10.5 Productivity Tools - Part 1

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Ahh, summer in Steamboat. Biking, golfing, camping, hiking, tubing, fishing… the list goes on & on. Most people I know came to Steamboat for the winters but stayed because of the awesome summers. But for Steamboat Springs real estate agents, this is the busiest time of the year! I’ve got 10 productivity tools I swear by to help get you out of the office & into the outdoors.

1. Jott.com - Free @ www.jott.com
Jott.com is a relatively new service that transcribes a voice phone message into an email to someone you specify or to yourself. Need to tell someone to fax you a document? Jott ‘em. Need to remind yourself to call someone when you get back in the office? Jott yourself. When you use Jott, your voice message is transcribed to text and via voice recognition, an email is sent to a person you specify in your contact list. So no more waiting for voicemail to pick up on the other end, or endless chit-chat. Just Jott the message and move on. Be sure to program the 800# into your cell phone’s speed dial. Try it - you’ll like it.
TIP: The clearer and more slowly you speak, the better the transcription results are on the other end.

2. Del.icio.us - Free @ del.icio.us
del.icio.us allows you to tag & organize bookmarks to an online account that’s accessible from any computer. The value of this may not be very apparent at first but it’s become one of my most trusted tools. Being able to associate multiple contexts with a bookmark is a powerful way of organizing information you want to refer to later. Instead of a long list of bookmarks (possibly grouped in folders) del.icio.us provides a powerful tool to store all your bookmarks. With each bookmark, you can assign one or more “tags” of your choosing. So say you wanted to bookmark a page you found on the New York Times website regarding FSBO home pricing and the article had a video. You might “tag” it with 3 separate tags -”Realestate” “FSBO” “Video.” Now 3 months later when you’re doing FSBO research for a Steamboat real estate report from your hotel room in Belize, you can access your account, click on a few tags to filter and voila, there’s the link.
I use the account to remind me of web pages I need to review. If I run across an article or a page that I don’t have time to read, I’ll add it to my del.icio.us account with my “Review” tag. Then when I have some free time I just look at my Review tag to see the stuff I need to read. Even better, all accounts and tags are RSS feeds so you can set up a feed for any of your tags in your newsreader or browser to have those links just a click away.
TIP: del.icio.us has browser buttons to add to your browser toolbar. This makes adding a bookmark to your account a snap.

3. MindJet MindManager - $99 - $349 @ www.mindjet.com
Got a new idea? Planning a marketing campaign? Brainstorming a business issue? Take a serious look at MindManager. Use this tool to create serious brainstorming and planning threads in an appealing visual way. MindManager creates mindmaps of the issue at hand that can contain documents, links, notes, photos and more. In productivity terms, MindManager helps all team members focus on the issue at hand with all relevant information and you’ll get to the end result faster. It’s a great tool to get info out of your head and into a container that’s easy to manipulate.

4. mozy.com - Free - $4.95/month @ www.mozy.com
Backing up your files is a pain. What’s worse is when you loose your data and don’t have a backup. Mozy to the rescue! This is an online backup service that’s very inexpensive and works great. You simply set up an account, install the software and either let it decide what to back up or tell it what to back up. Mozy quietly works in the background and keeps your data backed up to their servers. All the data is encrypted so no one can see your stuff. Plus Mozy will back up multiple versions of files so in case you suddenly realize you’ve been working on the wrong file for the past 2 days, you can go back in time to get the correct one. This feature really saved me recently when Wells Fargo screwed up my Quickbooks file and I needed to replace the bad file with a backup from a month ago. I restored a previous version in 10 minutes and was back in business. In terms of data loss, it’s really a question of when not if. I’d much rather see you on the golf course instead of recreating a contract from scratch on a Saturday afternoon. Yeah, I know, your stuff gets backed up onto the company’s server every night. So what, you’re in business for yourself, it’s your responsibility to safeguard your data. And what happens if you’re traveling? Who are you gonna call at 10:30pm to get your data off the server? With mozy.com just download your backed up file!

5 . Pandora.com - Free @ www.pandora.com
If you work better listening to music be sure to check out pandora.com. You can create personalized commercial free music stations based on a genre or an artist. Like Willie Nelson? Just enter his name in a new station and you’ll hear Willie plus similar artists that you might like. You have the opportunity to give each song a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” rating and the channel learns what to play by how you rate songs. So over time you spend more time listening to music you like.
You can also share stations. Here’s one of my stations I’ll share with you: pandora.com