Smartlife

It seems as if there are thousands of new tools coming out every day that can help you lead a more productive way of life. The trick is finding them, of course. With the numbers continuing to grow, discovering new tools can be tough. Here are fifty particularly useful tools that can help you be productive in a variety of ways, from managing your finances to getting things done to scheduling conference calls. Tell us which sites make your life more productive!

There’s something about psychology that responds to external motivation. Video games make most use of this kind of change — which is unfortunate because while they’re useful relaxation tools — computer games are the opposite of everything this blog stands for. In World of Warcraft, you adapt your own lifestyle to better serve the machine; here at Smartlife we make the machines work for you. This means that we’ll be first against the electro-wall when the Cylons come, but until then, we’ll help you work smarter with silicon…

If you haven’t heard of macros, you’re misusing this computer — you’re doing far more work than you have to for no reason at all. Sort of like putting your friends on the roof of your car and pushing them places. The fact is: if you do anything more than twice, the computer should be doing it for you. That’s what computers are for! You don’t need to know how to script your XML-interrupts to do it — “macros” are simple commands where you can show the computer what to do and…

American society is open-ended — an endless number of things to do, be, see, have, and experience. This open endedness creates a sense of time starvation among us — always one more thing to do or accomplish — which, in turn, drives us to seek means and methods to maximize every living nanosecond or to complain endlessly about how other people, corporations, governments, and electronic devices waste our time.

Product/Service Name

BubbleTimer

Brief Description

Knowing where you spend your time is the key to effectively achieving your goals but tracking your time to the second is just a waste of time! With one click on BubbleTimer, a web-based application, you have bubbled in 15 minutes of time. You get a handle on where all your time is going without any fuss or complexity.

Twitter is the service that asks “What are you doing?” and gives you 140 characters to answer. These mini-messages can be sent by web or SMS and act as high-tech haiku — if haiku was Japanese for “people who can’t spell tell you what they just ate, but not why you should care.” With endless uninteresting updates, it may seem to be an engine of anti-productivity, sent here by industrious aliens to weaken our social structure before invasion. But efficient people do use it. Barack Obama, for example, famously twittered throughout his campaign. And I think we can both agree that he has a lot more work to do than you and I combined.