Technology. Always on. Photo credit: http://www.planetofsuccess.com/blog/
Most of my working day and quite a lot of my personal time is spent connected to the Internet in some form or other. Sad? Possibly. A sign of the times? More likely.
The online tools and content my laptop gives me access to have resulted in it becoming my go-to hub for work and play. (Something my friend Ollie and I discussed in a recent podcast episode)
Through my own constant discovery and regular advice from others, I’ve come across a few tools that really make my life a lot easier and help maximise my effective (and efficient) ‘online’ time. Here’s are a list of some of these tools:
- Basecamp – online project management without the frills, beautifully simple
- LastPass – takes care of generating/remembering passwords with easy to use browser plug-ins
- XMarks – free cross-browser bookmark manager
- Spotify – a great way to listen, share and manage your own music collection
- Cloudflare – distributed DNS to accelerate your web site
- Tumblr – very easy blogging platform for text/photos/videos etc
- Skype – instant message/call people, computer to computer, for free.
- Dropbox – cloud file storage that makes cross platform file sharing/backup painless
By the time I hit ‘publish’ on this post there will already be hundreds (at least) more useful applications that could help me out, most of which I won’t even know about.
Such is the proliferation and pace of technological development, the real skill in this day and age is to quickly evaluate if something that you find/hear about is really going to be of value to you before you register/buy it and start using it.
Equally, it might be the case that something has the potential to be useful to you but the timing is not quite right (it needs another feature, not enough people are using it yet etc). In which case, you either jump right in (like Phil Campbell would) or keep it on your radar.
What about you, any ‘killer applications’ you can’t leave without? Feel free to share.