Personal Productivity Apps
By James Marwood
As much as I love working on paper with a pen , I use electronic tools to do much of my work . There are tons of apps available for all platforms which offer the promise of making work easier . Here ’ s a list of some I use and especially value . Some are Apple only , but many are cross-platform so whichever phone , tablet or computer you use there should be something for you .
OmniFocus
This is the tool I use to run my life . It ’ s a relatively complex action and project tracker with a lot of flexibility . As I mentioned in the article on Personal Productivity I use David Allen ’ s Getting Things Done approach , and this perfectly complements that . It ’ s available for MacOS and iOS only however .
Evernote
Evernote is my ‘ Everything Bucket ’. Any piece of information I might want to save gets added to Evernote and tagged . From emails to scanned documents or web pages I found interesting . It all gets pushed to Evernote . Even photographs of things like wine or cigar labels end up there , where Evernote makes the text within the image searchable . It ’ s a fantastic tool , available for pretty much every platform and it ’ s free to use in a basic form . Well worth considering if you ’ ve ever spent time looking for a bill or old email .
BusyCal and Fantastical
For MacOS and iOS respectively , where are my favourite calendar programs . There are dozens of alternatives however , and you probably have a calendar that you use most days . What makes these special however is how easy it is to add an appointment . Rather than find the right day , and add the appointment manually I just hit a single button and type normally . Both can understand instructions like “ 10am call with John for 15 minutes ”, making adding appointments almost effortless .
A Good Scanner
I invested in a good scanner over 5 years ago and it was one of the best things I added to my office . Mine is a Fuji ScanSnap , but the important thing is it is a sheet-fed scanner . Unlike a typical flatbed this makes it really easy to just drop in a letter or document and hit a single key to have it added straight to Evernote . It takes up about the same desk space as a large paperback , which means I can always have it to hand in the office . For removing the friction of getting paper documents onto an electronic medium I cannot recommend this highly enough .
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BUSINESS GENTLEMAN