| Trello - ESSENTIAL kanban system for project management and daily organization. I'm an absolute fanatic for Trello. OneNote - The greatest program ever made. OneNote isn't useful for short-term to-dos, but I couldn't live without its organization of my long-term work. Pocket - I never have time to read articles, and they're unpleasant to read on a squat laptop screen in any case. Pocket lets me read them on my tablet, in the subway, with gorgeous formatting. Google Calendar - The whole Google ecosystem is ridiculously useful for organization, including auto-additions to your calendar from Gmail and Google Now's intelligent suggestions. Gmail - Particularly the five-tab filtering. Holy shit. I had no idea how disorganized my inbox was before I could filter away the dreck. Google Keep - It's been displaced somewhat by Trello (in terms of grocery lists, etc.) but it's still great for medium-length notes that you'd like to read on the subway or something. I store a huge amount of poetry in mine. Google+ - The BEST place for photos. I don't understand the fashionable hatred. G+ is by far the best photo backup/organizer/enhancer/sharer I've ever seen, and the G+ social network is WAY better than Facebook's clunky organization. I'm amazed that Facebook is so bad with photos... isn't that pretty essential for social networks? G+ is just too good to be ignored forever. GDrive - Corollary to G+. Putting photos on GDrive automatically uploads them to G+, which again is just excellent. Google DEFINITELY needs to upgrade their 1TB limit to "unlimited," though... and offer auto-deduplication for identical photos for the billions of us with redundant photo hoards. Right now, GDrive prices are the highest on the market for limited storage and no extra features like deduplication or auto-organization. I still pay for GDrive just for G+ photo features, but Dropbox offers equal/better functionality and OneDrive offers much better value. Kindle - You never realize what a burden paper books are until you have an alternative. Ebooks are incredible. Calibre - Especially if you have a ton of academic papers or studies to pore through, organizing them in Calibre makes life infinitely simpler. Spotify - Outsourcing my music collection to streaming services is GREAT. I'm now trying out Google Music, which lets me upload 20,000 MP3s to supplement the holes in Google's collection. (Perfect for unpublished songs and so on.) Steam - The original Spotify for video games. All the same benefits, plus amazing sale prices that have forced me to buy way too large a collection. edX - Coursera and Udacity also, but any of these are gold mines for organizing self-paced education. Pidgin - Still the best instant messenger, though the shift toward closed networks is making it harder to use. That Google still allows Pidgin to access Hangouts via (limited) XMPP has kept me faithful. I don't understand why anyone would use something like WhatsApp and its crappy clients. - - - - - If anyone from Google is reading this, particularly from the Tasks team... just buy Trello already. GTasks is woefully inadequate, particularly when compared against Trello's unbelievably powerful kanban organization. Also, I'm a little disturbed by how heavily I depend on Google. I don't see any viable competitors, though -- Outlook lacks Gmail's tabs and themes, OneDrive lacks GDrive's functionality, Facebook lacks G+'s insane photo features, WhatsApp lacks open APIs. I hope Microsoft steps up soon, because I don't see any other real competitors against Google dominance of web services. |
Also Trello Inc's public development board(https://trello.com/b/nC8QJJoZ/trello-development) is just genius, imo.