There’s a New Yorker cartoon where people are sitting around a conference table and someone says: “You say it’s a win-win, but what if you’re wrong-wrong and it all goes bad-bad?”

I’ve been to those meetings.

They drone on and on. You just want to slit your wrists so that you have an excuse to go to the bathroom.

I’m sorry to say I have no solution to interminable meetings.  But you may want to check out a nifty Web solution that can help you avoid a two-hour commute for a meeting that lasts 20 minutes.

GoToMeeting.com is one of several sites offering a way to connect with people across town or around the globe and it is one of the simplest setups I’ve seen. You can sign up for a 30-day trial and test it yourself immediately.

If you’re convening a meeting, you send invitations that include a URL for the presentation, the audio phone number and an access code. Come time for the meeting, participants go to the Web address and call into the phone number. There is no elaborate pre-registration. Only those you invite get access to the URL and access code. GoToMeeting claims the online sessions are secure and encrypted.

Once you’re all in, the presenter switches the computer view to his or her screen and everyone can see the pie charts, competitors’ Web sites or whatever else can be shown on a computer screen and you can talk to each other. Presentations, demonstrations and collaborations, including the sharing of documents, are all possible with GoToMeeting.

There are different pricing plans depending on how much meeting power you need. The cheapest monthly plan is $49 and includes unlimited meetings for up to 15 attendees. Other products, including the better-known Webinar service, scales up from there. You can also avoid phone charges with GoToMeeting’s VoIP option. Not least of all, the service  is now compatible with Macs as well as PCs.

We ran into one hitch when testing the service. Black boxes appeared on the computer screen of Andreas Arvman, our digital content editor and faux meeting participant. The boxes obscured some of the content that I was showing on my screen.  But I suspect it’s a browser issue, so we’ll be testing it in different browsers.

Let me know your experiences with this meeting service. And, while you are at it, tell me your favorite excuse for avoiding a meeting. Here’s mine: “My dog ate my PowerPoint.”

I don’t know if your family is like mine, but we’re total sloths during summers.

We don’t get up until 6:30, maybe 7. The wash gets done on the weekends after it has built a mountain tall enough to block sunlight. Breakfast is leisurely; the paper actually gets read; the dog gets taken out more than she needs to and she knows it.

Come Aug. 25, that all changes. If your kids are younger than my college student, you’ve already come face-to-face, bleary eye-to-bleary eye, with this grim reality. School requires discipline similar to what you get force fed in boot camp.

It’s up at 5 a.m. to catch the bus or beat the school jam. All the clothes are ironed and laid out the night before. No more staying up past midnight. There’s a lot of yelling: “Into bed at 10 or you’ll be sorry, young lady!” Only thing missing is latrine duty.

The upside of the start of school is it forces certain efficiencies. Time’s running out, so you know you need to get cracking. If you have things to get done, do it now before there’s precious little free time. Get the doctor appointments over with, do the school shopping now, make sure the clothes and shoes still fit and the backpack is in good shape.

Check out your routes and the bus schedules, arrange car pools, write out daily lunch options and ingredient lists. A Real Simple trick: divide up eatables in zip-lock bags or packable containers (veggies, fruits, cheese, pretzels, etc.) and let everyone make their own lunches.

Make sure any documents, permissions, doctors’ clearances and academic approvals are ready to go with your child or sent in ahead of time. If your child is attending a new school, visit the campus ahead of time and help them understand the lay of the land. Meet the teachers, principals and counselors if you can.

Once you’re done with your checklist — and you did check it twice, right? — relax for one last time. At least until summer moseys in again, wagging its sloppy tail behind it.

If you knew you had only months to live, how would you spend your time?

The late Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor whose inspirational “Last Lecture” has been viewed by millions, thought about that, too, no doubt.

Before his famous lecture that preceded his death last week from pancreatic cancer, he spoke about managing time like money and offered smart ways to clear away the debris of life and work to make time for what really matters.

A tip of the hat to Lifehacker, which posted the video of his talk on time management and a link to the Powerpoint on his talk.

Sometime soon someone will find a way to convert a thought into a digital stream that will go directly onto my to-do list.

At that point, I can happily toss my index cards and printed to-do lists, abandon my cell phone notes and luxuriate in the seamless integration of things that must get done and the actual doing of them.

Like me, you’ve probably gone through every conceivable system to organize your daily tasks: Day Runners, shopping lists, calendars, Post-It notes, writing notes on your palm with indelible ink and hiding your hand for days after. You’ve left phone messages to yourself to get the dog groomed or e-mailed yourself a reminder to buy milk.

Did any of these work for you? Probably with varying degrees of success, I’d wager, but not perfectly.

I’m not sure I have a final solution, although I’m getting fairly task-efficient using the iPhone and Evernote. But you really don’t need these technologies to reach a point where your tasks don’t overwhelm you.

You simply need to build a better to-do list — on paper, on your computer, or however you keep organized.

This idea comes from Leo Laporte and his discussion on the TWIT Network about OmniFocus, one of the new applications for the 3G iPhone. One of the guiding principles behind this software is that you can become more productive if you organize your tasks by “contexts” or where you need to be to complete a task.

Instead of simply listing things to do arbitrarily, try ordering them instead by location. So under “at computer,” list tasks like sending a happy birthday e-mail to your aunt, adding a movie to your Netflix queue and paying a bill online.

Under the listing for “in car,”  your tasks could include taking in the drycleaning, filling up gas or picking up school supplies.

On the phone? List everyone you need to call and their phone numbers, unless you’ve already got their numbers nicely stored on your cell phone.

If you are super-organized, organize your list under even finer locations: downtown, Ward Centre, Ala Moana shopping center. With the iPhone application of OmniFocus, you could get suggestions on the stores you could hit to buy diapers. But again, it’s not the technology that’s necessary here, but the application of the principle that can work for you.

Try this for a week and let me know how you do. It’s a simple idea, maybe not as geeky as digital-thought conversion and the “duh” factor is rather high, but it works nonetheless.

The day is fast approaching when we won’t need to buy software. We’ll find whatever we want free on the Web.

Think my head is in the clouds? Take a look at one of the latest examples of Web applications at 280slides.com.

This beta presentation application could some day seriously rival PowerPoint and Keynote. At some future point, we may look back and see it was a key development in the march away from Microsoft Office and other desktop software.

What is really startling is how robust 280slides is. This is not just a simple presentation app. You can create slides in multiple fonts with a decent choice of background designs.

If you want photos or video in your presentation, you can upload them from your computer or connect to them from Flickr and YouTube.

You can save your slideshow on the site. Then when you are ready to give your presentation, call it up on your browser — provided you have an Internet connection. You can also download your presentation and open it up in PowerPoint or embed your presentation in your blog or Web site.

Of course, you won’t get many of the more advanced features of PowerPoint and Keynote in 280slides, but for simple, straight-forward presentations, it’ll do the job amazingly well.

And did I mention it was free? Try it and let us know what you think.