Some sort of personal dashboard?

[Tom]

Hi, all,

I have tried in vain to find the "right" software for keeping myself
organized, informed, and to avoid information anxiety or information
overflow. Nothing has seemed to work, but I thought I'd ask this group
if there's anything like the product I am describing here:

I'd like a window I can open--perhaps in a web browser, but not
necessarily--that would allow me to see information about everything
in my life in a window or sets of windows. The analogy I have in mind
is to business software that provides a "dashboard" of key business
information: inventory, cash flow, accounts payable and receivable,
etc. I'd like to be able to call up, in one window,

* My current calendar for the day
* A to do list (nothing fancy)
* My bank balances, credit card balances, bills due, etc.
* New email, perhaps prioritized using some sort of filter.
* Notes to myself, etc.
* Truly important news in my field, new journal articles, etc.
* Project tracking (writing projects, classes, etc.)
* Files recently used (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.)

There's a zillion other things that could be there, but the point is
to avoid having to launch separate browsers for all this stuff, or to
even have to remember where all this is. Another analogy is to the
"widgets" that I could arrange in a web page, like the Google
customizable home page.

My goal is to glance at a page, take care of little things right away,
and plan my day.

Has anyone ginned up a system that accomplishes something similar? Any
commercial software that does this?

Many thanks--I will clarify if this isn't clear.

Tom

[idmonfish]

Hi Tom

I've sort of done this. I used Netvibes which is a personalised home
page. You can set up different tabs which I have done for various
parts of my life ie email in one tab, calendar in another, journal
table of contents in another, blogs I follow in another and so on. It
took a bit of doing and it doesn't cover the financial side of things,
banks for some reason doing give rss feeds of account balances
commonly...

I think you could find widgets in the Netvibes system to do most of
the things you are looking for.

Cheers
David

[Matty]

Check this out. Someone just pointed it out to me this morning.

http://www.gen-9.net/

[Matty]

more to the point you might want to check out the many discussions of
such programs at www.outlinersoftware.com

[Daly de Gagne]

Or, if a program discussion relates to GTD, also at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Getting_Things_Done/

--
Discuss and learn about David Allen's Getting Things Done:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Getting_Things_Done/