As part of the new year reload that comes every January it’s time to revisit How I Work.
What new productivity tools have I started using in the past year? What have I moved on from?
Productivity Tools in 2014
Boomerang – I still use Boomerang regularly but am held back by the pricing. What hangs me up isn’t the lack of value I get out of Boomerang, but rather the relative pricing. For what’s essentially a GMail add on, it’s priced in the same range as a full featured product. Heck, it’s even more expensive than Photoshop.
Evernote – Speaking of value, I became a paying Evernote user in 2013. The additional storage space – largely taken up by images and screenshots – finally converted me.
GIMP / Paint.NET – After I switched to a Mac at the end of 2012 I had to find a replacement to windows-based PDN. I tried GIMP for awhile but the user experience never meshed with me. Nowadays I’m happier to just startup my windows VM (thanks to VMWare) and run PDN there.
Google Reader / Feedly – 2013 saw the end of Google Reader and Feedly emerge as one of the top replacements – and my #1. It’s a win for everyone as Feedly has surpassed what Reader was and now actually gets developer attention.
Meeting Burner / GoToMeeting – I’ve had too many calls with customers who couldn’t figure out how to get into the meeting with Meeting Burner. Happy to pay a few bucks a month for GoToMeeting’s consistency and familiarity.
Mailchimp – We want to avoid spamming inboxes with too many Less Meeting emails, but when we have an important announcement Mailchimp is our go-to.
Trello – Finally found a replacement to dozens of stickies and open text files. With Trello I can dump, schedule, and prioritize everything in my life.
Podio – I’m sure there’s a better CRM option out there, but Podio is “good enough” that I’m not motivated to search for it.
Outright – Quickbooks is my preferred full-featured accounting software, but I’ve struggled to find a basic accounting tool that gets the job done. Mint certainly wasn’t it. Outright did the trick for one of my accounts in 2013 so in 2014 I’ll be expanding it to cover additional accounts.
Timey – The app works just fine, but I rarely try to follow the Pomodoro Technique anymore.
Ducksboard – Ducksboard won our bakeoff against Geckoboard and is now our team dashboard on display 24×7 in our office.
Mousepose – I saw a presenter use this during a demo earlier this year and am going to try this on demos of my own in 2014.
And that’s it. I’m also looking for new apps to try out in 2014 so send me recommendations.