Mark Tosczak's Blog

With a new year just underway and productivity and organization being the focus of many new year’s resolutions and goals, I thought I’d give a quick run-down of some of the key apps and tools I’m using to stay organized these days.

General Productivity and Organization

• Dropbox for sharing documents between multiple computers and sharing large files with other people. It’s on both my personal and company laptops, plus my iPhone. Dropbox has become my default location for storing any file that I want available to me wherever I am. I’m using almost 90 percent of the capacity in my free 2GB account, so there is a pretty good chance I’ll upgrade to the paid version this year. (Though if you click-through the link here, sign-up for an account and download the software, I’ll get 250MB added to my account, so I’d very much appreciate you doing that.
• Evernote, for notes, travel information, reference information and lists — including my to-do lists. I use this every day as a key part of my task management and project management tracking system, and have basically stopped using paper. This is part of my effort to have less stuff and less clutter this. Just like Dropbox, I have Evernote on both my laptops plus my iPhone. I’m using the free version, for the moment.
• Basecamp for project management at work. We’ve been using this for over a year now at work, and although it’s not perfect, it still seems to have the right mix of just-enough features without too much complexity.
• LastPass for password management. I think it’s almost essential to have some safe, secure, always available way to manage passwords. I have a little home-brew system for generating and remembering unique passwords, but even that isn’t enough for the dozens of different passwords I need to keep track of. LastPass helps keep me sane.

• Scrivener for writing. I save the files in Dropbox and have it installed on both my machines. I love the writing interface as well as its ability to handle complex, multi-part documents – everything from blog posts to my daily journal to novels. I wrote the first draft of this post in Scrivener. It’s a Mac-only app, so Windows folks are out of luck (or perhaps there’s an alternative – I just don’t know).
• Xmind for mind mapping. I’ve found mind mapping an excellent tool for organizing thoughts and ideas, and translating the results of brainstorming to a coherent structure. I should be using it at work with our teams as a brainstorming tool. I would just hook the laptop up to a projector so everyone can see the mind map as it’s built. This comes in both free and paid versions, but I’ve only used the free version.

• I continue to be a huge fan of Hootsuite for social media management, especially Twitter. It’s a web app, so it’s available at any computer with an Internet connection, and there’s an iOS version as well for the iPhone and iPad. I get the same set of lists, searches and other features no matter where I log in from. Plus Hootsuite has built in analytics, scheduling and other capabilities. The free version has quite  a robust set of features, and the quality is so good I wouldn’t hesitate to pay for the premium version if (more likely when) I need the extra features.

Of course, like most people I use Microsoft Office for word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, email, contacts and calendars. And there’s a range of other applications and tools I’m in and out of each day. But the ones above are really my go-to apps for getting things done. If you have any must-have applications, I’d love to hear about them. Please leave a comment below.