Tech Tools I’m Loving

Any person of any profession is only as good as the tools they use – and internetting (yes, that’s a verb) is no different. There are a whole arsenal of apps and websites out there to help you organize yourself in our era of data and information overload. Here’s a few that I use, both personally and professionally.

Evernote: You’ll be worried I’m exaggerating when I say its the best thing since cable modems, but rest assured, I am not. Evernote is at its core a note taking app that you can keep on all of your devices – desktop, tablet, and mobile – with seamless sync between them. Beyond text notes, it also handles images and sound files. All documents are organized into notebooks that you create (sub notebooks are allowed, which is my favorite feature of anything ever). I use it to jot down ideas no matter where I am for various pieces of my life, such as blog posts for this and my personal blog, ideas and plans I want to research, vacations I want to look into, new and exciting web services. You can also use a browser extension to clip bits of webpages, which I don’t do anymore, and the reason why is the next this I’ll discuss.

Pocket: You know how this story goes. You’re on a deadline at work and you just glance over to twitter for a second a there are three amazing looking articles you want to click through to – so you favorite all the tweets. You’re reading from your pulse or Google currents and there’s an article you really want to read again later – you star it. There’s a really beautiful blog post you’d love to share in your weekly link roundup in three days, so you bookmark it. Except you never look at your favorited tweets, starred articles, or bookmarks again. Enter Pocket. You would save or share each of these articles to Pocket and then be able to view them later in a really lovely web interface or with mobile/tablet app. Everything’s in one place, and you can even tag articles to stay organized.

IFTTT: I’ll come right out and admit that I’m not the ifttt ninja that I want to be, but I am absolutely fascinated with the tool and its potential. The acronym stands for if this then that, and it hooks together the APIs of several popular services to create chain reactions and automations that make your life instantly easier. A friend of mine uses it to tweet his blog posts ( I personally use dlvr.it so I can keep a closer eeye on stats). I use it to automatically back up my instagrams to a flickr account. You can use it to store an article in evernote whenever you star it in Google reader. The combinations are pretty endless and many of the “recipes”, as they’re known, are right there for you, built by other users and conveniently indexed for the taking.

What are you using to make your internet life just a little bit easier?