The productivity dance; a look at systems Part 1

This is the first of a series of posts that will focus on certain tools that may change the way you get things done. I will admit that I am obsessed with cool tools, and many a times I try out software just for fun. Here are some cool things I have found that may change your relationship with information. I will start with Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha

You use a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) to look for information. The search engine gives you links related to your search input and you go through them to see if you can hit on exactly what you want. This works very well most of the time. But sometimes you just need specific answers not links. Lets say you want some quick facts about the Zambezi River (the inspiration behind this blog). If you enter “Zambezi River” on Google, you will get dozens of hits and it may take a few minutes before you can gather all the facts you want about the Zambezi River from those links (hell, maybe all you wanted was the length of the river or the countries it spans). But what if there was a computational engine that gave you specific answers not links. In comes Wolfram Alpha created by Wolfram Research. Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine – it is a computational engine which cross-references many specialized databases to produce specific answers to your query. So let’s try “Zambezi River” again on Wolfram Alpha and this is what we get:

Now this is information you can work with! Try it with many other things. Enter your exact birthday (e.g august 25, 1965); enter a famous name (Charles Dickens, Nelson Mandela, James Watson etc) – or just enter the name of a city to find out quick facts about it. Visit the site and before you know it you will actually be getting things done! (http://www01.wolframalpha.com/). For the business minded, it gets interesting if you type in your favorite company to quickly see how well it is doing.

GTD icon David Allen has often said that we suffer not from information overload, but from lack of meaning of the information. Wolfram Alpha gets you closer to finding meaning with the large pools of information you may have to deal with. Give it a try and you will get hooked. If you are a Mozilla Firefox convert, the story gets even better. There is a Firefox Addon that can allow you to get Wolfram Alpha results from your usual Google search – so you get the best of both worlds simultaneously.

Hope this gets you excited!