Common-Nature

Ok, these aren’t just for government. They’re for anyone forced to work without a budget and limited staff.

One of these are for online collaboration with staff. The other is a great tool for quickly building slick online applications (and you don’t even have to much about how to build applications). All of them are free (although some provide more features for a fee).

Mind mapping at mind42.com

This site gives you a great tool for building mind maps. If you’re not familiar with how mind mapping is done, check out this video on YouTube.

Even if you don’t use the site, it’s interesting to view various mind maps that other users have published to get ideas on how to more effectively use mind maps.

Zoho Creator

Zoho, of course, provides a whole suite of office productivity tools that are freely available. The Creator, however, allows you to build or use prebuilt web applications that can collect and manage data for you. Again, YouTube provides a video overview of what you can do with this tool.

Like many people, I circle the flame that is GTD (Getting Things Done) as a productivity practice. I do it awhile, get lax, and come back…each time getting a little better at the practice.

This time around, I realized that GTD provides a common framework that you can apply to many areas in your life. In other words, once you’ve settled on your basic categories you use to organized things, there’s not reason why you can’t apply them to many different places where you process information.

So…this weekend I came across this interesting article at Lifehacker.com  that discusses how to eliminate the use of the desktop on your computer. Sounds crazy, I know, and yet, I’ve found that even in one day, I’m able to get to everything I need on my computer much faster.

In less than an hour, I had not only cleared my desktop, but also had all Firefox bookmarks organized into 10 handy categories in the toolbar. What made it all go so fast was that I found that I was able to organized the bookmarks and the applications in terms of various roles I play (read GTD to understand what a role is).

Follow up on Windows Live Writer: I’m not sold on the product. Perfect for publishing to my blog.