We’ve mentioned a few productivity apps that you can download and install to save time and effort. In this post, we present a few websites that can boost your productivity. There’s no need to download anything, but you might want to bookmark these time-saving websites for future use.
Meeting Planners
Trying to organize a meeting with many attendees using email is an exercise in frustration. Dozens of emails go back and forth and it’s almost impossible to figure out who is available at what time. Meeting planners like Doodle and Calendly offer a solution. Simply sign up (for free) and you can create an event with possible dates and times. Invite people to your event by sending the link. Each attendee can choose which is the best time for them with a yes, no, or the option of if need be. Integrated time zone support means each invitee sees the event in their own time zone. Whether you’re planning a meeting between international business colleagues or the little league fundraiser, meeting planner websites are the way to go.
The Time and Date website has many useful tools. The International Meeting Planner compares the time in your city to cities anywhere in the world. It compares normal working hours (green), normal non-working hours (yellow), and sleeping hours (red) in each city to help you find the best meeting time for everyone. The list of Holidays and Observances Around the World will help you avoid scheduling a meeting on a holiday. The Date-to-Date Calculators are very handy. Simply enter beginning and end dates to count the number of days in between, or enter one date and add or subtract days, weeks, or months.
Home/Office Design
RoomSketcher lets you design floor plans online. You can have a maximum of five floorplans in the free subscription, but they can be edited/overwritten endlessly. You can furnish and decorate your virtual rooms and easily resize the pre-made furniture options to match the dimensions of your own furniture. The 3D and panoramic views of the space will give you an idea of how your furniture will fit in the rooms of your home. There is also office furniture in the free account to create or redesign your work/home space.
Calculations
Calculator Soup is one of the great time-saving websites. If you have ever struggled when adding or subtracting hours, minutes, and seconds to get a total time, click here to make your life easier! The website has many other calculators including financial (loan, interest, depreciation), mathematical (ratios, fractions, geometry), and many others (chemistry, physics, health).
Conversions
Converting from metric to imperial units and back seems to be a daily chore for many Canadians. The Online Conversion website will help. They have more common conversions such as speed and weight as well as less common ones like energy, pressure, and torque. But, it’s not just math and physics! They include clothing and shoe sizes conversions between countries, converting Brix to Baumé (cooking and winemaking), cholesterol and blood sugar units (medical), wire gauge (construction), typography (graphic design) and just about anything else you can think of.
Cooking and baking can be daunting when conversions are involved – especially those that relate to weight versus volume. How much does one cup of butter weigh? Visit Café Fernando to see a list of common kitchen/cooking metric to imperial conversions as well as the weight to volume ratio of common ingredients.
Other Useful Time-Saving Websites
Zamzar online file conversion. Upload your file(s) and the site will convert it to another format. For example, you can convert an eps file to jpg, or that archived WordPerfect document to MS Word. There is a monthly fee for the service but no contracts so you can cancel at any time.
Colour Converter. This lovely little site converts colour codes between CMYK, RGB, and HEX. It is very useful if you are doing any basic graphic design.
This to That. Check out this little time-saving website before you head out to the hardware store. It will tell you which glue you need to bond one type of material to another.
Internet Archive. Find almost any website the way it appeared on a certain day even if the webpage has been deleted from the active internet. You can also save any webpage the way it looks today in the Wayback Machine. For example, if your business was featured in a high-profile, online magazine, you can save a copy of that specific web page. (We also suggest saving the webpage to your own computer as well.)
If you are looking for more productivity tips, feel free to read any of our business organizing posts. If you want some “hands-on” organizing assistance or you are interested in a productivity workshop, contact us at 604-813-8189 or info@outofchaos.ca.
