I recently did an interview with Leslie Shreve of Productiveday.com about technology tools to boost your productivity. To listen to the podcast ”Time for Technology: Using Today’s Best Tech Tools to Increase Your Efficiency, Save Time & Simplify Your Life” visit thewinonline.com or download in iTunes.  This podcast happens to fit neatly into my series on productivity tools that I have found to be the most useful for improving efficiency, organization and focus. The objective or goal here is to add something, replace something or improve an aspect of your existing system, not duplicate what you are already doing.  This week I concentrate on desktop or internet based tools. If you are interested in apps for mobile devices, check out the posts for your iPhone, Blackberry or Android device.

My absolute favorite tool is Outlook 2010. I did not cover Outlook it in the interview, because that is a huge part of the work that Leslie does, but 2010 is my every day command central. I highly recommend that everyone start with that and make sure they are using it to its fullest capacity. If you are just using Outlook to check your email, you are missing out on some of its most valuable features. You can schedule meetings and generate tasks directly form email messages, set up rules to help with sorting and screening, categorize virtually everything and stay in touch with the new social connector. We’ll take a more in depth look at Outlook best practices in a future post.

In the meantime though, there are many other types of technologies or software out there that can supplement your basic productivity or organizational system. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Microsoft OneNote – It is a great tool for organizing information, projects, schedules and ideas. It neatly allows you to input information in whatever format makes sense for you (text, drawings, audio, video or screen or web clippings. You can even insert documents, scans, spreadsheets, etc. In essence this really replaces your old household, work and project binders.  The really convenient feature is that you can add an action item from OneNote directly into your Outlook tasks. This is especially useful for anyone who likes to collect information. For example it can be used to organize your recipes or decorating ideas, including screen shots clipped from the web. I have my Christmas notebook in OneNote with gift lists, decorating ideas, card lists, a prep schedule and a running tally of how much food I need to buy. For business use, I store marketing ideas, website design concepts, screen shots of competitor sites or advertisements, examples of newsletters, research notes and lists of quotes and tips to share. (OneNote is included in Microsoft Office 2010)

Evernote – With Evernote you enter notes or record information using text, photos, voice recordings and screen clippings. It does not have all of the organizational bells and whistles that OneNote has, but you can use tags and specify notebooks for your notes as a way to label them for fast retrieval and sorting. Evernote syncs via an online server between your PC and an app on your phone so all notes can be available in both places in real time. I use Evernote to capture blog post ideas and thoughts for my productivity book on the fly. I either enter the text, record a voice note or take a picture of something I want to talk about while I am away from my desk and then when I am ready to work on them later I simply open up Evernote on my desktop and flesh out my thoughts.

HootSuite – HootSuite is really an all -in-one online social media portal. This tool helps you to monitor and update many social media channels all on one screen. You can see your home feeds from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping, MySpace, and Foursquare all in one place.  You can also update your status, monitor you Twitter lists and Facebook pages. HootSuite makes it easy to schedule updates for when you are away from your desk, upload photos to posts, and get statistical information on usage and Klout scores of others on social media. It just makes staying connected to social media channels so much more efficient.

Focus Booster – Sometimes we get so wrapped up in what we’re doing that we completely lose track of time and that can be devastating both to our schedule and income if we are wasting our time. Focus booster simply sits on your desktop and you click on it when you want to start timing your work. When your time is up the timer signals you to take a short break. You can set the timer for whatever length of time you want or use the traditional recommendation of 25 minutes, choose your break length and whether you hear the ticking sound or not. This little tool helps you be aware of your time and work more efficiently and it also reminds you to take breaks which are a crucial aspect of productivity. It is a well-known fact that we generally use the maximum amount of time we are allotted for each task, so why get better control of that time.

Paymo Time Tracker – It is a time tracking tool that sits on your desktop or access it via the internet. It’s a very efficient way to track time spent on each client, project, task or even job. The really neat aspect is that it has integrated invoicing to make billing convenient.  It also has great reporting features and visual graphs. An app is available for iPhone that syncs the time that you need to track when you are away from your computer. For many the tracking offered in Outlook Journal may be sufficient, but for those who juggle multiple jobs, email accounts, clients or projects, especially if you need to generate invoices, Paymo is a great solution.