Free Productivity Tips
Could your productivity use a boost? These tools and services are my personal favorites. I use them every day to save tons of time. They’re all FREE.
Dial 2 Do is a voice-to-text reminder service that lets you use your phone to send email and/or text messages to yourself and others. Connect it to your account at Remember The Milk and Google calendar and you’ll have a fantastic system that almost guarantees that you won’t forget anything important ever again.
Universal Viewer lets you peek into your text, image, multimedia, and HTML files. You can see what’s inside them without actually opening them.
Shortkeys is a utility that allows you to set up replacement text for portions of text that you define. You set up an abbreviation to represent the section of text that will be substituted.
ClipX is a Windows clipboard manager: a tiny program that runs in the background, capturing and managing your clipboard entries, allowing you to keep 25 of them active at all times. Great if you do a lot of cut-and-paste in your writing.
Locate is a file finder utility that indexes all the files on your computer so that you can find almost anything almost instantaneously.
Google Reader is a wonderful service that aggregates your RSS feeds and alerts into an easy to use, easy to sort, fast to read format so you can quickly keep up with (and share if you wish) your favorite news items, blogs, web sites, and other Internet information.
Evernote, is a note-taking, picture-capturing, voice-recording, handwriting-recognizing memory service that lets you capture, organize, and (most importantly) FIND all your important stuff. The CEO of the company calls it your “external brain.”
Primo pdf lets you create pdf files optimized for screen, print, ebook, or pre-press and includes the ability to password protect files. This is what I use to send payroll data and reports to my clients.
Remember The Milk is a full-featured task list organizer and priority setting tool.
Google Calendar is an on-line service that lets you easily manage your calendar and share it with others (this is optional). You can synchronize it with your computer desktop, mobile phone, and other applications.
For more tips like these, you can sign up here for a free subscription to my weekly [e-fficiency] newsletter.
Do you have a free tool, tip, or service that I haven’t covered? Leave a comment describing it and I’ll share the best ones in an upcoming newsletter.
BTW, I also post additional references on Twitter almost every day.
