1) Find a great project management system

A great piece of the productivity puzzle is solved by having a simple but strong project management tool. Such tool can help you get an overview of your project, warn you when you get close to your deadlines, make to-do lists and also track your time. Things that can really boost your productivity. I suggest going for a web application (also known as online/hosted software or Software as a Service), because these offers the lowest commitment, are the fastest to learn and you get the bonus of being able to access you work from anywhere and possibly share it over the Internet.

I recommend: If you are a group of people or a team I suggest you head over to Basecamp as this is one of the most popular project management web apps for teams and mid-size businesses. You can set up milestones, create to-do lists, write messages and share files.

I have been involved in developing a project management web application tailored just for freelancers. Besides to-do lists, milestones and time tracking, it also enables you to share images, ideas and files with your clients, and it can create a full invoice in one click. So if you are a freelancer I suggest you take a look at Burden Butcher as your productivity software.

2) All those small tools

Whether you call them widgets, gadget, mini-tools, micro-software or whatever, all those small and simple, yet effective, tools can really increase your daily productivity. There are literally millions of them out there. Some are just day planners, calculators, reminders and image resizing tools, others are more elaborate and can do audio recording, file conversion and complicated screenshots.

I recommend: For finding all those small productivity enhancing tools I recommend you take a look at some of the major sites, e.g. the Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets page, the Apple Dashboard Widgets site, the Google Desktop Gadgets page. Recently I also found a directory called App-Stick where your can find small software tools that are a bit more advanced/useful than the average widgets out there, it also has a sister site for Mac users called App Donkey.

3) Get rid of disturbing elements

A third set of software that can help you increase productivity is all the tools that blocks, removes and deletes all the disturbing elements you are exposed to when using your computer. Here I am talking about spam, computer viruses, website ads, spyware and such. Getting rid of all that is actually a way to be more productive as you don't have to spend time nor energy on dealing with spam, ads, etc., hence you are more productive.

I recommend: For stopping spam take a look at either SpamFighter or Mail Washer, they both have free options. For virus ThreatFire is the way to go as it is both free and automatically updates itself in the background. For spyware, the free AdAware with more than 300 millions downloads is the most obvious choice. If you use Firefox then you can easily block all those annoying ads on websites by installing the Adblock Plus add-on.