Dual Screens and Productivity.

I once thought having more than one monitor was a unnecessary luxury. Well, ever since I got the opportunity to run two I can't imagine going back to just one. What a huge productivity boost. I put all my less important stuff such as reference material, task bars, file links, email and audio on my secondary screen will leaving my main screen's full real estate to the task at hand. Great way to keep the less important stuff you like or need to deal with frequently open but off to the side. This also creates a good reminder of the main job at hand if you find yourself spending to much time focused on the side screen and not enough time on the main screen.

Desktop Publishing

Looking for an open source desktop publishing program. Look no further than Scribus, a full featured program available free for Linux, Mac and Windows. Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, Spot Colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation with an award-winning combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.

Your Work Day as a Game of Football.

Here's an idea from "The Productivity Show" podcast I was listening to on the way to work. Think of your day as a game of football and break it down into four quarters. At the end of each quarter be the coach and go over that quarter. Look at what you did well. Where you could improve going forward. Was your time well spent. Did you get done what needed to be. At the end of the day go back over the game and see were you might improve for the next days game. I'm going to give this one a try.

The PocketMod

Here's a neat little idea along the lines of the Hipster PDA. PocketMod is an online way of creating a pocket size 8 page organizer out of a single piece of paper. Using the templates provided you can design an organizer with pages tailored to your unique needs. Select from shopping list, to do list, calendar, lined, graph and many other styles of pages to fill your book. Once you've laid out your design simply print and fold as directed and your done. A compact pocket organizer for the the price of a piece of paper.

Do Meetings Cut into the Productive Times of Your Day?

Meetings can take a big chunk out of precious productive time in your day. How many times have you sat through a meeting wishing you could just get back to your desk and get some much needed work done. Gina Trapini over at the Harvard Business blog has some great ideas on how to shorten and reduce your meetings so you can get on with your day.

Trackball vs. Mouse. How about both.

Working at a computer all day can be tiring and potentially lead to repetitive stress injury's. Using a combination of two different input devises can go a long way to remedying this problem. I for one use both a trackball located to the left of my keyboard and a mouse on my desk to my right. Constantly switching up during the day keeps my hands from getting tired and cramped. If you are only used to working a mouse with your one hand try switching it over to your other hand from time to time or put a trackball next to it. Another option for some would be the use of a pen tablet. Next time you find your mouse hand getting tied give it a try.

Project management & Scheduling

OpenProj and GanttProject are two free open source programs available to help you manage your projects by creating what are called Gantt charts. These programs use a type of bar chart to show the beginning and ending dates of a given project and the individual elements within it. You can utilize the chart to show the relationship and dependency of different elements to one another. Organize start dates for different operations and show completed tasks as the project progresses. A great way to stay on top of complicated projects which contain many different elements . Both OpenProj and GantProject are available as free downloads for Windows, Linux & Mac.