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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Websites that increase your productivity

There are so many great websites out there that can help you save time and money. I have a number of favorites, including del.icio.us for bookmarks and Google Reader for following feeds, and of course, Blogger for creating this website, but below are some of my more recent finds.

Posted this morning on Wise Bread, I just started using Sandy, a site that bills itself as your free personal e-mail assistant. I'm always looking for a new way to manage my to-do list, and this seems like a great option. I recommend checking the site out for yourself, but the basics are that you send the site an e-mail, and it manages that information for you. It tracks lists and bookmarks, stores information such as addresses and phone numbers, and saves reminders and to-do lists. You can get daily e-mails as well as reminders before an event. For example, I want to remember to update Microsoft Money when I get home tonight, so I asked Sandy to remind me to update MS Money at 8:00. And I will get an e-mail around 7:45 reminding me to perform the update. This seems like an exceptionally useful tool for someone who has regular e-mail access but does not want to surf the web at work or is dealing with blocked websites. You just send an e-mail to Sandy, and the site takes care of the rest. It's a great way to track a grocery list to make sure you don't forget things or buy too much, and it also might be a good way to track when you have to pay your bills.

I recently discovered Netvibes. Netvibes is like an RSS feeder with major bonuses. You can create your own Netvibes page with multiple tabs. On these tabs, you can track your RSS feeds just like any other feed reader, but there are a number of other modules available. For example, my Netvibes start page currently shows me the weather, my Twitter account, Gmail, two del.icio.us accounts, a Facebook feed, and a MSNBC graphic feed tracking the primary elections. I have other tabs for various RSS feeds, broken down by categories, such as "finance" and "entertainment." It's a great way to keep everything in one place without having to check multiple websites.

Trent over at The Simple Dollar (thanks Carrie!) linked to SuperCook earlier this week. SuperCook is a recipe search engine, but the great thing is that you can search based on what you have in your kitchen. I am doing my best to limit my grocery spending, so this is a great website for me. You enter what you have and SuperCook provides recipes based on the food in your house and also suggests things you can make if you just go buy one or two additional things. I used it the other night and made some breaded chicken breasts that were absolutely delicious and easy as well!

This is just a brief list. What are some of your fave sites?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Megan,

Trent at The Simple Dollar was the one who mentioned SuperCook.