JAYanthem blog

Looking for that tool that will help you be more productive both online and your life and general? Who doesn’t, right? Well there is a good chance you’ve looked right at it everyday that you go online and didn’t realize it.

YOUR GOOGLE HOMEPAGE

That’s right, it’s more than just a search page it can help you organize and easily display what is important to you on a daily basis, not to mention it can slice and dice your vegetables. Well maybe that is a stretch, but it can be great, open the image below to see how I use it.

You like? Are you now asking how you too can you make the Google homepage the savior of productivity in your life? Follow these steps:

1. Go to www.google.com
2. In the top right corner click Personalized Home
3. Choose from the sampling of content provided to get started
4. Click show my page
5. Now you should see some content in a similar form to what I had
6. Notice that you can easily drag and drop, contract and expand content
7. Now rather than just making this a nice pretty thing you never use, try and add content and gadgets that will really help you on a daily basis.

Here are the gadgets and content I have broken down:

• Remember the Milk- a great free TO DO list application that I’ll be posting more on very soon. Using this gadget will gives you a fast overview of what you need to do, it also always you to quickly add new tasks right from the Google homepage.

• Google Calendar tasks- I’ve blogged on this before, it is to me one of the top 10 products of my time, and I’m serious about that. Rather then see the calendar graph I instead just choose to view my upcoming agenda to see what’s in store. Not only do I ensure I don’t forget about the dentist appt, I also don’t miss any sports games as I have all my favorite teams calendars loaded in my GCal!

• Gmail- this doesn’t need a lot of discussion. It gives you a quick view of the most recent emails in your Inbox, the number can be changed. Also it is worth noting that other email providers have gadgets you can add like for Yahoo mail, etc.

• TWATM RSS feed so you can easily keep on top of new posts. Okay well if you don’t put TWATM here you can put the RSS feed from any of your favorite sites. To add any RSS feed, click Add stuff link on your personlized homepage- then click the Add by URL link next to the Search Homepage Content button at the top of the page. Enter your RSS feed URL and click Add!

• Weather- this one is simple and it is usually one of the first gadgets shown when you go to choose your content, just add it then put in your zip!

Now once you become addicted like me and feel the need for more-more-more, but there is just no space- not to worry Google Homepages now have tabs! so just add new stuff in a new tab by clicking the Add a tab link go to town on the new tab!

That is how I use Google Homepage to help manage my online and off-line life and it really does work wonders for me. Hopefully you can have the same success, and if you have any tips you want to share, please leave a comment!