Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 3 - Productivity Tools

This session, following the excellent free & open source tools, was a mild disappointment, but interesting nonetheless. Linda Kellem and Beth Filar Williams described, in an unusually democratic fashion several, generally free, tools which can be used for task management, scheduling and note taking. It was democratic because, lacking time to describe all of the tools they had considered to the extent they would have liked, instead they had an online vote to select which tools were discussed. I wasn't overly fond of this method as

1. it was hard for me to get a reliable, useful wireless signal and
   
2. I had never used and had no opinion about any of the tools so voting for any of them over the other would have been completely arbitrary.
   

That said, the discussion of the tools that were selected was quite interesting.

The selected ones, with a little information about them were:

In the category of "Task Tools":

• Things (Mac/iPhone based). Application. Not cloud-based.

• Todoist. Cloud-based. easy. Integrates with Google somewhat. Good with sub-tasks

• Remember the Milk. Many things you can do with it. You create tabs. Supports tagging. Save search lists. Can share lists. Doesn't excel at adding notes and context.

In the category of "Scheduling Tools":

• Jiffle - Pulls in Google calendar data. displays times you are available

• Cozi - for a "busy family" calendars/photos/widgets/tasks. Does groceries. Good for a small group.

• ScheduleOnce - Might be good for scheduling a reference desk.

Finally, in the category of "Note taking":

• Evernote - copy and paste from the web. Nice management features. Tagging.