What do I mean?



Ten minutes of spam sorting per day equates to over 60 hours a year deleting email.

Five minutes per day spent looking for your to-do list comes out at over 30 hours a year of unproductive time.

Thought to represent the saviors of our lives, computers actually eat up our time in tiny, almost imperceptible bytes.

As the computer world grows increasingly complex, anyone or anything that removes clutter from your desktop (or your mind), save you time, or eliminate effort rates a closer look.

The answer to increased productivity and micro-time management may not lie in "bigger and better", but in "smaller and specialized."

Widgets, small specialized programs that typically run in the background while you do other things on your computer, may just hold the key to claiming back those lost seconds and minutes that add up over time.

Instead of trying to represent the "end all and be all" of software programs, "widgets" typically solve one - and only one - problem.

Whether it's managing a to-do list, computer performance, activity tracking or managing your calendar, widgets can solve the little problems that add up quickly.

Side Note: As always, when installing unfamiliar software from the Internet, backup all sensitive files, update your anti-virus, turn on your spyware detector software and generally heighten your awareness of what's taking place on your computer.

Log on to http://widgets.yahoo.com for a growing library of free widgets you can download and use right away.

However, to use the widgets you must install Yahoo!'s Widget Engine, which makes the whole process a bit cumbersome.

I would much prefer each widget stand on its own as an individual installation.

Also, Yahoo!'s organization of their widget library leaves a lot to be desired as it takes quite some digging to uncover some of the real gems.

To their credit, Yahoo! seems to be actively promoting third-party development of widgets which they in turn help distribute.

Log on to http://desktop.google.com and see Google's answer to widgets with their "Google Gadgets," a collection of handy little apps designed to help you out with little tasks.

Probably the best offering for increased productivity is the Google Calendar V2 (though it apparently carries no reminder feature).

Like Yahoo!, you can't run the gadgets without Google's software installed.

Though most of the widgets you'll find at these sites are not business related, they represent a trend toward micro-specialization in software development.

Solving one problem for a small group of people (niche audience) instead of trying to solve every problem for a huge group of people -like major software developers - makes a lot of sense.

I believe this represents a trend that will spill over into the mainstream once a viable profit model develops.

Once people figure out how to make money with these "widgets" or "gadgets," you'll see an explosion of mini-software applications performing a myriad of tasks people wonder how they previously ever got along without them.

Copyright (c) 2007 Jim Edwards