Social Networks and Nifty Online Tools

I’m always on the lookout for new tools to help me get organized (while being careful not to fall into “tool churn” and the mental trap that a new tool will “solve” things).  So, there is a balance between trying new things and pruning those which are not bringing value.

I’ve been surprised to find myself using stumbleupon almost every day.  I do sometimes stumble upon something cool that I would never have found otherwise.

I always went from not getting twitter six months ago to using the service throughout the day.

The native Producteev app has been killer for my to do lists over the last month or so.

I use Spotify almost continually for music. (with last.fm keeping track of everything for me).

New this week: penzu (a nice online journal) and fleetly (a game layer over fitness).  Time will tell if either of those stick and bring me daily value.

I’m always open to suggestions.

I Love Springpad!

I have only been using it for a few days, but it has already become an integral part of how I work each day.  Springpad is great.  I keep notebooks for the different projects I'm working on or topics that I'm studying.  It's replacing Evernote and some of the functions of our household wiki.  Great interface and amazingly consistent across platforms (iPad, iPhone, web,...).  Did I mention that it's free?

They have a social element if you want to use it, a web clipper for grabbing stuff while you're browsing, email notes to yourself, share stuff with others, etc...

Some of the features I've just started playing with include a board layout for spatially manipulating items and product lookup for creating lists of things I want to keep an eye on.

Great tool.  Highly recommended.

Getting Organized

Over the last two weeks, I've been looking at different technologies to help further organize my life.  After being a loyal Toodledo user for years, I've looked at a million task managers.  Finally, I settled on Producteev.  Cohuman and HiTask both have some really interesting ideas and could develop into strong contenders.  But Producteev is the most usable right now (lack of a native iPad app notwithstanding).  

Why switch from Toodledo?  Well, I was looking for something more collaborative.  All three products listed above allow multiple people to work together on tasks, assign tasks, and converse as the task progresses.  Been using it for a week and have noticed a big difference.