Tools I Don’t Go Without

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The following is a guest post from fnBlog Contributor Daniel Liebeskind. This post, originally posted on the Startup Destiny’s Blog.

SaneBox cleans up your gmail so that you only ever have to see emails that you would want to see.  Gmail’s priority inbox is similar, but SaneBox is much better.

Unroll enables you to organize your email subscriptions.  When I first plugged it in I had 570 subscriptions.  Now I have a few dozen and they are all rolled up into a single daily email.

This guide will teach you how to set up multiple gmail inboxes so that you can keep track of emails by category: yellow exclamation for “needs follow-up”, “purple question mark for “waiting for reply”, orange arrows for “delegated”, and purple star for “information to save”.  The emails are bucketed and displayed in a simple interface on the right of your gmail screen.

Asana is a fantastic task manager from Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz that has had a massive impact on my daily productivity.

Evernote is a great place to keep notes and writeups.  I keep all of my ideas, notes on meetings I’ve had, and random things I’d like to remember in my Evernote.

Dropbox is where I keep all of my files.  It’s great because you basically have a hard drive in the cloud and you can easily share files / folders with other people.

An example of how my workflow might leverage all of these tools: Due to my use of SaneBox andUnroll, I only see relevant emails.  If I receive an email with a deliverable that will take more than 5 minutes, I flag the email as ‘needs follow-up’ and add a task to Asana.  I switch to Asana and decide whether the task should be in the ’today’, ‘upcoming’ or ‘later’ bucket and can add a due date, which syncs with my calendar.  In the process of executing a task, I might have a great idea for a new feature and add that to my ‘List of Features’ in Evernote.  While executing my task, I come across several relevant articles, which I save into a shared Dropbox folder.

Do you use use any other tools that are awesome and have made you more productive?  Let me know!

Want to learn more about Daniel Liebeskind? Check out Daniel’s website or connect with them on Twitter @dliebeskind

 

 
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