Thing 16

UStart equals increased productivity. That is a joke right? Not since I discovered Pinterest has anything come close to equaling that "time sucker," until today. I consider myself to be a very organized individual. Nonetheless, there is always room for improvement, which is why I was so excited to acquaint myself with the tools suggested in this exercise. I started out by exploring NetVibes and quickly realized that the content heavy page was not to my liking. I was able to create “Dashboards” but was unable to figure out how to get multiple tools onto one single page. I moved on to Symbaloo and felt that I still had to spend a lot of time clicking on the various icons to get to the places and information that I wanted. Finally I tried UStart and instantly felt at home with this application. I customized my page by adding specific widgets and feeds I regularly utilize. My biggest problem came while I was customizing my page I happened upon several new widgets and feeds that caught my interest so I added them. I actually began using my UStart page exclusively for a few days until I realized that I was not being as productive as I had been before I began utilizing the tool. I routinely found myself reading articles and engaging in activities that took me away from my original task. I did utilize the calendar feature offered on UStart and appreciated being able to sync it with other applications such as Google and Facebook. However, I was disappointed that I was never able to figure out if the tool offers an alarm feature to notify you about upcoming events. One resource from this exercise that I did find useful was the Lifehacker website. The site offers a lot of suggestions on how to search for things online more efficiently and other web tools that can increase productivity. I found the following article pertaining to Google searches especially helpful. I am not positive if I will continue to use UStart on a regular basis. In one respect having all of my online tools/applications in on location was convenient. On the other hand it also led to a lot of unproductive, off task behavior.