Frustrated at the time you waste seeking some needle of information in your haystack of a desktop? Welcome to the human race, says industrial-organizational Psychologist Jeffrey Stanton. "The human being is a limited-bandwidth processor," says Stanton, an assistant professor at Bowling Green State University’s Doctoral Program in Industrial-Organizational Psychology in Bowling Green, Ohio. "A number of studies suggest that people are overwhelmed by the amount of information coming across their desktops. So there is a clear need for tools that can present what we need in an intelligent way."

Franklin Covey, renowned for its day planners and time-management training, may have that tool. FranklinCovey OnePlace, developed with Pasadena, Calif.-based Enfish Technology, enables users to organize all desktop information on a computer screen. Type a client’s name in the find bar, for example, and OnePlace scans e-mail archives, your desktop folders, your company’s intranet and the Internet, and retrieves everything related to that client. In one window with up to six panes, you can see all correspondence with and about the client, contact numbers, spreadsheets, to-do lists, webpages and more.

That’s just the kind of product David Tanner wants. Tanner, president and CEO of management consultancy ISO Health Care Group in Westport, Conn., expects OnePlace to be a big time-saver. "It’s important to me to be able to have multiple windows open at once and in one place. I don’t want to have all that layering on the desktop and have to search through all that," he says. "This eliminates a lot of jumping back and forth."