I’m gathering in one place the tested services and apps that make my life easier. I don’t claim they’re universal, ideal or unbiased. You get the idea. Platforms: Chrome and Android. From keeping to-do lists and a minimalist text editor to finding an interesting film.
LastPass. An excellent free password manager. Forget the constant trouble of 1) coming up with yet another password that’s more or less secure but that you won’t forget; 2) remembering passwords at all. Better to remember what a beautiful day it is today.
RescueTime. Automatic time tracking by the apps you use and the sites you have open. In the settings you tell it what counts as productive and what doesn’t, and once a week it emails you a pretty report with charts and an overall productivity score. You can install it on your phone or tablet and track those too. You can set goals and follow how you’re doing. For example, no more than X hours a day on social networks.
Zenmoney. The best personal finance app I’ve found. The team recently switched to a subscription model and finally unfroze the project. What’s handy: a smartphone app that reads bank text messages, sync with WebMoney and Yandex.Money, transfers between accounts, a pleasant interface, easy budgeting by spending category. The premium subscription is worth its laughably small price.
Awesome Screenshot. The fastest and most convenient way to show someone something on the internet, with marks, arrows and annotations, is the Awesome Screenshot Chrome extension. Unlike Evernote’s app, there’s no hassle with sharing, and the image quality is much better. Recently it learned to sort screenshots into folders on its server and to take comments on a screenshot (think mockups, kid).
If a screenshot is worth a thousand words, a screencast is pure magic. Two apps here. Recordit, for short casts without sound, which turn into GIFs automatically and are stored on the service’s server with no limits. And Screencast-O-Matic, for long recordings with sound and commentary. It’s handy that you can upload a video to YouTube straight from the program.
I constantly have to type the same details in different places on the internet and in apps. To make this easier I’ve adapted the AutoCorrect feature of the Punto Switcher keyboard layout switcher, but I’m looking for a cross-platform replacement. Haven’t found one yet.
This hack alone is worth a lot. It’s more convenient than the templates built into various apps, such as Gmail’s canned responses. You trigger them with a key combination set in the settings. For example, the “Kind regards, …” email signature is “KR + Space”. I use it most for signatures, my phone number and email in various forms, and answers to frequent email questions.
WorkFlowy. The best thing you can possibly use for keeping lists. Seriously. Infinite nesting, two kinds of tags, a minimalist interface, the ability to share any part of a list with whoever needs it. It’s impossible to describe, just try it. I guarantee you haven’t seen anything like it.
I keep lists of ideas in it, which grow there until they make it onto the project list in Podio, a checklist of groceries for the house, plans for the year, project notes and so on.
Podio.com is a list builder that’s handy for automating workflows. I’ve adapted it for my GTD system. That deserves a separate post or even a series, so I won’t go into it here. I’ll only say that after trying your Todoists, Wunderlists, Any.dos, Trellos and other task managers, I got tired of apps I couldn’t configure or automate. If you want something truly flexible, look at Podio. It’s something else. Hardcore time-management nerds only.
Timer Tab. A simple online timer, ideal for anyone practicing the Pomodoro technique.
Ghostery. A browser extension I use to switch off analytics on my own sites (so my daily sessions don’t distort the real picture) and to block the popular banner networks. I wonder how some projects make money at all, until I open them in incognito 🙂
Yesware Email Tracking, a Chrome extension that adds read receipts to Gmail. You can set a reminder to send a nudge if nobody replies.
Pocket. A service for keeping a “to read” list. Everything that comes my way or that friends send me (“read this now, really useful stuff”) I’ve trained myself to skim for usefulness and save to Pocket. And I read on my phone or tablet when I’m resting (not instead of working).
The workflow goes like this: I process my inboxes (email, social network messages, the company chat and intranet notifications) and send everything that looks interesting to my “pocket” with Ctrl+Shift+S. Most of it I never read. Profit!
A bug I’ve noticed in this service: the built-in reader (the simplified view of saved pages) often cuts out important chunks of useful information and images, because it misreads the page markup.
With IFTTT, videos I mark “Watch later” on YouTube also land in Pocket automatically. Here’s a recipe you can copy.
You can also send everything you’ve read or watched to a special Google Docs spreadsheet. I have one, but honestly, I rarely look at it.
I don’t know how “personal use” this one is. I use IFTTT to forward text notifications for one of my personal cards to my accountant. It has a few more recipes that deserve a post of their own. This is very individual and depends on which services and gadgets you use. Combined with its mobile app, IFTTT has become very interesting, since it can use your location to trigger recipes. For example, it can turn off Wi-Fi on your phone when you leave home.
Draft. A minimalist text editor with version control and the option to send a text to someone for proofreading. There’s no more convenient way to compare their edits afterwards. I’m writing this post in it.
Careful! The Markdown markup language it uses may be a drawback for some.
Draft’s killer feature is that you can publish to your blog straight from the document. It supports WordPress, Tumblr, Ghost and a few others.
Grammarly. A service and a browser extension. I’m proud of this home-grown product. An excellent grammar checker in the free plan, and the Chrome extension works as my translator: double-click a difficult English word and it shows synonyms.
Forgive me for this one. Listen is a Chrome app that shows and plays music Last.fm recommends for you (does anyone besides me still use it?). Last.fm is like Amazon for music. Its main drawbacks are the paid subscription and the clumsy interface. Listen solves both beautifully.
For music there’s Last.fm. For films there’s Imhonet.
Noisli is one of many services that let you set up ambient noise for work (a campfire, a river, the sea and so on).
TeamViewer is indispensable. I even managed to teach my mom to launch it and tell me the password when, once again, “ohmygod the internet is broken!!!111”
Trello, beloved by agile developers and American housewives. A handy board for planning small projects. Top-notch aesthetics. Its practical use drops sharply as the number of projects and users grows. There’s no to-do list across boards. From my experience, Trello’s usefulness for non-developers is greatly overrated.
I deliberately don’t write about Dropbox, Google Hangouts and other more or less popular things. Slack, which everyone is singing the praises of right now, I also leave out, since it’s for work.