In addition to offering a wealth of information, the internet also provides us with a ton of tools. Are you taking full advantage of them? For example, how well do you manage your life? Are you well organized, do you easily remember birthdays, deadlines and appointments?
Should you struggle with these tasks, don’t worry, most of us are. Fortunately, you are free to change things and make your life a little easier. Here is what you can do to organize your life and reduce the amount of things you have to remember:
A quick search in the iPhone App store can return you more than a dozen to-do list apps. If you can’t make up your mind over which to-do list app to choose, here are five of the best free to-do list apps that I have reviewed.
If you like simplicity and just want the bare minimum, then Dobot is the one for you. Dobot provides a plain text interface, but with some really useful features. Usage is easy. Simply press the ‘+’ button to add a task. For each task, you can edit the Task name, due date, priority and note. On the front end, you can easily change the task priority by tapping on the blue horizontal bar.
If you need a reminder service, a message scheduler and a generally cool way to organize yourself, I have just found a service that could help you (and me), called Sendible. The main profile is message scheduling, but you can use the tools offered not just to keep in touch with people, but also to manage your online and offline life.
With Sendible you can schedule messages to be sent at any time, down to the minute, and I’m not just talking about email here. SMS, Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5 and Twitter are the services available and all work without fail. The services are completely new so you will probably see some development in this area but the list is already impressive.
Springnote is a Wiki based online note taking utility.
Sounds simple and that’s what it is. But even though it’s simple, it’s far from being simplistic! Springnote doesn’t come short in features, yet remains easy to use because all of the functions are useful and smart and ordered in a plain way, instantly making you feel comfortable using them.
Springnote supports OpenID, which you can read about in Dave’s article OpenID Overview and Four Awesome Providers.
You possibly already know that I am a huge Remember the Milk fan. Well, a while ago I found a service that rivals RTM, a powerful and simple to-do manager called Todoist. It manages to incorporate Gmail, Launchy, Quicksilver and even mobile support in a seamless way.
After you sign up, you’ll be taken to your task manager with a link to go to the info page. You can easily hide and show this page using the appropriate link on the top right, but take some time to go through it as it has many great tips plus all the help you’ll need to integrate Todoist with other apps, i.e. Launchy and Gmail.
There are many Getting-Things-Done (GTD) apps for the Mac. Some, like Midnight Inbox and iGTD are just too complicated for everyday use and require too much planning for GTD-beginners. Others, like Actiontastic are very multi-functional, but most of us just want something that simply works. This is where Things steps in and it’s my favorite.
‘Things’ is essentially a straight-to-the-point task manager. You won’t need to compile all of your information, emails, images, PDFs, etc in preparation for this application. Basically, all you need to do is: recall your To-Do’s and start entering them in. Like most GTD apps, new entries automatically go into the Inbox. After you’ve emptied your brain of your daily, weekly and monthly chores, you may begin start to sort them out according to priority, and this is where Things shines.
I did some research on iPhone specific websites and found out, to my surprise, that there were quite a few out there. Aibek has covered iiPhone web apps before, but here’s a small list of more websites specifically designed for the beautiful iPhone.
Information / News Web Apps :
CBS News: www.cbsnews.com/iphone
Fox News: iphone.foxnews.com
Google: Google.com
Reuters Mobile: mobile.reuters.com
BrainyQuote: www.brainyquote.com/iphone.html
Social Apps :
Digg: www.digg.com/iphone
Facebook: iphone.Facebook.com
Twitter: m.twitter.com/login
Reference:
Wikipedia: www.keishi.net/ipodia/
People Finder: www.2robots.com/iphone/#_ByNumber
Urban Dictionary: www.idotg.com/apps/iwurd.php
Realtor: iphone.realtor.com
Weather Web Apps :
AccuWeather: apple.accuweather.com/widget/iphone1/iphone.html
Weather Underground: i.wund.com
Weather.com: www.weather.com/iphone
Rainlendar2 is an easy to use and lightweight desktop calendar for Windows and Linux computers. Although, it’s available both as lite (free) and pro (€15) version, here I am only looking at the lite version. With the lite version you can:
The pro version supports network sharing and provides support for Outlook and Google calendars. Actually, you can download and use a fully functional pro version for free with only a small limitation: network, Outlook and Google calendar events will carry the string [Unregistered].
As you will see once you get to know me, I am quite the productivity and organization junkie. This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m productive and organized, but I know how I could do it.
Today I have decided to show you some free online (and one offline) GTD apps (Getting Things Done) so you can organize yourselves like true productivity ninja’s. While I am not saying GTD is the best method for everyone (despite its popularity), I think the groundwork is solid and the apps that have been developed are great for non GTD followers as well. I believe that only you can develop a truly good method that works for yourself. I hope you will find some of these tools useful.
I have always been a huge fan of the yellow post-it notes as my memory is atrocious. But the downside to using so many pieces of yellow paper was that my office always looked like it had been the victim of a mustard explosion. Wherever I went, I would trip over a note that had fallen off the computer monitor because the gum had given out. Plus it was difficult to keep them organised. But now I use the digital version of the post-it notes and things are much better organised as a result.
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