The last six months since my layoff has been a flurry of freelance work especially article writing. Moving from the glacial drift speed of a federal government contract back to freelance writing meant I had to get organized quickly. It was back to living by my ideas again.
One of the first things I did was get reorganized quickly and came to rely on the following apps:
I am past the three month mark working from home again and haven’t gone completely Lord of the Flies or gone total hermit yet. On the other hand, spending three years on a federal government contract might have made me a hermit. Some things had really changed since the last time I worked from home with any frequency.
Here are some observations from what I call Working from Home Redux:
The combination of Evernote and the iPad is a powerful note taking combination. While the Evernote iPad app is maturing nicely, the Evernote Trunk has some even more powerful note taking apps that use Evernote as their backend. If you frequently take notes and find the performance of the Evernote app underwhelming at times it is time to look at some third party apps that can help raise the bar for Evernote note taking.
The third party apps I profile in this post all require some minor upfront configuration so they can talk to your Evernote account but beyond that, you can fire off notes from them into Evernote at will.
If you work with documents, you are probably awash in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) files, so one of the first apps to install on your iPad is a good PDF Reader. The list of Adobe Reader apps for the iPad is ever growing.
Even better news is that Retina Display support is dropping on some of the readers I profile in this post making the iPad even more attractive for reading PDFs. App developers are also using the latest iPad’s launch to crush bugs and tighten up user interfaces which only adds to the good news.
While you can read PDFs through iBooks, there are many great (even business class) options available for viewing and even annotating PDFs on your iPad including:
My Thyroid — actually the subsequent Thyroidectomy I had in October 2010 — has been perhaps the most prolific productivity teacher in my life thus far. The farther I get away from the surgery the more I’ve come to realize the productivity lessons from the whole thing.
I had to bring many things to a cold hard stop and then turn things back on in my life switch by switch like bringing up a server farm or a data center. Ultimately, I am realizing the benefits and seeing how it has been a catalyst for positive change.
Here are the five productivity lessons my Thyroid taught me:
I’ve been using Penultimate since I first got my iPad. Up until now, I had to email my Penultimate note pads to my Evernote account. The email step in my workflow was fine but I longed for Penultimate to get Evernote integration.
Well, my wish came true because of its last release, Penultimate now includes Evernote integration enabling you to send Penultimate notebooks and pages directly from the app into your Evernote account without workarounds like having to email Penultimate notebooks to your Evernote email address.
Evernote is one of those cloud-based apps fees I have no problems paying every year. It helps me centralize a lot of information and keeps me organized both personally and professionally. I’ve liked watching the growth of Evernote’s ecosystem through the Evernote Trunk and seeing the application extended into new directions.
Evernote is ideal as a backend for information-centric applications and the Evernote Trunk shows some excellent extensions of Evernote through its API.
I’ve long been better organized electronically than I ever was with dead trees and paper so Evernote was a natural application for me to adapt to organize my notes and research. It has become a go to application of sorts for me because I centralize so much personal, professional, and especially project information within various Evernote notebooks.
Here is a overview of how I made the move into Evernote:
The Kindle Fire is definitely one of the hottest sellers of the 2011 Christmas season. I went for the Amazon Kindle early on because I wanted to get a taste of an Android-based tablet. My expectations with the purchase were that it wasn’t going to be a game changer and wouldn’t supplant my iPad. While there isn’t a lot new in the device, and despite what Jakob Neilson bemoans it is actually a smooth 7” tablet.
I was quick to outfit my new Kindle Fire with free apps because I never intended for it to supplant my iPad and I want to see how much use I apps on my latest mobile device before I spend any money on outfitting the device any further.
Here is a list of some must have (and more importantly free) Kindle Fire Apps available from the Amazon Android store:
Skitch – the popular Mac graphics app recently acquired by Evernote – is now available for the iPad as a free app in the App Store. This is a logical next step for the app especially with the growing number of graphics and photo editing apps in particular appearing on the AppStore. I am checking out the app to see if it is a better screen capture option for me on the iPad because I write about iPad apps on a semi frequent basis.
With Skitch for iPad, you can edit photos already on your iPad; annotate screen shots; markup web pages; annotate maps on your iPad (and you can then email the map to somebody who needs it); and sketch images from scratch.
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