Your favourite productivity softwares

[Anish]

What are your favourite productivity & personal effectiveness softwares that you use regularly? (Any kind - be it for journaling, a selfhypnosis software,etc..as long as it fits 'personal development')

I use these:

* SmartDiary Software - great journaling software. I never thought a journaling software would change my productivity, 'cause I thought writing on notepad was sufficient, but I've been able to keep track of my time and schedule in much better ways since I started using it.

* Cooltimer: It's a stopwatch software. Period. There isn't anything more to it, but I love this little piece of software because it lets me keep track of how much time I spend. Like, if I take a break of 5 minutes from work, I set the timer and after 5 minutes it starts screaming at me to get back to work. I use it a lot while writing articles to check how much time I'm spending writing each, too. I find it very useful.

* Neuro-Programmer: Just what it sounds like. A software with great number of audio & visual sessions for things like meditation, energizing, mood enhancement, insomnia, cognition, etc. I just started using it 3 days ago but I'm really liking it - the sounds are kinda effective.

OK, that's all about me. Which personal development software(s) do you use to enhance your productivity?

[CoolBee]

Windows Live Mail - collects emails from all (about 18) different accounts into one place on my pc so I don't have to sign on to each one separately so I only have to look at them all when I choose to. Most of the accounts it just collects quietly in the background. I have a couple of key ones which I don't let it collect automatically, but just click the button when I want it to. And it's really easy to set up storage folders which I move emails to after a time and then I can copy them onto a flashdrive and use on a different computer if I need to.

Stopwatch/Countdown Timer - I like to have a real-life one, but I can't get a battery to fit it here in this country, so I have a computer one now which I loaded onto my desktop on all my computers. You can open it multiple times so I can be counting down / timing more than one thing. Only problem is I have to remember what each one is for so have defined locations on the desktop!

XXcopy This is a much extended version of xcopy and I use it for all my backups (having never ever successfully managed to restore anything from a 'formal' backup software of any type any time!) and other things I like to do like collecting all my pdf, jpg or whatever files easily into one place.

ReaditLater I love this for storing all my bookmarks and paid for the digest version (the princely sum of $5 for life) which sort of displays things like a webpage. I had it set up for Mozilla Firefox, but since I mainly use SRWareIron now as my browser of choice, I have to get round to setting it up for that.

HCC Clone Cleaner I love and adore this and paid for it. I run it over various different files from time to time eg pdfs or whatever and it finds duplicates so I can zap them and keep them under control! Only thing IS I did let it loose on dll files one time and ended up having to do factory restore on one computer - lesson learned!


Non-computer based:

I do journal considerably but prefer paper and pen for that!

I love my big whiteboards

Tick sheets, timing games, counting games, to do lists. I have discovered that the same thing every day doesn't work for me depending on my mood, and the nature of the task. Sometimes I find 'just do 5 minutes' or 'just do 10 things' or whatever works better to start things going.

And let's be frank, I am coming to the realisation that I was more productive when I had a full-time job (not when it was at it's most stressful for the last few months, but on the whole, over time!) than now when I can live a life of leisure everyday!

[claritystar]

readitlater is by far my favorite
also wordpress for building sites and blogs

[brilliant]

does metapad count? i use it more than notepad.

[russianrocket]

RescueTime

[ButterflyWoman]

NoteTab (text writing, allows multiple files open, can do a universal search and replace, and other cool features; the light version is free)

Open Office (similar to MS Office, but open source, free, and you can natively export documents as PDF, which I find extremely useful)

Allway Sync (free file sync program; I used it to keep certain critical files in sync with the backup on my external drive)

I also use NeuroProgrammer (just upgraded to v3, in fact), but I use MindStereo by the same company more frequently)