Several people of recent, including my good friend Rabbi Shaul Wertheimer, have asked me about my personal productivity. With multiple projects, portfolio companies, and widely varied interests it is hard to keep up to speed with all I have going on in my life.

Certainly, a modicum of learning to say “NO” has helped, but I am not very good at that, always wanting to be of service and desiring of new challenge. My proverbial “Ace in the hole,” has been my personal coach Jennie, who has assisted me in further defining my goals and aligning my activities and priorities with what activities and deadlines are ongoing.

On to the take-away for you my readers.

What tools do I deploy to best manage all of my activities?

BlackBerry Pearl from Verizon – with unlimited data plan, email synchronization, maps, camera, and SMS texting. This is plugged in at least once a day to synch with my desktop. Two complaints, short battery life (or, I spend WAY to much time on it,) and I don’t love its predictive text typing function.

Moleskine Calendar – I always hand write a backup of my electronic calendar at least daily. It is also much easier to view at a glance when lying on my desk in the open position to the current week. Downside – NONE, I love Moleskine.

Moleskine Notebooks – various sizes, I keep a Moleskine for every project, for every personal activity, and every class I take. Don’t get me wrong, I take notes on my laptop but it is often far more emotionally satisfying, not to mention more attractive while in a formal meeting, to write using a quality pen and a notebook that is compact and organized.

Fountain Pen – my handwriting is atrocious, and I tend to use a heavy hand. A good quality and fine nibbed fountain pen can make the difference in both writing comfort and legibility. My personal daily writer is a Pelikan Souveran M800 in classic green and black.

Plastic with Elastic Closure Band Portfolios – I keep one for each project, and inside of it are at the very least: business cards, pen and pencil, project Moleskine, documents for that specific project.

Sony Vaio – a very nice laptop, built in camera for video conference, a soundcard that is giving me trouble (probably a software issue I caused,) and XP loaded (no Vista for this guy!)

MS Office – I have experimented with Open Office in the past, and while it is great for a tech savvy guy who has the slightly rebellious bent, I find it somewhat more cumbersome and certainly less easily integrated with many of my synching functions that allow interoperability with my other devices and software. I have upgraded to Office 2007, and have been quite happy, with the exception of having to backwards save for many other people when sharing documents.

MS Outlook – part of office but mentioned on its own as it is so integral to my productivity. While I have experimented with both Thunderbird and Gmail (native,) Outlook synchs in relative simplicity with my BlackBerry, my Google Calendar, Plaxo, Evernote, multiple mail accounts and signatures, and LinkedIn. Negative – well it’s a Microsoft product, and I don’t love its task list function (see below.)

Google Calendar – my partners, clients, and family use various calendaring functions. However, most of the disparate calendars and platforms offer (with varying levels of simplicity) synchronization with Google Calendar. By synching all calendars (where they do not natively synch with Outlook) to Google Calendar, I can then synch them to Outlook and get an all in one view that also uploads to my BlackBerry. I monitor about 8 calendars on a regular basis, this is hugely important to me.

FuseCal and Google Calendar Synch – the softwares I use to synch all these calendars together. A bit kludgy to setup, still in beta on some, but FREE and seamless once the systems are established correctly.

FireFox – umm if you are using AOL or Internet Explorer its time to get with the modern age. Not just for techies anymore, Firefox is a stable, fast, supported, easy to use, and free browser software. It also offers incredibly varied and easy to install upgrades and add-ons.

iGoogle Homepage – I open my browser and logon to my iGoogle homepage. Within iGoogle, I have three tabs. My start page is my daily snapshot and personal productivity page, the second tab is for news, and the third for finance and trading (my former career and something I do not even attempt to escape.)

Jott – on speed dial in my phone, excellent text to speech free software, allows for dictating replies to emails received on my BlackBerry, integrates into my Google Calendar, integrates with Remember the Milk, and also allows me to dictate blog posts. Great for recording notes on the fly and then placing them with deadlines and to-dos into the appropriate software or forwarding to the appropriate party in my address book. The Jott widget is on my iGoogle 1^st tab.

Remember the Milk – I have experimented with every to-do list out there (almost…) This one allows me to email task lists into it, integrates with Jott (above,) the widget is on my iGoogle 1^st tab, it allows for tasks to be assigned to other people, and it integrates with my Google Calendar as well.

Other Widgets on my iGoogle home page – Activity/Time tracker setup for each of my common projects for both billable hours as well as productivity tracking, Google Calendar at a glance, Weather, Google Maps, Instant Chicago Traffic, IP Address, Google Reader (RSS feeds,) and LinkedIn search.

Pidgin – I really am not a big fan of instant messages, but since I have to use them on occasion, Pidgin (formerly GAIM) is a freeware aggregator of my various identities on the most commonly used IM systems.

MeGlobe – a great beta freeware IM service that offers real time translation of IMs’ into various languages when doing business with those abroad.

Skype – does anyone really pay full telco long distance fees these days?

Plaxo – I use Plaxo less for its sorta/kinda social networking, and much more to keep my professional contacts up to date, as well as their new de-duplicator function for my contact list.

WordPress – the platform which hosts this blog.

FolderShare – we have been experimenting with various software packages to replicate project folders and files across our enterprise. While this is free, it is severely limited in functionality, and Microsoft which bought the firm is not offering ongoing support. ***If anyone has a recommendation for a better similar system to share files and project folders, and that offers better safety and security, along with version control, PLEASE let me know. This is an ongoing issue yet to be resolved.***

Evernote – I purchased the professional edition of this great note taking and clipping software, and have never looked back. It keeps all my random ephemera in one place, is highly searchable, and offers great support when necessary.

GIMP – no, not politically incorrect, it is the Gnu Image Manipulation Project, a freeware version of PhotoShop. I am not highly skilled, but it is more than sufficient for my touchup purposes.

Spybot Seek and Destroy – great donation based virus and Trojan killer.

TruCrypt – freeware strong encryption for specific files, folders, and partitions.

PGP – whole disk encryption for those who want to manage keys and lock their entire laptop.

Carbonite – spend the damn $50.00 a year to backup all your files without ever actively thinking about it. Our corporate files are all backed up in multiple places, and I am a big believer in at the very least tertiary redundancies!!! Spend the money – you will thank me in the end.

So that’s the short list. It will give you a pretty comprehensive look at my day to day operating environment, all accomplished for well under $1000.00 in investment (and can be done for far cheaper…)