Here are some helpful productivity tools.

Hi, there,

I've gotten a lot of help from this forum and would like to offer something back in my own area of expertise. I've been working as a tech or a programmer for over 14 years and in those fields, if you don't have software-based productivity tools, you're dead in the water.

So with that in mind, here are some of the tools that you can use to save lots of time and effort. (Some of these are totally free. The others might have a separate "Pro" version that's pretty cheap but worth every penny, I've found.)


Action Outline - www.actionoutline.com

ActionOutline is an information organizer which you can use to keep all thoughts and content related to a topic with multiple sub-trees. You can use it to organize all you know (and what you learn) about any topic, or use it for your own content ideas.

It will help you organize your information in such a way to be more easily and readily available. I use it for everything I learn about IM, my own content ideas (from brainstorming to final-version content) to personal things like putting whatever I learn about health and fitness (specific exercises, etc).

It's really super and they do have a free version that you can use to see if it'll work for you.


Spartan Clipboard - www.m8software.com

This gives you the ability to copy multiple items into a clipboard and paste later, instead of Windows' standard copy, then paste, then copy but lose the first thing you copied.

The free version retains the last 25 things you copied. The paid version allows more, plus the ability to permanantly hold certain copied things that you specify for easier pasting later.


AutoHotKey - www.autohotkey.com

AutoHotKey is a freeware software utility that allows you to create keystroke and/or mouse movement "macros" and replay them at the press of a button or just a single key press.

If you find yourself doing repetitive tasks, like logging in to certain web sites over and over, or using the same tasks in a certain piece of software, you can put all these individual tasks into the program and assign them all to "Alt-G" for example or whatever you prefer. Adobe users found this type of thing so useful they demanded it be put in Photoshop for repetitive actions. Now you can do the same for whatever you do.

I use it to automatically loging to things like Hotmail and other browser-related things, and for doing repetitive multimedia file-related tasks, but the possibilities are far-reaching as to the time you can save.


Notetab - www.notetab.com

This is like Notepad but has tabs for multiple files being open at one time. It's great if you any sort of html/css/php because you can open multiple files at once and switch back and forth quickly by using the tabs for each open file.

There is a paid version, but the free version is surprisingly powerful.


Xmind - www.xmind.com

Good (free) visual mind map software.

Want to get a visual overview of your ideas? Download Xmind - better looking software than Freemind (and just as free).

Use the quick keys of "Insert" to add a "sibling" element and "Enter" to add a "child" element (though I may have gotten those backwards).


Bubbl.us - Good web-based mind map tool (free) - www.bubbl.us

A little more limited than Xmind, but it's fast and web-based.

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I'll post more later if I think of any more, but I use these on a daily basis and probably get three times the work done that before I found them.

I hope some of you find these useful.

Thanks to all who post their own helpful information.

Take care, all, and have a wonderful day,

- Paul