A Quick Note on Productivity

July 22nd, 2008 | by Scott

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My nemesis in business is wasted time. With so much information, blogs, news, videos, social networks and etc. to get distracted with it’s easy to lose track of the clock and fall behind with what I want or need to accomplish through the day.

That’s why I always look for easy tools and ways to make myself and my daily routine more efficient.

A few of the tools I use, and these are all absolutely free, help me to improve productivity without the expense of ignoring any of that information or my online friends that can be so distracting.

Mozilla Thunderbird with Lightning, ReminderFox and XNote Add-ons

As far as email clients go I’ve used at-least 2 dozen different titles over the years on Windows, Mac and Linux machines… Thunderbird is equal or better to all of them hands down. My only advice is to make sure you empty your trashbox and compact folders (both operations performed from the File menu) often to improve speed and stability.

The email program itself isn’t the big deal, but rather the Add-ons are.

XNote lets you create post-it type sticky notes on individual emails, which is great for me. I often read a message and think “I need to look into such-and-such on this”, or maybe it’s an offer that I want to make a future counter-offer to and I have an instant idea of what that will be, making a note on the message ensures I won’t return to it later and draw a blank for myself (the mind does go first after all). So this add-on is an awesome tool.

The Lightning add-on is essentially a full-fledged daily planner and calendar program that runs within Thunderbird. I’ve tried a lot of different planners and calendar systems, from physical books to PC and web based. All of them worked, but none were quite as convenient as I’d have liked for access.

However, with Thunderbird and Lightning that problem is solved because email is my business lifeblood, so my email program is always open, which means my planner is always open too now.

And finally the ReminderFox add-on is basically an alert reminder that sits in the status bar of Thunderbird. It’s sort of redundant with the Lightning add-on, however because it pops up alerts I like to use it for special and important things as a way of ensuring I don’t miss or forget about them. I call it my nagging assistant and believe everybody should have one :)

The Flock Browser

Here’s a tool that improves my work productivity in a round-about way. Flock is a web browser designed for the online social butterfly. It ties in to numerous social networks directly, placing lots of cool stuff like my latest Facebook messages, invites and such into the sidebar of my browser.

Now, some of the social network tie-ins do help me directly to be more productive. I can bookmark pages a little more quickly and things like that, but the real way that Flock helps me to be more efficient is by letting me connect, converse and play online with friends across various networks in a faster and easier manner.

That may seem like an oxymoron, how does easier non-work activity make someone more efficient at work?

The answer is that I’m going to keep up to date with my friends and contacts no matter what, so if I can do that in a way that uses less of my time it leaves more of my time for work. I just have to stay focused enough to capitalize on that and not use the additional time for more play.

Flock is built from the same technology as FireFox, and a majority of the plugins and add-ons for FireFox will work on Flock too.

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