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:
It’s the end of another year and time for the annual rundown of my favorite iPhone apps for the year. There haven’t been a lot of changes from previous years but a few new apps have joined the lineup.
I’ve always been better organized electronically than I ever was back when I used paper organizers so I depend on my iPhone along with my iPad to keep myself organized personally and professionally during the day. This means I am relying on cloud apps and others that enables me to sync data between my iPad, iPhone, and one of the PCs in my home office.
Back in the Stone Age, I made the move from a dead tree organizer to a PDA because of the promise of being able to manage my task lists electronically. Like other parts of my life, I became better organized electronically than I ever was on paper. The same holds true today but I am trying to capture and track a lot more task items than back in the day leading me into a completely new set of issues.
Perhaps my biggest task management sin is creating the never-ending task list. You know, the one that is impossible to complete bringing about many overdue tasks often times fading away into the ether of iOS. I’ve been using OmniFocus (definitely not to its fullest extent) to manage my tasks because I can synchronize it between my MacBook Pro, iPad, and iPhone. On the side, I’ve also been flirting with Things for task management because I especially like how it handles tagging and project organization. However, its lack of true synchronization between devices is at best an inconvenience for a real showstopper and at times me. I also like how Things includes a Someday list where OmniFocus only has an Inbox.
Just because I got an iPad in 2010 doesn’t mean I’ve lost any love for my iPhone. In fact, I recently upgraded to the iPhone 4. Today’s smart phone apps are something I could only dream about when I got my first PDA in hopes to better organize myself and my schedule.
My phone is always on me so it is my primary organization tool especially now I am having to track a lot more things since my surgery.
2010 has definitely been the year of the iPad and its application ecosystem is flourishing. My iPad is seeing a lot of use and I have my list of go to applications I use during the course of the workday and on my freelance projects.
My iPad comes with me to work where I use it for managing my project tasks and calendar, to the doctor’s office to manage my medical history, and even manage my Apple TV with it.
A recent Lifehacker post and the launch of OmniFocus for the iPad gave me cause to reconsider my own personal project management tools as I look to continuously improve and streamline things since adding my iPad to the mix.
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