6 Must Have Google Gadgets

Posted under Business Related, Free Resources, Home and Family Related, Productivity, Small Business, Time Management, Tools, Work by ltruex

I’m a huge fan of Google’s start page, iGoogle. I’m an out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of person. With several income streams to manage, I need a fast and clear way to keep all my projects, ideas, and information organized. iGoogle has been a God-send.

There are hundreds of gadgets you can add to your iGoogle page. Here are the ones I believe every web-living person needs to have.

1) Gmail – I have been a late comer to Gmail mostly because I thought it was like all the other free email accounts. Further with a personal and several professional emails, why did I need another email? Gmail’s benefits as an organizational tool is why. You can manage all your emails through Gmail. If you don’t have or don’t want Gmail, you can use Mail2Web’s free web-based email service. It doesn’t offer the tagging and organizational features that Gmail does, but if you have a single email account, it should work for you.

2) Calendar with Remember the Milk – The Google calendar isn’t my favorite planner system, but for the price and having an online system (as opposed to a computer system that requires phone syncing), its not bad. Because I need to see all my tasks as well as appointments, I have added Remember The Milk to my calendar and feed to iGoogle. Remember the Milk can actually plug into or be used by many applications including a Firefox add-on, Twitter feed and iPhone.

3) Activity Tracker – Time is a precious commodity. Most people don’t have enough of it and don’t quite know where its all spent. The Activity Tracker gadget allows you to track time you spend on all your projects. You can can even designate what activity you were working on within a project category. Further you can create a graph or table that outlines how your time is spent. Since one of my income streams pays hourly, it helps me track how much and where the time is going so I can show my client. But it can be a good tool for identifying where your time is going and whether or not you’re making the most efficient use of it.

4) Social Networks – Do you Tweet? Hang out at MySpace? Network at Facebook? You can feed your social networks onto your iGoogle page so that you know if you have friends waiting and see what others are up to. To see if your network has a gadget, search for it on the “Add Stuff to My Page” in iGoogle (link is at the top right side of the iGoogle page).

5) News feeds – Keep up on the latest news and events or with your favorite blogs. Blogs and RSS feeds can have their own gadget window or you can add them all to Google Reader and simply have the reader gadget on your iGoogle page (my choice as too many gadgets on a page can get distracting).

6) Google Notebook – There are several notebook programs you can use and many can also be fed to iGoogle (search for notebooks on the Add Stuff page). Having a good notebook can allow you to jot down an important idea or clip and save content from a website, and then quickly return to the work at hand. Your ideas and information won’t be forgotten, but neither will be distracted from your work for too long either.