With a new job, a new apartment, and a new city, life has been insanely hectic for me during the past couple of months! This had made me appreciate just how much technology has changed my life. While I still have a physical planner to write down my daily to-do's and assignments, I really try to limit my planner to more current to-do's and use my virtual apps as the place where I store anything else that comes to mind.
I have no idea what I did to organize my life before Trello. Being the nerd that I am, I used to google phrases like "best organizing apps" and stumbled upon Trello as a result. Trello is a website and app that allows you to organize all of your projects and to do lists in a board format. Within each board, you can make lists, and within each list, you can make cards of to do's. Trello is great for anything that is project-based because you can organize it however you'd like, attach files to the corresponding cards, and even share projects with other people so that you can assign tasks to different people. For my personal use, I have two boards - one for work and one for home. From there on, I have lists of anything from shopping lists to blogging projects all under the same board. Since I have the Trello app downloaded on both my iPad and iPhone as well, everything syncs seamlessly.
Evernote is a cloud-based note taking website and appthat allows users to make notes, organize them into notebooks, and then even into stacks of notebooks. You can share notes with others and clip pages off the web easily. My favorite part of Evernote, however, is how easily photos integrate into your notes. You can drag and drop photos from your computer into a noteand make comments right next to any photo. The only downside of Evernote is that in the free version, you can only upload 60 mb worth of notes per month. For me, this isn't too much of a problem since I use Evernote mostly as a place for lists (i.e. gift lists, wish lists, vacation places), but for users like my mom, who uses it as a place to store photos, these 60 mb can go very quickly.
OneNote is an application from Microsoft that is exactly what it sounds like - a virtual notebook. While at first, OneNote wasn't accessible to Mac users, it is now a free download that Mac users can easily add as an app on any Macbook. What I love about OneNote is that it allows you to organize things as if it were a real notebook! You can put tabs within each notebook and then pages within each tab.
Note: When I initially started using both OneNote and Evernote, I was trying to decide between the two applications because I wanted to keep everything on one system instead of being spread too thin. After using both, however, I discovered that I really like both systems but felt that they were best used for different functions. I tend to use OneNote for more intensive note-taking because it has more options for highlighting and labeling notes. I use Evernote as a place to keep lists, save inspiring articles, and recipes.
Siri
There are a millions of Apple users out there but I doubt most of them use Siri to the extent that I use her. I am a loyal Apple fan all around - I own an iPhone and iPad and two Macbooks so I feel that since there's really no turning back at this point I may as well utilize all of the features available! On a daily basis, I'm asking Siri about the weather, telling her to wake me up the next morning, giving her notes to jot down and asking her to give me directions. While these are all things I could physically type into my phone, having the ability to speak the commands without unlocking my phone saves me a ton of time in the long run. If you're not too familiar with Siri commands, just ask her "What can you do?" and she'll give you a nice little list of commands to start you off. My favorite command is the "Remind me" command because I can let Siri know to remind me of tasks I need to do when I get to a certain location or at a certain time - and being the forgetful person that I am, she has saved me on multiple occasions!
What are your favorite strategies for organizing life? Technology has made organizing so much easier for me and I'm so grateful for it!
