Yahoo.Com as a productivity tool

A funny name for a serious set of features

by John Hood, webmaster at The Best of Free Software, Mar 2006

Many people know Yahoo.com through their add campaign: "Do you Yahoo?" You may even have a Yahoo.com mail account. You may not know that Yahoo.com loads the account service with serious features to keep you organized, plus it's all available, free, on the web. How do I know? Part of my job is computer software and service evaluation. I've seen the good, the bad and the indifferent. I also spent the past three weeks in three different cities, burying my father and then my mother-in-law. I couldn't have made it through without Yahoo.com.

Here is a look at Yahoo.com as an roganizational tool. For those of you familier with David Nelson's "Getting Things Done" method, there is a terrific article on GTD and Yahoo here.

First off, the mail account has spam filtering available, a VERY nice touch. Incoming mail can be tagged, moved by rules, the whole kit. It also tells you how much space you have left. My work email doesn't do this (I'd complain to the email admin, if he wasn't, well, me). Email can be edited in plain text or HTML. The mail editors remember previous addresses in the TO: line, so you don't need to search for contacts in the address book. Start to type the name and the editor fills the rest in. Address book also lets you create contacts and groups on the fly.

In the mail account is a calendar with reminders (two of them no less), a notepad, a "To Do" list. All entries have a "last updated" date. All Yahoo content except the emails themselves, can be sync'ed LIVE with a palm device, or Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla, and others (see Clif's Clif Notes Newsletter, March 5 for further details). I resurrected an old Palm VIIx for this purpose. Screens are easy to navigate with just a little reading. The behavior of the features can be customized through the "Options" link in each. I turned reminders "Off" by default in calendar, Notes shows "50" at a time, sorted "alphabetically." I changed the color scheme, and added some sorting rules.

The "My.Yahoo.com" service allows you to take almost any Yahoo content and create a custom page with it. My custom page has weather info for the cities I was going to, in addition to my Yahoo Mail "To Do" list, Yahoo mail calendar and notes.

I could save web searches by signing up with Yahoo MyWeb, which is great for saving maps and directions, addresses I haven't saved yet, and other web tidbits I don't want to lose. The Yahoo Toolbar is one of the few tools where I use all of the features.

There are other organization tools on the web. I have seen few that have as many features, and none of them that are available for free. Plaxo.com charges for it. Gmail doesn't have the features, neither does Hotmail, AOL or Netscape. Visto.com disappeared into private hosting oblivion. Yahoo.com is the most feature-rich online productivity tool I've seen. It is the one to beat.

Visit The Best of Free Software


Page Information

  • Changed 2 years ago [show history]
  • View page source
  • You're not logged in
  • No tags yet learn more

Wiki Information

Recent PBwiki Blog Posts