I have an account at Docstoc (and also at their competitor Scribd) where I store documents online that I can make public or privates. Several days ago I received an email about their new features Docstoc MyDocs and Docstoc Sync, which they refer to as "the easiest way to put your documents online and the fastest way to preview your documents."

Joe's Goals is a free online habit tracker. It is a simple tool to easily track your goals. You use one single page to setup daily goals and track them. Your daily score acts as a gage of your success and use negative goals to get rid of bad habits.

"Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. Its aim is to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks ... Anxiety utilizes Leopard's Calendar Store to remain in sync with iCal and Mail. Add, remove, or check off a task in either Anxiety or one of these apps, and the changes will be reflected in the others."

Anxiety can be toggled on or off via a menubar item and can float above other windows or subtly fade out when you switch applications.

A talk given on January 8th, 2008 to the Princeton Macintosh Users's Group by Janie Hermann.

Enhancing Productivity with Web 2.0 tools.

Instapaper is a web application that lets you explore interesting links later when you have the time. You signup for the service and install a 'Read Later' bookmarklet in your browser toolbar. You create a personalized newspaper with the links you have saved. When your schedule permits, you browse through the links choosing to 'Skip', 'Edit' or 'Delete' them.

http://www.freelinereport.com

Text to Speech Maker is made by Xrlly Software. It will convert text to a variety of audio formats such as wav,mp3,vox files. You can get a free trial from http://www.xrlly.com/text-to-speech.htm.

Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program. All computer voices installed on your system are available to Balabolka. The on-screen text can be saved as a WAV or MP3 file. ... Balabolka uses various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI); [you can] alter a voice's parameters, including rate and pitch. It can be downloaded from http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

For more information on other Text-to-Speech programs, check out the Text To Speech Tools mini guide by Robin Good.

"Presdo is an online scheduling application that helps you to quickly, and attractively, schedule events with a group of people. It’s very minimalistic from the get go, only requiring you to type in what you want to do with your guests before bringing you to another page where you can add locations and more event details. ... You can add a location by entering in the exact address or you can do a search based on the type of place you’re looking for and the location.

Flypaper Studio, a startup that allows users to create flash-based web presentations without any programming experience, has closed a $3.5 million round of funding. The round was led by Sierra Ventures and SCF Arizona, and brings the company’s total funding to around $6.5 million.

Roboform is a great tool that I've used for many years. It stores your username and password for all the different sites that you need to login to access. You don't have to remember them or look them up if you've written them down in a book. Once you've save the information, Roboform will remember it and fill in the information into the username and password fields when you return to the site. Favorite feature: the ability to save pascards into folders. If you have multiple accounts at one site i.e. Google Mail, you can create a gmail folder that holds all your gmail account data.

Lana Hawkins of MomPaysforCollege.com explains how valuable she finds Roboform in this video.

Normally sending your email as an attachment in a new email is a simple process using a desktop email program. Today I needed to forward several emails using my gmail account and they needed to be sent as attachements. I then discovered there did not seem to be a way to do it in gmail. I of course used Google to try to find out if it really wasn't an option.

Zimbra is an easy to use offline email application that has many people in the tech world taking note. In addition to accessing their email accounts, users can do everything from editing documents to importing calendar entries from iCal to viewing addresses with Yahoo Maps. Zimbra is currently available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Decision making can be a grueling task and can affect a person’s life tremendously, good or bad. Although there are people that seem to have good fortune (seemingly living a charmed life) when it comes to the decisions they face, others are not so lucky. Most people struggle with the consequences of their decisions every day. It may not lead to immediate results, but eventually, every decision changes the outcome of a situation. Taking time in these choices is not always an option, although it is preferred.

A digital painting done by Marilyn Sholin, Corel Painter Master. She states that portrait paintings can be done quickly in Corel once the tips and tricks are learned.

Here in the United States the Forth of July holiday is fast approaching and despite the high price of gasoline, many people will still be driving to visit friends and family or to go to a holiday event. A Global Positioning System (GPS) makes navigation a breeze while driving. You don't have to read paper directions as you are driving because the GPS gives you voice directions and you also don't have to pull over somewhere and take out your map to find an alternate route because the GPS will recalculate directions.

Good PC Software tools to help with your productivity.

Email:
Outlook
Gmail
Eudora

FTP:
FileZilla

Video:
Camtasia
Sony Vegas Pro
Adobe Premiere

Security:
ZoneAlarm
Roboform
Moosoft's The Cleaner
TrojanHunter
Max Registry Cleaner

Image Creation/Editing:
PhotoShop
Painter
Illustrator
ArtRage

Office Software:
Open Office
Microsoft Office

A digital painting by Daniel Ching using ArtRage.

SproutBuilder is a drag-and-drop Flash authoring tool built with Adobe's Flex. SproutBuilder lets you create "widgets, banners, mini-sites, mashups for your website, Myspace, Facebook and more for free." Its makers refer to the sprouts as 'living content'. In just a few minutes I was able to create a Potent Mind sprout by modifying one of the pre-built sprouts that you can use as a template. The sprout includes the site's twitter feed and two videos from the Youtube channel.

http://symphony.lotus.com FREE office productivity tools to download. A great alternative.

The makers of the picopad have come up with PicoPad® Wallet Notes®. A pad of 15 refillable sticky notes and 1 tiny-but-functional pen.

Finding the right planning tool depends primarily on your personal style and preferences. Certain planning tools that work well for some may very well not work for others. When choosing a planning tool it is important to know that the first method you try may not work for you. If this happens then simply move on to the next and the next, until you find the one that works best for you personally. You may actually find a planning tool that works but needs a little adjustment in order for it to be exactly what you need.

A very good list of free productivity tools.