sequence like CTL - W. Also makes form-filling a snap. Try it out at www.mjmsoft.com

Mindmap

Very effective way of capturing your ideas or the brainstorming of others. Very well proven model and there is a very good book as well on mind mapping by the guy who formalized this and on which the software is based. It is called simply The Mind Map Book by Tony Buzan. Think you will like it. Then this is the software that enables you to capture this all digitally and make it much easier to share with others, publish and print, etc. Frankly we still end up doing most of our mindmaps on paper and napkins and often on planes as this is when such creative and analytical thinking hit, but the tools are very good for taking them from the first stage and improving, modifying and publishing them. They also have a new "e" version which is cheaper and does the basics. Kind of a Mindmap Light if you will. There is also a downloadable trial version of the full program that will let you find out how well you like it. www.mindjet.com

The Brain

This cool tool "The Brain" lets you build a set of relationships between any pieces of information in a web like fashion. Then when you call up a "brain" you can click on any item and it automatically puts this in the center and grabs all associated files with it and creates little link lines to each one. Very useful for organizing information and ideas. Check it out at www.thebrain.com (of course!)

InfoSelect by Micrologic

You may want to check out both Marcia and Wayne's all time favorite information manager: InfoSelect by Micrologic. It allows you to connect random information in a single, easy to search database. You can grab anything on your hardrive or online quickly, easily and in any format you want. Takes a bit to get the hang of, but it lets you collect random bits of info at it whenever you have them and it will automatically find, sort and retrieve them. www.miclog.com

Levenger Circa notebook rings

Hard to explain, go see them at www.levenger.com Essentially these little plastic disks let you have  something like a ring binder, except that you can make up your own to be of any size and easily add or remove pages at will. Wayne's mini-notebook is tiny. The rings comes with paper in any size from post it note size up to full legal doc size, covers available, a paper punch to create the unique shape cutouts  that the rings fit into, etc. Wayne couldn't work without this system to allow him to keep all his notes handy and ever expandable.  After a  bit of time he  removes the older pages, files them and add in some new ones. YES this is paper and YES you still do that low tech writing thing, but he loves it for the right situation. Its ubiquity and never fail solution is nearly perfect.

Levenger Text Liners (Highlighter Pencils)

Conventional highlighters can leak or dry out and are impossible to erase. These problems are eliminated with the new Textliners from Germany, special colored pencils formulated by the master pencilmaker Faber Castell, that  highlight text with neon colors. They can't dry out or leak inside a bag and they can be erased nearly completely. Marcia buys the 3-pack of yellow pencils instead and buys a large-diameter cheep pencil sharpener from the local drugstore instead of buying the Levenger pack that includes three Textliners (one in each color), a  sharpener (Textliners are a bit too wide for regular pencil sharpeners), and an  eraser, all in a sturdy box. She likes the yellow best. www.levenger.com

URL Search

UrlSearch can extract URLs from files residing in your computer. It shows you the URL, description and file location and lets you export those items into Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator and Opera bookmarks. (Shareware/Win95-98-NT) Click for more.   http://wwwzdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_4266.html

Hardware

XeNote "iTag":

Radio station "bookmarker", early indicator of things to come: This  is a very cool little gadget I have discovered from Xenote.com that let's you "bookmark" a song you hear on a radio station! Seriously! Go sign up and get yourself one to try it out. Basically you get this little Xenote "i-Tag" device and whenever you hear a song on one of the radio stations you listen to, you can click it to "bookmark" that song! Then when you plug the i-Tag into your computer serial port it uploads your "tags" (metadata don't ya know!!) to your free personal Xenote web page where  you can get all the detailed metadata about the song, artist, album, related products, concerts and of course buy it if you like. Check it out and get yours at www.xenote.com

Too complicated and a bit clumsy right now in this first iteration to be sure. But as a fellow "early adopter" you will appreciate as do I what this is the beginning of. Imagine where this will go:

- you just say "buy it" as you are listening to the radio and the CD is delivered to your door or the MP3 file is added to your online vault of music

- you are listening to an interesting story or news item on the radio and you can instantly order the book of the guest who is speaking

- you are sitting in a keynote and the site which is referenced by the speaker is book marked automatically on your wireless PDA which shows you the site information

- you are in a restaurant or see an add with a great picture of a fabulous looking seafood dish and the recipe is downloaded to your kitchen internet appliance and the ingredients are added to your daily food supply delivery order so you can make it for dinner that night

You get the idea. Cool application and sign of things to come in the future.

Tips and Tricks

Fast Finds

For those who use IE 5 (and possibly older ones I don't recall) one of the fastest and easiest ways to check for web based information is to type your query directly into the "address" box in IE. Instead of typing in a URL as you most often do, simply type the word "find" and then your search key words and see what happens. IE will automatically use the key words to conduct a web search based on the search engines specified in your setup of IE. Even nicer, IMHO it puts in a list bar on the left side of the screen with the results of the search so you can click on these and see the results in the remainder of the screen on the right. I am consistently delighted by how quickly and well this seems to find what I need much of the time. Try it. You'll like it!

Articles on Productivity Tools

The Alexa Effect: Can a new Web utility topple the portal regime? Steve Johnson. Feed Magazine.

I'm Okay, You're Type A: There are two kinds of people in the world; those who think a PalmPilot is a business tool and those who think it's a Tamagotchi for grownups. Stanley Bing. Fortune. April 13, 1998.

Interesting commentary about portals.

Books on Productivity

Made in America: Regaining the Productivity Edge

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