One of the first things many people do in the new year is make New Year’s resolutions. These resolutions are about a wide range of subjects. They can be very formal (I am resolved to do…) or they can be less formal (This year I want to do…). In either case, although people often find it easy to make New Year’s resolutions, they just as often find it difficult to keep them. Consequently, for the most part, I have just stopped making New Year’s resolutions. Instead, each year I try to set forth goals early in the year and then work towards accomplishing them.
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.
