January 5, 2010

Simple free tools to boost your productivity

Today there are many free tools using which we can dramatically change our working style and boost our productivity. While choosing a free tool, just apart from the functionality, we need to see various factors such as comparing with competitive tools, growth rate of the tool, ease of installation etc..

Considering all these factors, I use and recommend the following.

FreeMind

Let’s start with this tiny tool, which is very useful in visioning and planning.

If you do not know the concept of mind mapping, you are missing the ease of recording your thoughts. Never mind, just start using a mind mapping tool such as FreeMind and advantages will be clear.

A must for visionery managers and leaders.

tmail

Many of us do not realize that there has to be much better ways of task communication than email, phone or fax. Use tmail and you will wonder the ease of managing your operations. Unavoidable for employees of an organization.

trac

Want the simplest Intranet where your departments and employees can express themselves? Use trac. It is also the simplest project and issue management tool that I have come across. We use it heavily in the organizations I work for.

Dia

My evaluations of simple diagramming, UML or flowchart tools ended with dia.

There are many other free tools that I use - will expand this list gradually. I have not mentioned the obvious ones: OpenOffice, Ubuntu etc.