Ah the convinces of modern-day living. Technologies work for us to provide quicker service, bigger savings and more leisure time. Yet I still can’t manage to pay my damn cell phone bill on time.
There are all kinds of tools out there that can help keep our hectic everyday lives from falling apart but most of them are just no fun to use. And as more people are using more devices regularly (work computer, home computer, laptop, PDA, etc.) the need to have one place to keep track of everything in once place becomes even more important.
Thankfully there are already a few great ways (and more come out of the binary woodwork every day) to keep all your shit together.
First and foremost at the moment is Basecamp. Ostensibly a project management tool for managing any number of collaborative projects, it also works great as a catch-all personal organizer. Included in the basic free account are Messages (notes-to-self), Milestones (due-dates), To-do lists (also available as a stand-alone product), and Writeboards. There are varying degrees of subscription accounts that add other features and the ability for multiple projects. Most of the features are pretty self explanatory/basic but Writeboards is the really cool thing here. With the free account you can keep track of one document that could potentially be contributed to by any number of participants and it saves each iteration of edits so you can “roll back” to a previous version if need be. I actually wrote this article on my Writeboard because it was incredibly easy to make adjustments/additions as long as I was working on a computer with an internet connection. No need to carry around any kind of media between work and home! As an added bonus, each Basecamp has a unique RSS feed so if you are working collaboratively everyone involved can keep up to date on what’s changing without even having to log on.
The only thing that’s missing here is a good calendar tool. That’s where 30boxes comes in. While I haven’t used this one quite as much (most of the time I personally don’t have plans for the weekend to keep track of, let alone two weeks down the road) but everything I’ve seen on this tool is absolutely fabulous. The interface is slick, intuitive and looks like a regular grid calendar so the learning curve is barely a speed-bump. The collaborative element comes in here as well as you can add people to view all, part or a single event on your schedule. This also provides a wide variety of RSS syndication.
The last site I’ll mention here is de.lcio.us. This has been around for a while but i’ve only just recently discovered the convenience of keeping track of bookmarks online, again back to the multiple computers issue. the other nice thing is that with each site you link you can assign searchable keyword tags as to what the particular site is about. This makes it WAY easier to find that post about CSS drop downs without having to remember the site’s all-too-clever URL. Here again, each account can be private or open for anyone to see.
The largest inconvenience of all these great tools is mostly in their decentralization. Having to log into multiple apps to keep up on everything can be a pain but I don’t see it as much less a problem than having to launch different applications on your desktop to do similar functions. Also, while it’s not the best idea security-wise, you could set all of them up to use the same username and password, just so there’s one less thing to keep track of.
As with any kind of personal organization, these do take some work to keep on top of things but their ease (and fun, amazingly enough) knock off a few of the barnacles on the Pier of Procrastination.
