Tools

Tools Recently I have been trying to use a a couple of new tools to help keep things organzied in my life. Every now and then, I try to go out and see what is out there to help try to help keep my on task and maybe even scavange some hours for myself. Honestly, it never works, but I try anyway. Via work, I have Microsoft Outlook, but I don't really like Outlook, and I have tasks and projects that have nothing to do with work. I also like to have more control over things, like possibly hosting my own internal server. One of the tools that I have been using for quite some time is TimeTTracker MX from R&F Consulting. I first started using this tool about a year into owning my first PDF, an iPAQ handheld. I decided that I needed a tool that would help me keep track of how long I was spending on different tasks and projects at work. The main driver was this was the IT trouble ticket system we were using. A previous job had timers for when one was working on calls. The job at the time did not. I missed it. But I had a PDA, so I went looking for a tool that worked as a stopwatch that let me tag timers by project or activity. TimeTTracker (the version at the time) did most of what I wanted. Subsequent revisions have done more and more. When I bought my VX-6700 phone, this was one of the first things I bought for it. The only challenge with TimeTTracker is that timers have to be started and stopped. While this isn't a problem on its own, there is one tool in the modern office environment that makes it difficult for your modern knowledge worker: e-mail. I pretty much keep Outlook open on my work laptop all day long. Even when I am working on something, I have to help keep my eye open for calls from help from the distributed groups I work with. There are hundreds of little things that I'm asked to do or look at that really don't take a lot of time to do, but if I'm working on project A and someone needs me to look at task B and answer a quick question about project C and an IM on thing D, my own timer puts all that into project A. And I'm not going to start and stop the B, C and D timers unless the activity really does take me away from project A. Yes, I know, multitasking is a myth. One day, in one of the summary e-mails from Technology Review, there was an article that seemed to suggest that there was software out there to help capture time spent on 100's of little things. The tool is called Smart Desktop, currently still in beta. I signed up and quickly got an invite. The tool really does track opening and working on Outlook e-mail and MS office documents. The timeline tracking tool is really useful for trying to figure out what it was I was doing an hour ago, or two hours ago or so. I just sent the support group for Smart Desktop a quick e-mail just saying Hi. I was just curious how the beta was going. And I was curious if they were doing anything to support their community. They use Drupal for their website, so I used what I know about Drupal. I'm only user 295. One needs a login to download the beta, so I wonder if that means they haven't really gotten a lot of interest in their beta. I do like the tool and may write more about it later. Another tool I started using, again in beta, is Evernote. I first saw Evernote when I was first started using OneNote. I had looked for something that worked on more or even all the platforms I use everyday. I like to be able to choose that I'm going to use Linux or even Solaris. I also want to be able to use these tools on my home machine, my work desktop, my linux workstation, my Solaris workstation, Natalie's and the boys' machines. (Last count I was running about 10 machines at home.) Evernote was something that did things like OneNote, but it had a web component, as well as a desktop component, at least on Windows. I think they were talking about the future of the product and it was pay for. I wasn't looking for something pay for at that point, so I moved on. I got back to Evernote recently, just while their beta/preview was getting near wrapped up. And I am trying to use it. It does really nice screenshots. It let's me capture data using the camera on my phone. And it lets me categorize things into different notebooks. There is also an e-mail address that Evernote hosts that lets me send things right to my notebook, even when I am just on my phone. More on this later. I'm kind of running out of steam, so I might just stop here before I get into the next set of tools, including Jott and OSAF Chander.