I’m a tool hoarder. I’m an app junkie….I can’t help myself when a new website, app, or service springs up promising me untold productivity, informational, or business riches. I sign up, I bookmark, and I try to make the best use of them as I can. I’ve found some great ones lately, but haven’t shared them with you, until now.
Some tools you just can’t live without, it’s not necessarily because they are the all around best, (sometimes it is) but often times it’s because they fit your workflow, your clients needs, or your specific needs.
I’m laying out some recent and awesome finds below, along with a one or two-liner on what I use or have used them for.
They fall into the categories of productivity, time management, life automation, information mining and expanding your capabilities. Most are online service applications, some are desktop download and install applications.
I truly hope you find some gems below, special thanks to Noah Kagan’s @appsumo for shedding so much light in this area, your service (and newsletter) is a gold mine.
- InboundWriter – live updating SEO analyzing of your writing. i think this will get huge, especially if you do a lot optimizing for keywords
- Gist – link up your networks, it pulls your contacts then scours the web for info on them. great datamining tool, and contact sync tool.
- 750 Words – a no rules, empty your mind by writing website. i’m finding it really really helpful. i’ve never been able to “journal” but this just go and type website has something to it that has me sticking to it.
- Evernote – ok so i’ve shared this before, it’s so great though, how are you not using it?
- Sparrow – switched from Apple Mail to Sparrow since my e-mail is Google Apps/iCloud based, i haven’t looked back. it’s faster, a smoother, and searches better.
- Focusbar – tiny Mac application that pleasantly annoys you with something you’ve told it you want to focus on. it’s actually bringing me back to my goals until i accomplish them when i sit down to do something that needs a chunk of time.
- Google Docs Spreadsheet Forms – use this for information capture everywhere.
- Buffer – find yourself spamming your twitter account then not using it for a while? use buffer to pace out your tweets really easily, more easily that Hootsuite
- ifttt – this is a powerful automation tool. it’s like if you had access to every website services API (the stuff they use to talk to other things) and can do basic functions with them. the website name stands for if this then that and it’s all about tasks and triggers. it’s saving me time.
- Hello Bar – easy call to action implementation, just reminded me i need to put this back on itarsenal.com
- Ge.tt – super low friction, no account needed,
unlimited spaceboo they moved to a pay model with only 2GB free file sharing. Use dropbox instead. - ManageWP – i don’t want to tell anyone about this so i’ll be cryptic. if you manage more than one WP install, you don’t want to click this.
- ScheduleOnce – easy google calendar integration appointment scheduling. see in action here – http://itarsenal.com/scheduler/
- Join.Me – web-based, free, screen sharing. alternative – teamviewer.com
- LinkedIn Answers – a new forum for showcasing your expertise, and getting referrals, or new users from it.
- Facebook Groups – i created a group for feedback and invited a bunch of people, the involvement was rapid and bigger than i expected. try it for data mining.
- App Sumo – treasure trove of time sensitive deep discount deals for business oriented training and software
- Newsmap – i don’t keep up with news very well, this literally makes a size map of all the news going on. things with more articles on the entire web show as bigger, meaning it’s easy to see what’s happening very very quickly. tip: you can easily narrow it down to juse US, or just Tech, etc.
Cheers!