Amazon Prime

We live in a rural area and while I like to try to shop local, there is a lot of stuff we need that simply isn’t available nearby.  Amazon Prime gives me free two day shipping on most of their items.  This means I can place an order on Monday afternoon and have it Wednesday.  For an extra $3.99 per item I can get it the next day.  I’ve used this to buy everything from books to fruit juicers to network cables.

Working from Home

Working from home means I don’t have to waste any time getting in a car and going somewhere every day.  My office is down the hall and down the stairs.  Its not that uncommon to find people who are putting 6 hours (or more) into just sitting in their car each week.  That’s more than a full day of work for most people (once you take out all the interruptions and office stuff).  Working from home means I can spend my time either making money or being with my family without the whole “sitting in the car on the road” part of things.

1Password

1Password is a little application that keeps track of your passwords for websites.  You can create a login in Safari and then access it from Firefox.  Since I usually have a few different browsers open at a time, this saves me a lot of time.  It will also help generate passwords for you, which makes it easier to use different passwords for each site you visit and keeps things much more secure.

Online Bill Payments

This saves a lot of time–especially when we are traveling.  Paying a bill is a matter of logging into my bank’s site, filling out the amount in the list of people I pay and clicking “ok”. One of my biggest frustrations is that to pay the water bill at our new house requires reading the meter and then sending it back in to the company along with a check, so it is the single bill where I can’t use online bill payment.

Connect Now by Acrobat

Since I work from home, most of the people I’m interacting with are somewhere else.  Connect Now lets me quickly share screens with people so I don’t have to waste a bunch of time explaining how to do something over the phone.  There are a bunch of other remote control products that do this as well.

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