Thing #13 -- Online Productivity Tools

Once again, on first reading through the Thing I think to myself: I'm already doing a lot of this with my Mac...

• My husband and I share an iCal calendar, and use our iDisk to keep it in sync.
• Mac's OS comes with a built-in PDF converter. Just choose File>>Print>>Save as PDF. I use this all the time, both for converting word processing files and for saving web pages.
• OSX also comes with both a Stickies application and a Stickies widget for the Dashboard.

The other thing I'm noticing (no pun intended) as I work through the Things, is the process makes me take closer looks at things I've been aware of, to a greater or lesser extent, and examine whether there's a place for them in my life or my library. In some cases the answer is yes, in others it's no.

One yes goes to iGoogle. I chose iGoogle over Pageflakes because I already have a Google account (still trying to keep the creeping account-itis down...), although they seemed equally appealing. I had tried My Yahoo! a bit ago, but found it frustrating to customize the way I wanted. One feature I like is creating multiple tabs. I can put work related items on the main tab and things more for personal use on a different tab--still easily accessible, but not right in front of me. I did add both the New York Times and Village Voice gadgets, so in spite of what I wrote for Thing #12 I may stop receiving their content via email.

I had tried Google Calendar previously, and while the web accessibility from anywhere is nice, I was a little uncomfortable with the safety consequences of having my schedule "out there" and stopped using it. I didn't want some hacker knowing that I would be leaving work at night after an evening shift, or that my house would be empty if I was out of town.

It's not exactly a calendar, but one useful tool I've discovered for scheduling meetings is Doodle. It works via a "poll" of available times that participants vote on, and automatically calculates the best time for the most people. Especially if you're scheduling people from multiple institutions and calendar systems it saves a lot of time. There's no need for multiple emailing back and forth.

It's interesting how some of these Things play off and refer to each other. For an earlier Thing I was trying to remember where I had seen something I wanted to mention. I tried searching for it, and while I couldn't find it I did discover Lifehacker, which looked really interesting. I added it to my list of feeds, and now here it is mentioned as a resource for Thing #13.