Here is one goal I have for this year. In 2009, I want to become far more productive with my own time. I also want to help others become more productive with theirs. After all, each of us only has a fixed amount of time. It is what we do with our time that matters. I look toward technology to help me with the effort to be most productive. There are a large number of Web2.0 tools available which can be classified as personal productivity tools. One that I use daily is Firefox, my web browser. Firefox has so many built in features, and so many more add-ons and plugins, that a person could spend days and even weeks just trying out each of them. (Of course, spending days or weeks trying out each of the many tools would not help lead to increased productivity.) Over the coming weeks and months, I will be writing about many of the personal productivity tools available for Firefox.

The first Web2.0 tool I want to mention is Delicious. According to their website, “Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.” Although the site highlights the social bookmarking nature of Delicious, the personal productivity aspect of it is what I want to discuss. The obvious question then is, “How does Delicious help me be productive?”

I use Firefox throughout the day. I am always online and typically have many pages open at the same time. The Delicious addon for Firefox has options for both a toolbar and a sidebar. I display both of these in my browser all the time. Delicious also displays a few icons in the navigation toolbar. Every time I open a new page I can quickly bookmark the page by clicking the tag icon in the navigation toolbar and then adding one or more tags. Delicious automatically groups all pages I have bookmarked with the same tag. This makes finding like pages easier. I simply type the name of a tag into the search box in the sidebar and it quickly displays all pages I bookmarked with that tag. I can also bundle tags together. This allows me to further classify and group pages.

The Delicious toolbar allows me to manage and display my tag bundles and favorite tags. I don’t currently use tag bundles but I do use the favorite tags functionality. Since I tend to work on multiple projects, I usually tag all pages associated with a project with a unique tag. For example, let’s say I am currently working on three projects: one for the local city, one for my son’s school, and one for a local manufacturer. I would tag all pages relevant to the local city project with “localcity”. I would tag all pages for my son’s school project with “school”. I would tag all pages for the local manufacturer project with “manu”. I would then select to view the “localcity”, “school” and “manu” tags as my favorites and Delicious would display each tag in the toolbar. If I wanted to access any page for the local city project I could just click on the localcity tag and then select the page to view. I would do the same for the other projects. One of the best things about this arrangement is I could even click on one of the favorite tags and then select to view all the pages associated with that favorite tag. Firefox would automatically open every page in a seperate tab. This is very useful when I have to use several pages in several projects and I need to switch quickly between projects. This is one way I can increase my personal productivity on a daily basis.

I like what Cammy Bean said about Instructional Design being a Spectrum. I also like what Ben Hamilton wrote about analysis in his comments. He wrote”…a quality instructional designer will be able to identify if this is, in fact, a project that requires a training intervention.” If a “training” intervention is not needed, then perhaps neither is an instructional designer. On the other hand, a non-training intervention might require the services of a “quality” instructional designer even more so than would a training intervention. An SME might be perfectively able to develop a good training intervention. However, she might not have the knowledge or skills necessary to develop a non-training intervention.

The conversation ranged from Mike Huckabee’s admission about frying a squirrel in a popcorn popper to high technology to high school reunions and more. Good people. Good conversation. Good social networking.

I don’t really know enough yet about Upcoming to write intelligently about it so I will keep it brief. It allows users to set up events for themselves plus keep track of other’s events. It also provides the capability to set up favorite places and groups. It could be a quite useful tool, but only if people use it. I’ll try it for awhile and see how it goes.

I really enjoy technology. I enjoy learning about and using new tools. I also enjoy learning how using technology can help improve my performance and the performance of others. Nevertheless, there is always a time when getting together face to face is worthwhile. I am looking forward to this evening’s meeting just to meet with others in Austin who blog. It will be the combination of online social networking with f2f networking. I really don’t know what to expect but I imagine it will be fun. I’ll write more about the experience later. I just got a text message on my phone, sent from Google Calendar, telling me it’s time to get to the meeting. Later.

Of course email works well for much of my day-to-day communication needs. However, email does have some significant shortcomings. There are times when I just need to speak to someone. For that, one of my favorite tools to use is Skype – one of the popular VOIP tools available today. One great thing about Skype is that the basic service is free. All I need is an internet connection and a computer and I can communicate by voice with anyone, anywhere, who also has those. Since my laptop has a built in camera, I can also let them see me while we are talking and they can do the same. Skype also allows phone calls to any mobile or land line anywhere in the world for very small charges. I can even purchase a phone number in several different cities and allow people from those cities to make local phone calls to me. Of course Skype also offers voice mail so if I am out or on another call I won’t miss my calls.

Two other communication tools I like are LinkedIn and Ning. Both of these are social networking tools. LinkedIn is a great tool for professional networking. It provides a way to keep up with what is happening with other professionals in one’s network. Ning allows people to set up their own personal networks. I have only been using it for a short time but I think it is great.

I will write more later about these and other communication and collaboration tools I use.

Another tool I like to use, which I didn’t mention in my top ten, is another one by Google – Google Desktop. I use it to search for information I have saved on my computer. However, it will also search web sites visited. This is a useful way to find information contained inside files even if you can’t remember which file a particular piece of information is in.

There are many other tools out there useful for information management. I am sure I will be writing more about them at a later time.

I use Google Calendar as my main scheduling tool but, as with many of the tools I use, I don’t use Google Calendar by itself. I include the weather icon on each date so I can easily access the daily weather from within my calendar. I also use Remember The Milk for task lists and I have the Remember The Milk task list icon on each day. This allows me to very easily access my list of tasks from within my calendar. One of the things I like about Google Calendar is that it allows me to have multiple calendars, color coded and all viewable on one screen. I can have one for each customer I work with and thus easily keep track of tasks assigned to a customer. I also frequently set reminders for my scheduled events. I usually set a pop up reminder; however, if an appointment is very important, I can have a reminder sent to my cell phone. Another thing I like is that I can view my calendar from any computer and can share it with or hide it from anyone I want.

I also frequently use Google Notebook. One of the nice things about it is that I can access my notes online from any computer. Nevertheless, I usually always have my laptop with me and am not far from a wireless connection. I have the Google Notebook plug-in for Firefox. If I don’t see the necessity of tagging a page with del.icio.us, I can quickly and easily pop open my Google Notebook and take notes about any web page I am viewing. Although I often have a tab open to my Notebook, having the notebook icon at the bottom of my screen gives me another option to view a different page while taking notes in my notebook.

Some of the other Google tools I use also help me be productive – Google Scholar, Google Earth, and of course Blogger. I have used Blogger since 2004. However, I have not written very consistently for most of that time. I have determined to write much more regularly starting this year (not really a New Year’s resolution – more of a goal for the year). Because of this I decided to check out a few of the other Blog programs. I looked at both WordPress (which is a commercial program) and Typepad (which has a free version or a commercial version). They are both very popular among bloggers and both have many popular features. Nevertheless, after checking them out, I didn’t see anything that made me want to switch away from Blogger. I might not stay with Blogger forever, but for now, it will remain my software of choice for blogging.

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