Productive use of Active Desktop – More ideas
by Mandar Vaze on January 7, 2009
in Hack, Productivity
Once you understand the idea behind using the Active Desktop, you can come up with several creative and unique ideas to make this feature work for you. Let me get you started by listing some that came to my mind.
- Apart from the mini phone list, I also have my Plan of the Week, as another HTML on my Desktop. At the end of each week, I create the plan of next week (Friday 4-6PM). Again, it is very easy to convert any piece of text into an HTML.
- Use a web page as Sticky Note to yourself. No Coding needed. Check this out.
- You can put your Google Calendar on your Desktop.
Please share your ideas in the comments
Productive Use of Active Desktop
by Mandar Vaze on January 5, 2009
in Hack, Productivity, Tutorials
Refer to my previous post about displaying my To Do list on the Desktop. I have since stopped using todo.sh for various reasons. But I continue to use the Active Desktop feature of Windows XP. One of the use I have found, is to display a mini phone list.
Ginko: Quick note taking with Outlook
by Mandar Vaze on January 2, 2009
in Productivity
I came across this really neat tool for quick note taking. It is called Ginko (after Ginko Biloba which is memory enhancer herb)
I had downloaded it earlier, gave it a try and realized that I am not using it the way it is to be used, so I stopped using it for few months. Then after a while I really need to create a @TODO folder in Outlook so that I can track my action items. I started moving the emails which required some action from my side into this folder. But quickly I realized that there are action items originating outside the emails. I had thought of writing an email and send it to myself,that is when I remembered that I know of a tool which does exactly same thing.
But I couldn’t remember the name of the application, so I searched my machine using X1, trusty desktop search engine. After couple of combination of search terms, I was able to find it in my download folder. Rest was easy. I had used it earlier, so I knew I needed to edit the .hta file to point it to correct Folders. As soon as I was done, I was able to jot down the next TODO item. It was that easy.
More about this tool at the author’s page here.
Originally Published on Jul 18, 2006
