I don’t ordinarily think of myself as a productive person. I like the idea of it, but productivity, organization and efficiency are all things I strive for but rarely attain. At least that’s how I feel about it–others would probably describe me as productive, organized and efficient. Those people also don’t see the piles I usually have surrounding my work space.

I especially like it when I find a new way to make my work more efficient, like I found today. It starts with Lifehacker, a blog dedicated to productivity, mainly through technology. I stumbled on the site more than a month ago and it wasn’t until today when I actually had time to sift through the 200+ plus Lifehacker RSS entries and see what the site was really about. It led me to a few new upgrades:

1) Firefox 1.5 – I haven’t noticed anything brilliant about the latest upgrade to the best browser out there, but it’s nice to have the latest version and it did allow for one of the other upgrades below.

2) del.icio.us Firefox extention – If you use del.icio.us–an online social bookmark site which basically lets you store and categorize web links and share them with anyone, opening up a world of cool possibilities–this extension is awesome. It integrates del.icio.us into your browser so you can add links with one click and without leaving the page you’re bookmarking. You can even right-click on a link and bookmark that link without ever visiting the page. Cool. Well, it may not be that cool if you don’t traffic in tons and tons of web links like I do. But if you’ve ever opened 16 different browser tabs so you could come back and read an article later, only to shut down or lock up or forget about them, then del.icio.us is for you.

3) Foxmarks – And if you work on multiple computers like I do (desktop and laptop), it’s always nice to be able to sync your bookmarks. Using Safari on a Mac you can do it pretty easily (.Mac may be required, I can’t remember), but you can’t do it with Firefox. Unless you use Foxmarks. Basically they store your bookmarks on a server and let you sync the bookmarks between multiple computers. Pretty sweet. I find my laptop gets much more use when I can set it up just like my desktop and not feel like I’m using a lesser machine because the bookmarks aren’t all up to date or whatever.

Nothing really life changing, just cool and time saving. And I like that.

Except for when I blow any time saved by blogging about it.

Update:
4) Down Them All – And just when I thought I was productive as could be, I had to go back and get this one. It lets you download every file on a web page without having to sit there and click on them all. It’s great for a page with a dozen PDFs or mp3s you need to get.