Use Open Source Software to Improve Your Productivity
Personal productivity or time management is important for professional growth. Here are a few open source tools that can help you achieve optimum productivity.
Most of us have heard the term ‘ Productivity Improvement’ in the context of the manufacturing sector. But this term has gained importance even in the services sector where you nd professionals peering at computers throughout their working hours. One could think of improving the productivity of these professionals, also known as information workers, by increasing their typing speed. But there are better ways available! In this article, I will share my experience with ve open source tools that I have used to improve my personal productivity.
The first tool that I want to talk about is Pdfcreator. Let me confess that I use Ms-office as it is the standard in our organisation. But I need to convert Ms-office documents into PDF files uite often. Ms-office programs do provide a feature to convert Ms-office documents into PDF files. But you can't create PDF files that are password protected or the ones from which text cannot be copied. Thankfully, there exists Pdfcreator, which provides these features without any cost or hassles. Pdfcreator installs as a printer so when you are ready to convert your Ms-office document or even TML document into a PDF document, just select that printer and print to it. The dialogue box that comes up will have an Options button that can be clicked to set permissions for the soon-to-be-generated PDF file, as shown in Figure 1. You can download this software and access help at http://www.pdfforge.org/
Another tool that I use uite often is Wikidpad, which I used to prepare the draft of this article. This is basically a personal wiki wherein the contents are stored on your machine. You can consider it as a notepad with some advanced features. Using Wiki syntax, you can create a hierarchy of documents. You can also paste images within the text and can do a spell check. It's very useful if you regularly write blogs or articles, as you can write and rewrite your draft of ine uite conveniently using this tool. Figure 2 shows a screenshot of this tool. More details, along with the installer, are available at http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/
If you love to prepare mind maps to take notes during a training programme or while reading a book you will nd Freemind software uite useful. Actually, there are uite a few software tools available to prepare mind maps. I had evaluated some of them—covering both open source and commercial software (using evaluation copies). I nally selected Freemind— not because it is freely available but because I found it superior to other tools. Thanks to its simple layout and keyboard shortcuts, one can prepare mind maps using just the keyboard, without the need to juggle between the keyboard and mouse. That helps in uicker note taking. The software allows you to export the mind map documents to image formats such as PNG. Thus you can share your mind maps with the world in the form of images. Browse http://freemind.sourceforge. net to know more about this product and to download its installer. Figure 3 shows how this software can be used.
Another tool that I use fre uently is actually a software platform for running popular software tools from a pen drive. Portableapps.com is a site that provides this platform along with software tools that can be installed on a pen drive. You can then use this pen drive on any PC and launch your favourite applications from the former. Some examples of such portable applications include Firefox, Chrome, Skype, VLC Media Player, Openof ce.org, etc. Figure 4 shows a screenshot of the launcher when you run the Startportableapps.exe le from the pen drive. It lists all the software tools available on the pen drive. You can simply click on the one that you wish to run. It's that simple! Visit http://portableapps.com/ to know more about this software solution and to download the base platform along with the portable versions of your favourite applications.
Finally, let me share one of my most favourite software tools, workrave. This is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of epetitive Strain Injury ( SI). The program fre uently alerts you to take micro-pauses and rest breaks, and restricts you to your daily limit. Obviously, this fre uency is what you pre-con gure based on your preference. For example, I have con gured the program to enable me to take 30-second microbreaks after every 30 minutes of active keyboard/mouse usage and 5-minute rest breaks after every hour of active keyboard/ mouse use. I have also set up six hours as the daily limit for me to spend working on the keyboard/mouse. I sometimes skip or postpone these breaks but generally tend to honour them. The tool also shows the statistics for metrics such as break prompts, breaks skipped, breaks postponed and even mouse button clicks over all the days in the last six months. Figure 5 shows the window that pops up reminding you about your rest break.
I hope you too will nd some or all of these open source software tools useful in improving your personal productivity. I would love to hear your feedback.