As an entrepreneur, you’ve got a lot on your plate. Anything that saves time and frustration helps. So here are several productivity tools that I’ve been very happy with recently:

1. OnlyMyEmail (http://www.onlymyemail.com) – Spam filter. This service costs $3 per month. Basically, it retrieves e-mail from up to three different servers (your ISP and some free accounts like yahoo), and removes the spam, viruses, etc. You then configure your Outlook (or whatever e-mail client you’re using) to retrieve your e-mail from the onlymyemail.com server. They send you a daily report of all of the junk they’ve filtered out. If they deleted an e-mail that should not have been deleted, you can change a setting. So far, this is only happening for some opt-in newsletters.
2. YouSendIt (http://www.yousendit.com) – Solution for transferring large files. E-mail was designed to send small text messages; that’s why large attachments sometimes fail (or take forever to send). This free web-based service allows you to send files of up to 1 GB in size. You simply upload the file to their server, and they send an e-mail notification to the recipient. The recipient clicks on the link, and the file downloads. Easy.
3. Vice Versa (http://www.tgrmn.com) – Synchronizes folders among two or more computers. Changes to files, new files, deleted files, renamed files, files moved to another folder – whatever you do gets replicated on the other computer. It’s not perfect (I’ve had to manually run the re-synchronization a few times), but it’s a massive timesaver if you have a laptop and a desktop. Now I can sit down at either machine without worrying about which one has the latest version of my documents.
4. OsaSync (http://www.vaita.com) – Synchronizes Outlook among two or more computers. Changes to contacts, notes, tasks, and e-mails (new mail, deleted mail, mail moved to another folder, etc.) gets replicated on the other computer. Also not perfect. For example, if you read a message on one machine, it will continue to show up as unread on the other computer. Also, if you delete an attachment from a message on one machine, the action is not replicated on the other computer. Still, it’s great to have access to everything I need on both machines.
5. Yahoo Desktop Search (http://desktop.yahoo.com) – Find anything quickly. Searches through documents (spreadsheets, Word docs, PDFs, PowerPoints, text files, etc.), e-mails, instant messenger archives, and virtually everything else on your computer. I personally find the interface to be more powerful, flexible, and useful than Google’s Desktop Search. For example, if I search on a person’s name, a “preview pane” shows me the contents of every file the person’s name appears in. Refine your search by directory/folder, file type, date modified, and more.
6. Treo 650 (http://web.palmone.com/) – It’s a phone. It’s an e-mail client and web browser. It’s a PDA. It’s a camcorder (although not a very good one). Basically, this little baby does it all, with the glaring exception of voice dialing. Great battery life. I love this thing. Be sure to buy the anti-stupid insurance to protect against accidental damage, since this thing is fragile and it isn’t cheap.

Know of a great productivity tool? Let us know!

You can always submit resources to our website; just find the appropriate page in the Resources section and click on the “Suggest a Resource” link. Some sections of interest:

- Reference & Research: http://www.caycon.com/resources.php?s=41
- Services & Utilities: http://www.caycon.com/resources.php?s=42
- Writing: http://www.caycon.com/resources.php?s=43
- Market Research Tools: http://www.caycon.com/resources.php?s=6
- General Research: http://www.caycon.com/resources.php?s=8

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 5th, 2005 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.