Whether you're taking a beating in the current financial situation, or you're on top of things and positioned to lead us all back out of recession, everybody can agree on one thing: you won't know how you're doing if you don't keep an eye on things. If you've got a portfolio of more than one or two investments, you probably already get some help from a high-powered tool like Quicken or Microsoft Money, but sometimes you just want to take a quick look at what's going on today, without having to wade through layers and layers of complicated stuff.

If you live anything but the most simple of lives, you've got more stuff to keep track of than anybody really should have to. Whether it's projects at work, stuff at home, kids' schedules, volunteer work, or any of a zillion other things, there's just no way you can hold all that stuff in your head. All those little scraps of paper just don't cut it any more. You know that some day, it's ll just going to blow up and you're going to miss that important deadline, or the kids will be at soccer but you'll be looking for them at ice skating, or worse. Now what are you gonna' do?

It's all about the information. Every day we've got tons and tons of it that comes our way. Trying to survive the deluge is no small task. If you're taking lots of notes on what's going on around you, then you need a good way to organize it—after all, data's not information until you can find it and use it.

You're pretty careful in your computer life. You don't accept cookies that aren't from sites you're visiting. No pop-ups for you. You dump browser history regularly. But you're still leaving traces of everything you do on your system.

Your browser isn't the only thing on your machine that likes to keep track of where you've been and what you've done. Windows itself likes to make a record of things as well—and it doesn't want to let you get rid of this data either. Privacy Mantra can give you a hand with that.

There are lots of drawing programs out there. If your graphical needs run to something for the kids to play with, or the occasional sketch you need to run to the hardware store with, then your operating system's default image editor may be just fine. If you plan to appeal to a wider—and perhaps more professional—audience, you may want to upgrade from this. If your illustrations require more precision, you might use a tool like Visio to draw illustrations of process flow or the next revision of the corporate organization chart. You might also want to go take out a loan to afford it.

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If you run more than one blog, there's a good chance that they're on different platforms. Trying to keep track of "who's on first" when you're jumping back and forth between WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, and others, can make you crazy. What you need is a uniform way to write your posts so you can focus on their content, instead of getting bogged down with the mechanics of making it all work. You need a Swiss Army knife for your blog posts.

If you're prowling the web looking for images, audio files, or other tasty downloadable stuff, you know that finding a page you're interested in can be a mixed blessing. Sure, there's all those files you were looking for, but it also means that you have to download them, probably one at a time. That's going to take you all afternoon.

No matter what you do in life, everything always goes easier if you've got the right tools. If you're a carpenter, you need a hammer and a saw. An auto mechanic? You need your wrenches and screwdrivers. Sure, you could drive a nail with a rock or use a pair of pliers to loosen a bolt, but that makes your life harder than it needs to be. The same can be said for those who write computer code for a living.

We all know about pictures and their worth (about 1k words, at last count). But what kind of challenge is there in creating that picture? What if you could use just a few words to create that 1000-word-worth image? Check out Diagrammr.