To be (productive) or not to be (productive)--Thing 13

I'm not sure that most of these tools aid in productivity. Sure, you can set up your iGoogle page and have all kinds of neat stuff on it. The gadgets are fun. Several months ago, I organized mine very nicely with tabs like Home--Tools--Weather--Bookmarks--Feeds--News--Shopping. I used it for a while and then took it off my homepage link. I think load time had something to do with it. Perhaps I'll give it a try again, as there are some things on there that could be useful all in one place.

Something similar that I do use frequently are the "toolbars" that one can download into a browser. I have (and use) toolbars for Google, Stumbleupon, The Weather Channel, Upromise, Yahoo, and more. These allow one-click access to websites, search boxes, shopping discount reminders, and more. Because they don't take any extra time to load and are out of the way of my normal pages, I like these better than the other site-type productivity tools.

The Zamzar document converter could be really useful. Our board recently had trouble with a Works to Word conversion and this would have been a nice tool to use.

In the past, I also used Yahoo's calendar. It had the benefit of being accessible from any computer, but it seemed to take a lot of time to enter things into it. A neat tool that we (my husband and I) have discovered for sharing our Outlook calendars on two computers is a little product from 4team called ShareCalendar. It's the only way we found to share our calendars without an Exchange server, and it's been really effective. An online calendar would have been our next option, but it's much easier to use our Outlook calendars since we also use Outlook for our e-mail and contacts.

Again, these things are interesting to know about, but I don't know how useful they'll be. If I needed to accomplish something specific, I'd look for these types of tools, but I likely wouldn't use the majority of them.