Thing 13 -- and we're over the hump!

How appropriate that Thing 13 (the "now you're past the half-way mark" activity) should be productivity enhancers.  It also served as a reminder to me to be grateful to my school district (Hopkins, west of MPLS) for already providing its staff with many useful online tools.  Some of which it would behoove Miss Shelved to get to know better.  Well, what better time than the present?

To respond to the prompts:

***Start page?We have had a Google start page for some time, but this was a good time to refurbish and add some of the services the 23 Things folks have introduced.  Useful to have widgets like weather and local gas prices available . . . both of which are behaving immoderately in recent days. It is the #2 page on this computer, since the internet startup is a district page (about which we have no complaints!)

***Useful tool?  Miss Shelved has long been a fan of stickies.  These tend to serve as to-do lists as well as reminders.  Doubtless there would be times when it would be useful to access this information online, or form a different computer.  However, it is at least as likely that the information will be needed when offline.  Miss Shelved will stick (hmmm) with her local stickies for the nonce.  However, MyStickies was a big hit (see below).

***Calendars are a resource for which Miss Shelved must be deeply endebted to her district. We share Entourage calendars with capabilities to schedule, invite, sync, etc.  Upon touring the list of recommended online calendar sites, we decided instead to take an hour (2 as it turned out) to explore our current tool and become a better user.  Adding tags, finally sync-ing in holidays, changing preferences to make better use of invitations -- all should add considerably to one's productivity.  Sometime the best way to learn something new is revisit what you already started.

***To-dos?  We'll stick to stickies.

***Backpack:  What a terrific resource for an ad hoc group. However, for professional groups that supply their staff with computing capability, one would think that such resources would already be shared.  But one could see a group coming together to organize a fundraiser, or a performance, or a slate of PTO meetings using this to link users from many different home or corporate systems.

***What else is good?  Loved Gliffy -- easy creation of flowcharts and floorplans.  See Miss Shelved's "Dream Office"   with grand piano and hot tub.  Ooops:  this was supposed to be productivity enhancement, not time-wasters.  Still, one can dream.  And MyStickies is a neat way to remind oneself why a particular website raised one's interest in the first place.