10 Apps to Launch Your 2015

Happy New Year my friends!

I hope you had a wonderful holiday and a safe and happy new year. As we launch into the new year, I am sharing this guest post from my friend Peter Gerr. These tools will help you start 2015 off with more efficiency and more effectiveness.

For me, 2015 will be the year of automation and delegation. I am building on my strengths and focusing on the things that matter most. I currently use many of the tools Peter describes below and look forward to adding many more to my systems this year. As I strive to improve the workflow at my firm Fivecat Studio as well as here at EntreArchitect, I will share everything I do here on the blog. 

I would love to read your thoughts as well. What are your favorite apps? Which tools are you using to improve your efficiency and effectiveness? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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As I’ve done for the past couple of years,

here are my picks for apps and web services (in no particular order) to launch your 2015.

These apps are unified across phone, desktop / laptop / tablet and web unless otherwise noted. I typically demo several apps in a given category before sticking with one, so IMHO these are the best. Also, I work on Macs and Android for my phone, so I’m not sure if any of these apps are available (or would even work) on a PC (couldn’t resist).

1. Pocket – free – Here’s a simple concept. You’re on a web site you want to read the article, but not now. Click the Pocket icon in your browser tab bar and save the article to your Pocket account for reading anytime. This is an invaluable tool for me as I typically used to have dozens of tabs open in Chrome because I love to read about things. Pocket also supports tagging, so you can filter your many articles on any one subject.

2. Evernote – free basic for 60MB per month which I’ve never run over – I run my lives (personal, work, other) on Evernote. I’ve tried probably 10 note-taking, organizer apps and this one has the most features and simplest but most powerful workflow I’ve found. They totally botched the release of v6.0 earlier this year, but fixed it within a few days.

3. Airmail 2 – $10 – The only app I’ve paid for this year – Airmail is a unified email client with many features not found in Outlook or Mail. The feature that has become invaluable to me is the ability to export an email out to Evernote as a Reminder. It’s also the only app, of the 6 or 7 I tried, that successfully configured my work Exchange server on the 1st try.

4. Libre Office – free – Pretty simple concept here… “F you” Microsoft Office.

5. Dropbox / Drive – free basic – My stash in the cloud. I’m up to 17GB on Dropbox from getting referrals. I basically store everything, other than my photo library (see below), on Dropbox so I can access my info anywhere. For additional security and peace of mind, I wrote a script that copies my entire Dropbox to my Google Drive account every month for another cloud backup copy.

6. Mint – free – This is another simple but incredibly powerful tool. Mint pulls the transactional data from all my financial accounts (banks, credit cards, investments, etc) into a single, elegant user interface. It enables you to have an up-to-the minute snapshot of your entire net worth and categorized spending patterns (I spent HOW much @ Starbucks last month?!). You could probably achieve the same thing by jumping from account site to account site, but with 15 or so financial accounts, who has the time?

7. IFTTT – free – My engineer buddies will figure out the acronym easily, but I had to read the liner notes. “If This Then That” has simple, (nearly) unlimited power. IFTTT automates actions on many of your apps. Example: “If I star an email then export it to Evernote and tag it”. Example: “Save the NYT Best Seller Sci-fi book list to Pocket”. Example: “If it’s 10pm, turn off WiFi on my phone then turn it back on at 5am”.

8. CloudMagic – Android/iOS – free – Airmail for your Android. CloudMagic is a unified inbox and email export to Facebook, Evernote, Pocket, and many others. I’m demo-ing Accompli as well right now, but so far it doesn’t match up. Although it does include your Calendars within the same app, which is a nice feature.

9. SwipePad – Android – free – Thanks to Christian Tate for this one. I like to keep my Android UI clean – 1 screen, hidden tray, clock/weather app is the only thing visible. SwipePad hides your favorite 12 apps offscreen which you can access by touching one of the screen edges and swiping towards the center.

10. Textra – Android – free – A stock text app replacement.

So there are my 10 favorite apps as we head into 2015. Here are a few other goodies to take you into the new year.

BookBub – free – web only (I believe) – Its kind of like Groupon for online books. Select your categories of interest and you’ll get a daily/weekly emaill with books that are on sale or free. Usually free to $1.99. Hundreds of books are on sale at any one time on Amazon, etc.

Amazon Prime – SOOOO glad I made the leap! I’m hooked on 2-day shipping, which more than paid for itself during the holidays. Every Prime account also includes unlimited photo storage (that’s ~ 300GB for me) and Prime playlists & Amazon Movies/TV actually have some good content.

Also, a bit of what you might consider preaching, but I don’t mean it as such… Back your stuff up! External hard drives are dirt cheap (I just picked up a 5TB Colossus for less than $100. We protect our other valuables and our data / information is possibly the most valuable physical asset we have. Back that shiznit up!

Also, get 1Password.

Finally…Tiny Buddha for daily inspiration and emailed reminders to keep it simple, stay present and be grateful.

I hope you find some useful tools here to simplify your life and save time, which IMHO, is the most valuable asset we could ever have.

All the best to you and yours… and Happy 2015.

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Photo Credit: Pixabay.com/Geralt