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Repetition: something that computers do well, and people don't. Give your system a task, tell it to repeat a hundred—or a thousand—times, and you can just walk away. If you had to do that same thing that many times, you'd surely go nuts.

It's easy to work within applications to get them to repeat actions like updating records in a database or mail-merging a letter to your Christmas list. What about other actions that aren't so easily defined? In those situations, keyboard macros are often the way to go.

Windows Macro Recorder by Freelabs is one such tool. To create your macros, it records keystrokes and mouse events from any application. Once you've recorded these actions, it's easy to play them back. Use them to insert little passages of text into your documents ("Dear Mom….") or use the repeat function to have them carry out complicated procedures. You can run it from their GUI, or you can use its command line interface. Either way, you'll be automating your workflow in no time.

Windows Macro Recorder is (obviously) a Windows application.

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Back in the day, you could run a business—or your life—on the back of an envelope. A couple of notes here, a little sketch there, and you were good. Nothing all that complicated.

Update to today. There's no such thing as simple any more. What you used to be able to do on a legal pad requires computers and more. There's a lot you can accomplish with a word processor and a spreadsheet, but if you really want to take care of everything, you need specialized software that deals with your particular issues and concerns. Who knows what those are better than you?

Now you can take your knowledge and expertise and leverage it into applications that you build yourself. LyteRAD is a lightweight rapid application development framework that lets you build complex database applications without writing a line of code. They supply the tools, including an embedded database, and you put it together. Sound good?

LyteRAD is available as a free download (the "CE" edition), and also has paid upgrades. It's a Windows application.

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If getting things done were easy, there wouldn't be so many productivity tools available out there. Writing a letter or putting together a budget, while they can take some time and effort, are generally pretty straightforward. You can use a word processing application or spreadsheet, or even just a yellow legal pad. Dial the complexity up, however, and all of a sudden the paper-and-pencil approach probably isn't your best bet.

Planning, scheduling, and project management fall into this category. Even a moderately complex project involves all kinds of resources, schedules, deadlines, and more. Trying to sketch this out on the back of an envelope is just looking for trouble. Microsoft Project is one tool you can use to try to manage this type of thing. Unfortunately it can also be a way to severely deplete your bank account.

Open Workbench is a free open source project management tool. It includes all the capabilities you need to successfully plan your next big project, including scheduling, allocation of resources, tracking progress, and more. You can even schedule across projects, so your planning can stretch across the enterprise.

Open Workbench is a Windows application.

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Back in the day, a photocopier was a big investment. You had to be a big deal company, and in some cases, they were so expensive that you couldn't even buy them—you had to lease them instead.

Fast forward to today. You can now buy all-in-one machines that scan, print, fax, and just about anything else. What if you're stuck somewhere in the middle? You've got a scanner and you've got a printer, but you aren't interested in chucking them both for a new piece of hardware. Sure, you can scan documents into a paint program, and then turn around and print them out, but wouldn't it be more convenient to just push a button to copy a document?

iCopy can give you a hand with this. It's a small little application—so small you can carry it around on a USB drive—that lets you do exactly that. With your scanner and printer fired up, just push the button in iCopy and before you know it, you'll be printing a copy of whatever you put on the scanner. You can adjust brightness, contrast, and even choose the number of copies you want.

iCopy is a Windows application.

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Does it ever feel like your brain is going to explode? You can reach a point where you couldn't possibly cram another idea or piece of information in there. Or maybe even worse: you've got it all in there, but now you can't retrieve that important fact that you need right now.

Evernote is a tool that will help to keep your head from blowing up. Whether it's typed notes, images you've grabbed, web pages you've seen, you can save it all, and in a way that allows you to get it back when you need it. Their technology helps to organize it all, so you can retrieve your data. And maybe best of all, it's available to you across all your devices, so you're not stuck with not being able to get to your Windows bright ideas while you're on your Mac.

Evernote is available for Mac (OS X - Leopard), Windows (XP/Vista), Windows Mobile, and as a Web Clipper.

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Our lives are just too complicated. People, places, things; stuff to do, events to attend. We each need a secretary, but then the secretaries need one too. Eventually we run out of people, and nothing gets done.

Total Organizer may help here. It's a combined calendar, organizer, to-do list, and more. Enter your important dates, events, and contact information, and maybe you'll stand a chance. Your information is organized into category trees, so you can build hierarchies, nesting items in subcategories as appropriate. A given item can also be hooked into several categories, so getting the kids to soccer can show up under "kids", "things I have to do today", and "work schedule" categories. That makes it easier to not miss things. With built-in search capabilities, you'll always be able to find what you're looking for as well.

Total Organizer is a Windows application. You need to be running Windows NT/XP to use it.

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Regular expressions are a way to identify specified strings of text. While simple in concept, they can be complicated in execution, and learning how to use them correctly is not a trivial undertaking.

If you've ever done a file search, running a directory listing looking for "*.exe", then you have an idea of what we're looking at here. In this case, we're looking for "zero or more characters followed by a period followed by the letters E-X-E". Regular expressions do this one better, since you can specify strings and substrings to match for in your search, including letters, digits, non-alphanumeric characters, whitespace, and more in almost limitless combination.

Learning to think in regexp is a challenge. The Regular is a free regular expression testing and learning tool. You can enter text, or point to a file or web page, enter your regular expression, and see your results. To help you see what you're really asking, it displays results as a hierarchical tree, making it easy to visualize the logic behind your query, so that you can understand how your expression got you the result you were looking for—or see why you may still need to tweak it a bit.

The Regulator is a Windows application. You need to be running Win2k or better, with ver. 2.0 of the .NET Framework installed.

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How did we ever get along before PostIts? Those ubiquitous little pieces of yellow (and other colors) paper stuck to documents, books, and computer monitors are everywhere. Someone landing here from another planet might well think they were some sort of religious talisman that we used to stay in the good graces of the Powers that Be.

Unfortunately, little sticky notes don't stick forever. They also aren't too portable, especially when they're glued onto your laptop computer. Maybe there's a way to keep the metaphor in a slightly more durable version.

Stickies is a Windows app that lets you create virtual sticky notes on your computer. Nothing fancy, they don't jump around the screen or feature multimedia content—they just sit there to remind you of the important things you need to do. You can tweak the colors, font, and other appearance-related properties, so they look good on your desktop. You can leave 'em scattered around the desktop, or you can snap them to the side; even hook them together if that's what make sense. You can set them to pop-up at specified times, so you've got a Stickies reminder of what you need to do.

Stickies is a Windows application.

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It's not at all unusual in today's global workplace for you to be working closely with people you'll never see face-to-face. Project groups may include members from Europe, Asia, North America, and beyond. Collaboration tools are a must if you plan to get anything done working in this global workplace.

Some collaboration software allows for multiple users to edit documents, letting everybody get their input into the new project schedule or marketing plan. There's another way to collaborate that may be even more powerful: application sharing.

Gogrok is a tool that lets you not only work on the same document simultaneously, but literally to run the same programs at the same time. Choose whether you want to share a particular application on your machine, or you can share your whole desktop, literally opening your system up to your collaborators. As the Application Owner, you get to call the shots regarding who can run applications on your system ("Editors") or merely watch them—looking over your shoulder ("Viewers"). The possibilities are endless, from true hands-on training on new apps, to complete cooperation with your group.

Gogrok is a Windows application. It requires XP or later.

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Backups are a good thing. Whether it's your critical data, or some interesting tool that you downloaded that isn't available any more, it's always good to have a copy of your important "stuff" tucked away in a safe place.

One approach is to write down a list of what you've got, and try to make sure you remembered everything when you back things up. Another approach is to just squirrel-away a copy of your system's whole hard drive. That's a big pile of stuff, but at least you know you haven't forgotten anything.

Reflect is a disk imaging tool for XP and Vista. With its built-in scheduler, you can set it up to create backups on a regular schedule, making it harder for you to "forget" to take care of business. Images can be saved off to network drives, DVDs, or removable drives (USB and FireWire). Images can be password-protected for the security of your data.

Reflect is a Windows tool, and is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.

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