At cocktail parties, perfect strangers often remark to me: “Jeff, you’re
supernaturally organized, and so handsome; I despise you, and yet at the same time, I envy you. How does one stay so perfectly put together in this fast-paced, lickety-split, attention deficit disorder world?” And I laugh, deeply, and handsomely, because they’re right; I’m almost annoyingly organized — but it’s only because I use the right tools, and lucky for you, they’re all completely free:
Gmail: If you’re not using web-based email by now, your life is harder than it needs to be. The advantages of web-based email are myriad: your mail is available to send and receive from anywhere and everywhere where there’s a web browser. Also, all your mail is online and available for searching at once, which is key, because I use my email as a catch-all database of everything I need to remember, from software serial codes to random
phone numbers. And there’s no need to sort and delete your mail, as most web based email providers give you at least a gigabyte of email — Google gives you 2.7 gigabytes — which is likely to be enough to hold all your email and word processing documents until you’re old and grey and we’re not using email anymore. Google’s spam filtering is top notch, the interface is a joy to use, and as an added benefit, you can make your Gmail account masquerade as any of your other email addresses, so if you want to dash off a quick email that appears as if it originated from your work address, you can easily do that.
An additional benefit to web-based email: it’s not tied to your specific internet service provider, so if you decide you want to change your internet connection from, say, Comcast to Verizon, you won’t have to send out that embarrassing mass email to tell all your friends your email address has changed. Learn more at mail.google.com; Gmail, as of right now, is invitation only, but if you’d like to check it out, email me at and I’ll send you out an invitation.
Google Calendar: Along with terrific email, Google also offers a free online calendar. It’s incredibly easy to use, and once you’ve entered your schedule into it, you can share the calendar with friends and coworkers, the calendar can automatically email reminders and SMS pages to your cell phone at a time before your events occur. Google’s calendar can even be set to mail you a daily agenda at 5 AM every day to remind you of the day’s events. Check it out at calendar.google.com.
Ta-da lists: Having a list of things to do can really help keep you on track, but storing that list on a precarious sticky note on the fridge can limit your ability to act on that list. Plus, eventually the back of the sticky note will get hairy and less sticky and you’ll lose it. It’s perhaps better to keep that list online where you can access it from anywhere, and for that I use Ta-da Lists from 37Signals. It’s a wonderful and highly-intuitive way to make and organize lists that you can access from anywhere. 37Signals also provides an excellent, more capable suite of additional products (Backpack, Basecamp, Writeboard and Campfire) which you can read about on their website: 37signals.com.
Foldershare: If you work with the “computers”, you might even have to deal with a couple different computers every day, each one with a different set of files. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have one single, magic folder that automatically contains the same stuff on every computer you work with? You can set that up in ten minutes using a service called Foldershare. Once you set up the client program on the computers you need to access, you can use the web based interface to set up “shared folders” between any of your Macs and PCs. Once set up, all you need to do is drop files into that folder and they’ll automatically propagate to all your other machines, across your local network or across the internet. Download the software and learn more at foldershare.com.
~jeff
