Blog #3 - Personal Productivity Tools for Your Improvement

Personal Productivity Tools for Your Improvement 

            c2024, Baratko, Microsoft Designer            

This month, we’ll look at productivity tools you can implement in your work, research, or personal life. There are many of them, but for our purposes, we will just select three that you can employ. The ones we will look at here in my Blog #3 are Diigo, OBS, Notebook LM, and Notion. Diigo and ODS are your primary personal productivity tools. Notebook LM and Notion are add-on AI productivity tools.

One of your goals for technology is to maximize your human productivity. i.e., the tools you can use to increase your personal digital technology will be essential for your success. Such tools can help optimize your workflow and achieve your goals more efficiently. Once you have selected a technology tool, you will need to onboard it and then determine if it is and will be advantageous to your personal digital improvement. You want to be able to appraise your choice/s critically, identifying those best suited to enhance learning efficiency. So, one of the 1^st questions you need to ask yourself is, How will I evaluate the use of the digital productivity tool? For that, you have many, many choices.

Many people use SMART, an acronym for setting end goals, which started ~1980. However, it is outdated, and we need something more current. We’ll choose Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable – PACT (Caucci, 2021). The simplistic difference is that SMART measures reaching some final goal, whereas PACT is based not just on established goals but on the endurance and longevity of attaining them. If you apply PACT to the following tools, you can quickly validate their advantages.  So, let’s get started.

Personal Productivity Tool #1 – Diigo – https://www.diigo.com

Diigo replaces the “Favorites Bar” on your browser. 

Notice all the information in Diigo's Giving a Speech. Easier recall and search abilities. Try it.

Personal Productivity Tool # 2 – OBS Studio -  https://obsproject.com

OBS is a placement for making videos of your presentations with Clipchamp, PowerPoint, & Zoom

                                        This is how it looks using voice-over on PPT or Word

However, on OBS, you can edit it and look look like this...

It should be obvious which one to use to show you.. Pretty cool.

Finally, I am extra - Personal Productivity Tool #3 – Notebook LM & Notion

These two guys are the new AI tools for taking information and producing simplified results. For example, you could take 12 research journal articles, 2 books, and several websites and give them to LM or Notion and ask it to organize, summarize, and produce an outline for you, and wala, there it is. The question is? Is it legal? Is it ethical? I found one article on related ethics by Jiao et al. (2024).

I will be discussing this ethical use of AI in upcoming blogs

If we apply the PACT analysis to each of the ones I have just shown you, You can see that using the diigo and OBS substantially impact these productivity tools. It will prove that they are excellent for personal information organization and making your presentations look and feel better for the audience.