In a post on productivity tools, Geekpreneur outlined what might go into a personal dashboard. I've used LifeTick for sometime now and am fairly happy with it. I use it to track some personal items, but also my writing and speaking commitments, large projects at work, and general professional housekeeping (website updates, etc...). It's helped. I drop fewer items, and I feel like I can worry less about forgetting to get something done. That frees me up to focus on the task I'm currently doing.

For things that have to happen on a regular schedule (drafting release notes, checking ticket queues, crunching numbers for metrics, etc...) I use calendar reminders. My calendar is peppered with five minute tasks that I sometimes need a gentle reminder on. This was I don't have to worry about remembering to do them.

Sometimes, when you have a pile of work to do, and you just can't find the time to do it, it means you need to get out of the office. The office comes with distractions: people stopping by with questions, noise from across the hall, email, IM, and phone calls. Getting out of the office might mean working from home, working at the coffee shop down the street, or even just book a conference room and working in there. To make the time most effective, give yourself specific goals for the time you block off. What are you hoping to finish during that time you're away. While you're away, turn off the phone, close IM, and don't check email. Get done what you need to get done.

As a tester, I suspect you do a lot of copy and paste. Sometimes it's test data from a file into an application. Sometimes it's from a screen into a defect report. And sometimes it's from one application into another. Many times, it can be nice to remove formatting before you paste.

I keep Notepad (or TextEdit on my Mac) open all the time so I can quickly paste and re-copy to/from Notepad before I paste it into the target application. This automatically removes all simple formatting (bold, italics, fonts, etc...) and makes it much easier to clean up spacing formatting (tabs, spaces, etc...).

Most people are familiar with the concept of lunch and learns. They are also sometimes referred to as brown-bag sessions. It's where a group gets together over lunch and someone presents a topic to the group. I like lunch and learns a lot, they are a cheap way to get people thinking and talking about testing concepts.

Another alternative to having one person present for the entire period is to have everyone bring something small to the table. Give each person five to fifteen minutes (depending on the size of your team) where they present a test tool, project artifact, test technique, software development idea, or new application functionality.

This is a good way to shake things up. Sometimes it's difficult to get someone to want to present on a topic for an entire lunch session. Here the commitment is much lower.