Do you do a lot of shopping online? I bet you’ve been in a situation where free shipping is just $2 away, but you can find any item you like for that amount. In my case this inevitably results in higher spending because I just put in something else I like, which is generally in the $20 range. This is not the best practice, especially if you’re tight on money, or a spending machine like me.

A really cool tool (and idea) to help you plug in your shopping cart holes on Amazon is the Amazon Filler Item Finder. If you’re just a bit short on the $25 minimum, just visit this site, enter how much you need, and you will see a list of products which cost around that amount. You can enter any value, it works with decimal places as well, and you can also check and un-check categories if you know what type of product you’d like.

What I really liked about the site is the idea, the simplicity, and the speed. Just enter a number, click go, and you’re done. Pick something from the list, add it to your cart, and that’s it. The other great thing is speed. You can filter by price in Amazon, so you could really do this there, but Amazon Filler Finder is extremely fast, and I mean extremely. Click go, and out pops the list in the blink of an eye. I just moved, and I’m stuck with a really bad connection for a week or so more, but this still works in a flash.

What might be cool to add is a social feature to the site, where you could see what other people bought for $1 – $3. There might be some great novelty items, things you really want, but just didn’t come to mind, or you might just get some inspiration from what others are buying.

If you’re the supportive kind of person, I urge you to use Amazon Filler Finder because they are helping to support Haiti, The American Red Cross, and other organizations. For you it doesn’t really make a difference if you shop on Amazon or through Amazon Filler Finder, but it does help them if you do go through them, so why not?

I don’t know if I’m alone out there or not, but I don’t like to give an hourly rate for my work to clients. I do have a good idea of what I want to be getting each hour (millions of Dollars), but I feel safer when communicating the price of a project as a fixed fee, or a fee between X and Y. As a consequence, I do tend to either overwork myself (more common), or underwork myself, and checking up on my pricing policy is becoming a habit.

This is easily done by taking your fixed fee, and dividing it by the hourly fee you’d like to see from similar projects. As a result, you will get the time you should spend overall on the project to get exactly the fee you wanted. To track how I’m doing, I use a great little Adobe Air application called Klok. The application is a great time tracker, I shall have to do a long review soon, but to showcase just this feature, I’ll use the Project Summary page.

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If you’re on the road with your iPhone and you want some internet goodness, you can find many free Wifi spots across the country. With the Speedtest.net Speed Test you can gauge the speed of your connection anywhere, really easily.

The app is completely free (and ad-free), just fire it up, press a button, wait about 5-10 seconds for the speed test to complete, and view the results. The best part of the app is that it keeps a record of the speeds you’ve measured, meaning you can compare different Wifi network speeds very easily.

If you frequently use the internet on the go, this is definitely a handy tool to have on your Iphone, take a look!

I’ve talked about how to put your effectiveness into numbers a short while ago which is definitely good advice in any field of work, because you get real feedback on your performance, but the stats you generate can also boost you psychologically.

My favorite example of this is blogging. I’ve been on and off for ages now, for various reasons, but there were many instances in my blogging life where I either came back, or stayed on, due to statistics. After not writing for 3 months, I went to my Adsense account and saw ad revenue! I thought “wow, I need to get in on this”, so I came back (this was a while ago). The same happened about 15 months back, when I realized I was getting more and more comments. Little stats like this can help boost your determination, even if those stats are negative.

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If you read a few productivity blogs, you’ll come across some posts which help you to focus, or get lists out of your head, by asking you to limit yourself. In some cases you might have to spend no more than 10 words per list item, or describe a project in 100 words, and so on. So is this method a blessing for productivity or a curse? As usual, it depends, but in my case, definitely a curse.

I think the biggest problem people have, especially the entrepreneurial sort, is that they have a load of ideas floating around in their heads. While this is great, it clogs you up, and all the productivity methods out there urge you to get everything out of your head. Limiting yourself to few words can help a lot, you will jot down the stuff in less time, you’ll have a shorter, more concise list, but chances are you won’t get everything down.

Taking ages to describe everything in my case is a part of my modus operandi. I get ideas while I’m thinking/typing, I have very specific thoughts I do not want to forget. Therefore, I can describe something in 10 words, but I’ll be missing out on aspects, most of which I don’t want to forget. Also, the reason for getting things out of your head is to free you up to think about other things, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting important details. If I have to limit myself in any way in this process, I will still have things sloshing around in my brain because I couldn’t write them down.

I would recommend limiting yourself in the main task list, but attaching notes to every single task you need to, and instead of limiting yourself, spend as much time and as much space as you need, filling out notes. This way you will still enjoy the benefits of a clean task list, but you will also reap the rewards of a clean slate in your head.Here are some good tips for adding data to task lists without cluttering them.

Over at Lifehacker, they do some  browser speed tests now and again, and I thought the results worthy to share with you guys. The subjects of this round were Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4 and Opera 10.5. In some areas you’ll find surprising results, especially in javascript use (Opera wins by a mile), and memory usage with extensions, which is won by Firefox.

Since I’ve been using Firefox for 10 minutes with about 6 tabs, and its eating away at half a Gb of memory, I find that hard to accept. I might have a really badly written extensions somewhere I guess, but compared to a lot of people, I hardly use any extensions at all.

To be completely honest, until now, I didn’t really care about browser speed tests because Firefox was just so ahead of the game, that the features it offered far surpassed any speed problems. Even if you had to reboot, or restart Firefox every hour, it was still worth it for your productivity. However, nowadays that Chrome is right behind Firefox (Opera is fine as well, I just never really made a connection to it) I just might change browsers for speed reasons.

For the complete list of comparisons, along with nice bar charts, take a look at the full post on Lifehacker.