Tools for Organization Addicts and Unapologetic Daydreamers

This fantastic guest post comes to us via the lovely Kyla Roma.  Her blog is one of my absolute favorites!  She writes about life, design and living a creative life.  Go say hello!

I think that one of the coolest things about being an adult is having so many choices that effect your daily life- especially in your experience at work. At the same time, I didn’t realize how much flexibility I had in how I managed my time and tasks until I’d left a traditional work environment. Once I had to invent my own system for doing things, I realized how useful they were and saw how much more fun they would have made my previous work life.

No matter what kind of work you do I think there’s a creative, dynamic way to build it into your life- and sometimes something as simple as having a good system can be a big part of that. I wanted share a few applications and tools that I’m head over heels for – and that aren’t just for creative types and mac users - in case you fall in love with one of them like I have…

These are smartphone friendly apps and tools you can take on the road.

Scatterbrain

This is the jot note app of my dreams! It lets you write quick notes, categorize them… and then schedule reminders for the future! I’ve been using calendar and alarm applications for this for a very long time, and none of them work properly at all. Scatterbrain is intuitive, beautiful to navigate, easy to use on the fly and has a really cool category system that adapts for anyone’s style. It’s better than the “note” function on an iPhone and is a must add in my books.

Price: Free   Works on: iPhone +  iPad   Read More: Here

Beejive

This is a mobile chat application that’s fabulous. It’s important for my business that if something’s going wrong my clients and the Freckled Nest designers can get in touch with me quickly, and since many of us live in different countries this app is my favourite. It lets you sign into multiple chat accounts, choose an individual status and availability settings for each account (or one for all), and sends you chat messages like they’re text messages. It gives my design clients instant, constant access to me and is perfect for catching up with blog friends. Love it! :)

Price: $7.99   Works on: iPhone, iPad, Blackberry & Android   Read More: Here

These apps and tools will follow you to the moon and back. Wherever you are? They’re right there.

Google Docs

I know that you know about this, but if you do any online collaboration Google Docs are a fabulous way to keep documents in a central place with minimal fuss. I love having a shared doc open with a client when we have a live chat to make sure we keep meeting notes or don’t miss an important topic. It’s the only tool I used  to plan my wedding, and Jesse and I use it to manage our budgets in a place we can both access. It’s love :)

Price: Free   Works on: Everything!   Read More: Here

Evernote

Woah my gosh, this app rocks my world. With one Evernote account you can gather up inspiration, reserach, images, text, PDFs- anything that has content you want to flag for later. You can automatically clip selections, whole web pages, images or text to your computer anytime you see something great and want to remember it. And the categories go on forever. Best of all, you can use it as a computer program, smartphone app or by logging into their website. I use mine to gather style inspiration for clients, and to keep my blog ideas on hand and easy to update.

Price: Free   Works on: Everything! Read More: Here

These are apps and tools that are desktop based and serious about getting the job done.

Pomodoro

The Pomodoro technique is an anti-procrastination tool that works really well- it’s a little eerie, actually! It’s a way of putting meaningful, solid amounts of time toward what you’re trying to get done while still taking breaks and not time tracking in a traditional sense. You can use a fancy app or a kitchen timer and piece of paper, you just need to learn the basic idea behind it.

Price: Free, but I use a paid desktop app for my timer   Works on: A piece of paper!  Read More: Here

TweetDeck

First things first: This is really worth putting in a few minutes to learn. The first time I downloaded it I thought that it took a fun, simple idea (see: Twitter) and turned it into fast scrolling columns in a dark colour scheme. After hearing lots of people praise it I gave it another chance and in reality, Tweetdeck is kind of wonderful. It’s a powerful and sleek way to get updates from everyone you follow or just the people you really adore, it can be in your face or in the background, it tracks your lists in real time and offers cool features like badge notifications when you gain followers, and it even has a way to mute users. All that, and it delivers scheduled tweets on time! You can even change the colour scheme ;) Really amazing tool for bloggers and social media butterflies.

Price: Free   Works on: iPhone, iPad, Desktops (PC + Mac), Android, Google Chrome Read More: Here

What tools/apps/programs do you love?