Ftrain.com has a bunch of productivity enhancing tips that can be used with emacs. I could not get the "search the web within emacs" working 
but I hope to write a shell script that will do the job and then call that script from withing emacs. I had found that link from this post by Merlin, called Calling all Terminal nerds. One of the comments there has pointed to the rockin' the emacs post, which points out how to use planner.el from Sacha Chua.
Defined tags for this entry: geek stuff, link