New Year’s Resolutions: Let’s Whip Some Apps by @djstomp

Wow, 2012 is almost over, can you believe that? Seems like things get harder everyday to keep up with.

Time for some New Year’s resolutions! And my theme in 2013 will be ‘Lean and Mean’! A giant step for me as a notorious tech lover was to face the fact that sometimes tech makes things more complicated. Because there are so much possibilities it’s easy to lose yourself in the fancy apps and features.

Time to bring in the vacuum cleaner and delete a lot of apps. For me that’s is in the field of ToDo lists, GTD systems and Feed readers.

Cross device
The apps that I can’t use cross device will not make it into 2013 …. I use a laptop, a phone and a tablet, so I want all information available on every device. I use Dropbox to transfer files between the different devices.

These are my apps that have survived 2012

Todo list hack
This one is actually an old fashioned pen-and-paper approach. Surprising isn’t it?!
Recently I bought myself a Moleskine ruled notebook just dedicated to handle my daily todo list.
Check out the todo list method I use here (scroll down on the page once clicked). On each page of my Moleskine I have a todolist, a done list and a short summary of the day. It really helps you recall in case you experience that ‘wow, where did my day go?’ moment.

Taskmanagement
For keeping up with my upcoming tasks I use Taskpaper (video). You can sync it cross device using Dropbox.
Keywords: simple, no fancy layouts, just a text-based task inbox. But the pretty smart tagging makes it very useful. (A great alternative by the way is workflowy (video) )
And I’m really sorry Things app, for leaving you behind in 2012.

Bookmarking websites and articles
I read a lot online. That’s a potential productivity killer. Remember when you got an interesting link via Twitter and you ended up 3 hours later 50 steps away from what you were reading initially? Multiply that by the different sources you check….. I’ve connected my Pocket account with all Social Media, my browsers and my feedreader. So when I stumble upon an interesting post I instantly bookmark it to Pocket to read it later.

Digesting information
All my feeds and Social Media I digest on my iPad using Flipboard. Saves a lot of browsing. If I don’t have time to read full articles, I instantly add them to Pocket.

So my theme for 2013 is keeping things simple. What are your themes and tips for 2013?