Free Online Tools That Boost Your Personal Productivity
Hopefully you had a good week over at work, and are getting ready for the weekend.
I like weekends because they allow me to spend time with my family and friends, but also because they provide me with a unique opportunity to review my goals and plan the upcoming week accordingly.
One conclusion I often reach during my weekend reflections, is that I didn’t make the most from my time during the previous week. I am not a personal effectiveness guru or that sort of thing, however from my past experience I have learnt that effective time management is first and foremost a matter of planning and self discipline. Today, i would like to introduce you to four simple, but effective, online tools that can help you to get your tasks organized around your goals and priorities and hopefully boost your productivity, without leaving your browser. These tools can be used instead of or in conjunction with more traditional task and time planning tools like those offered by the leading email clients (Hotmail , Outlook, Yahoo Mail etc’).
Remember the Milk
An easy-to-use and very recommended Web 2.0 online task management system, Remember the Milk allows you to log your tasks, categorize them, add notes to each task etc’. One of the nicest features of Remember the Milk, is the ability to add new items to your taks list via email. Recently, i have spotted a nice Firefox addin that can allow you to post tasks from your browser.Other nice feature is the ability to display tasks recorded over at Remember the Milk on Google Calendar.
Tada List
a lightweight task management tool by the makers of BaseCamp, TadaList allows for easy task entry. Feature wise, Tada List is a bit too limited, and thus i found it non flexible enough when compared to Remember the Milk.
GTDInbox
a Firefox extension that integrates the highly effective methodology of “Getting Things Done” (GTD) into Gmail. GTDInbox is somewhat strict and definitely not trivial to use. That said, if you grasp the GTD methodology and fully implement its principles, good chances are that you’ll experience a boost in your personal productivity.
Meetimer
a wicked Firefox Plugin that helps you to curb your procastination by logging the time you spent in different websites. This one is a must if you find yourself wandering around Facebook and Linked In for hours, and don’t seem to get nothing done.
This is all for today, what are the online tools you use to boost productivity? comments are welcome.
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Comment by Joseph Plazo on 28 September 2007:
An online app I relish is Morning Coffee. Check out shaneliesgang.com/projects/coffee.php
It’s an extension to firefox and installs as a browser button that loads up fave websites in different tabs with a single click. You can instruct it to even load sites on specific days!
I know folks who maintain multiple email accounts and browse various news centers would love this
Comment by gili on 28 September 2007:
Joseph,
Thanks. I was awaiting your feedback, as i noted that you are into time management. I was wondering when you’ll be posting your insight from Tim Ferris’ book. Will be looking forward to read that piece.
Great weekend,
Gili
Comment by Dave Starr on 29 September 2007:
Gili … and Joseph … you made blog rading well worth it this morning, thanks. I have been looking for something like Meetimer for ages now. I even looked hard at some of the Parental Child Protect “nanny software” for the purpose of tracking where I spend/waste my time. It’s very important to find out what one is doing in the real world before one can make any improvement … and this looks very promising.
And Morning Coffee loks great too. I, of course, use a feed reader … but there are about a dozen sites I like to read every day … I’m going there to see what’s new regardless of what showed up in the RSS … and this should make that process easier. Good stuff!
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Comment by WebDrops on 5 December 2007:
Remember the Milk, Tada List and GTDInbox are the names which I have heard a lot about…. Meetimer is something new, will try exploring it further… at our company we use http://www.taskbin.com it is a simple group tasks management tool (you might want to give it a shot)