5 Apps that help me save time

Regard­less of the time you spend on the inter­net, there are no lack of tools to help make the expe­ri­ence less intim­i­dat­ing and more use­ful. I often get asked what I use and why so I thought I’d put up list of my favorite appli­ca­tions most of which I’d be lost with­out, because they save lots of time. They also help keep my scat­tered brain in one place.

Some of the tools I’ve come to rely on are web based lets me have quicker access to stored infor­ma­tion while, also pro­vid­ing a safe and secure of stor­age for other infor­ma­tion. Other tools I love are desk­top appli­ca­tions that help me orga­nize my writ­ing, projects and passwords.

In case you are wondering…I don’t get any­thing from these folks, I  just like using their appli­ca­tions, also I wouldn’t spread the word about them if I didn’t think there were useful.

One thing you should know is I’m a Mac guy so other than the web based apps most of these are for that OS. If Win­dows users have their own favorites please feel to post them in the com­ments below.

Ever­note

With­out a doubt hands down my favoritist of favoritst appli­ca­tions of all time!! The funny thing is.…I didn’t get how this appli­ca­tion could be used until I real­ized it elim­i­nated my need to hunt around on one of my many hard dri­ves for every­thing from code snip­pets to links to pages within the blog.

Ever­note is an on line appli­ca­tion that is  avail­able wher­ever you go, elim­i­nat­ing in some cases the need for those annoy­ing USB micro dri­ves, that seem to end up in a pocket of a pair of jeans that just went through the wash.

Sim­ply put Ever­note is like hav­ing an orga­nized “junk drawer” on line. It has a handy-dandy desk top appli­ca­tion that con­tin­u­ally synchs with your on line account. See a web page you want to save for later, just click the browser or the desk top icon and a copy of the page is instantly in your account.  Want to save a receipt from that on line pur­chase? Again just click the icon and in it goes.

When you sub­scribe for $45/year you get 500 MB of monthly stor­age for pretty much any file type. It does have a free ver­sion giv­ing you 40MB of space and lim­ited file type. If you have a lap top and or smart­phone or more than one com­puter you’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll start using this app.

Drop­box

Next to Ever­note this app is almost a tie as a favorite, Drop­box is like hav­ing another hard drive always ready and avail­able any­where you go. With it you have secure off site stor­age for things you might not want to lose, like that artists’ state­ment you’ve been work­ing on but haven’t quite fin­ished. Store it in Drop­box and you can keep revis­ing to your  con­tent to your heart’s desire know­ing that it will always be there.

I use Drop­box for drafts of blog posts, code I don’t want to have to restart from scratch, work in progress that I want avail­able regard­less of where I go, back­ups of this blog etc.

Drop box is free for 2GB of stor­age and I have yet to come close to that limit, you can upgrade to 50GB for $99/year or if you really need space 100 GB for $200.

Both Ever­note and Drop­box allow you to eas­ily share files across the web with­out risk­ing the secu­rity of your other files.

OmniOut­liner

This pro­gram gen­er­ally comes, in its’ basic ver­sion, as a stan­dard appli­ca­tion included with most Macs, that’s how I dis­cov­ered it. It does just what its’ title says… It lets you cre­ate extremely flex­i­ble and editable out­lines for any­thing you want to write. Every arti­cle I write on this blog is first out­lined using OmniOutliner.

I also use it to set up my post­ing sched­ule, brain storm ideas, cap­ture and hold con­tent from other files so I have ref­er­ences read­ily avail­able. If I think I’m going to be ref­er­enc­ing some­thing from a web site I can copy in the quote as a clip.

Omni­Fo­cus

Last year I went on a search for a task man­age­ment system/program that could really help me keep things orga­nized in a way I would do on paper. I tested sev­eral pro­grams but none had the flex­i­bil­ity of OmniFocus.

Omni­Fo­cus is orga­nized around David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done (GTD) frame­work and method­ol­ogy. The con­cept is to get things out of your head and then orga­nize them accord­ing to projects, so all the tasks related to a par­tic­u­lar “to do” item can be included with it, given a start time, dead­line, flagged or grouped by con­text as in office, stu­dio etc.

You can cre­ate repeat­able projects and or tasks, for exam­ple I set up a folder of projects asso­ci­ated with spring clean up of my yard. Just as in a paper list when a task is com­pleted it gets tem­porar­ily crossed out, so the next spring all I have to do is click the crossed out tasks I need to do for that year and I have  fresh list.

A real time sav­ing ben­e­fit of this pro­gram is that it syncs across all of your gad­gets includ­ing the iPhone. So, for that spring clean up, I just pulled out my iPhone and crossed of tasks as I com­pleted them. Their sta­tus was auto­mat­i­cally updated to match my desk top and lap top.

1Password

This pro­gram is an absolute life saver…that is for Mac users. It lets you take those thou­sands of dif­fer­ent user names and pass­words you have for all those sites you log into and keeps them safe in one eas­ily acces­si­ble place. When you, come to a site that requires a log in, instead of run­ning all over check­ing draw­ers look­ing for that piece of paper or note­book that holds your pass­words, all you have to do is right click to open the browsers con­text menu. From there, click on the 1passord menu item and “open sesame” the pro­gram auto­mat­i­cally logs you in.

If you have an iPhone you can synch with it and for exam­ple sign into Face­book right from the 1Password app with­out try­ing to remem­ber your sign in info.