On-line productivity

When I consider the words "online productivity", I tend to think its an oxymoron, like "military intelligence" or "constructive feedback". I mean, when you get on-line and start surfing, playing and looking around BAM! that's two or three hours of your life you'll never get back. Maybe you learned something, maybe not.

So I took my typical cynical attitude to start looking around to fulfil the requirement for Thing #17, online productivity. I was blown away at home stuff is out, most of it free, to help you and me organize and share our documents, work lives and other things we want to communicate.

For starters, I had no idea there were so many online office suites, calendars, documents, RSS Readers, start pages, invoice managers, time tracking apparatus, project management tools, to-do lists, personal organizers and on and on and on. Id' heard of Google Docs and Zoho but learned that most of the big players have a foot in the door. My favorite name: Adobe's Virtual Ubiquity. (ubiquity and ubiquitous are among my favorite words--don't ask me why).

Secondly, so much of this stuff is free! How long can that last? I will admit, I did not probe deeply into just what you get for "free". I suspect that if you want to put a lot of stuff online, there is a charge since advertising can only give so many a free lunch. BTW there are no such things as free lunches, right?

Anyhow, I'll probably create a Google Docs account in the very near future so I can share my paperwork for my model railroad. People will look at the pics on Flickr then find a link to take them to a map or timetable or other railroad-related doc. Pretty cool stuff.