One of the hardest things about business - and life - is getting everything organized for productivity so you can manage the different aspects of your life quickly and easily. Keeping track of schedules, documents and mail can be overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to grow your business or streamline your personal life.
Finding the right organizational tools takes a lot of time and effort, but here are some great tools that can help you get started organizing your business, school tasks, home remodel or anything else in your life that needs organizing!
5pm is an excellent scheduling tool that by far surpasses the other scheduling tools available. 5pm is a low cost website that offers an interactive scheduling interface that you can share with others, allowing you to view and edit different tasks for yourself and anyone else you have working with you. You can access your 5pm schedule from anywhere - not just at home or work.
Other popular alternatives to 5pm, including Basecamp and Zoho Projects just didn’t measure up to what you can do with 5pm project management.
The creative geniuses behind Google have created a free, online calendar that you can use and access from anywhere as well as share with others. You can have multiple calendars and multiple people working on the same calendar, so everyone knows what’s going on and when.
Another great inception from Google is their Google Docs application. Similar to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, you can create both documents and spreadsheets to share with others. You can access your documents from anywhere, and you can even have multiple people viewing and editing the same document. There is also a chat box within the document that allows you to have a real time conversation with anyone who is viewing or editing the document.
Mozy is an excellent tool to use if you have a lot of information on your computer that needs to be backed up on a daily basis. For just $5/mo per computer, you can have Mozy automatically back up your files each night on an offsite server, so you know your information is safe no matter what happens.
We checked out the popular alternatives, including Carbonite and Dropbox, but in the end the simplicity of Mozy for “brain-dead simple backups that just works” won us over. And after a few months we’ve very happy with our decision.
Sending files to people via email can be difficult, especially if the files are quite large. Uploading it using a free email service such as Yahoo or Hotmail is even harder. YouSendIt is an inexpensive online application that allows you to send files to other people quickly and easily, no matter what the file size.
Earth Class Mail is an online service, much like a P.O. box, that will take your physical paper mail, scan it in and let you access it electronically – with an interface that looks a lot like email. You never have to deal with letters, post cards or the like again. You can access your mail from anywhere, and for a fee they’ll even deposit checks directly to your bank. Earth Class Mail is an excellent option for doctors, lawyers, home business professionals or anyone that just wants to go paperless.
Even if you’re not looking to replace your mailbox with a digital alternative… if you have your own business and don’t necessarily want your home address available to everyone, consider using a service like Earth Class Mail for your public mailing address.
With all of the organizing you’re doing, you might want to kick back and relax a bit with some tunes. Pandora is a great option for Internet radio, allowing you to build your own musical selection by choosing songs that you like while Pandora loads in musically similar songs. Feel free to let Pandora know if there’s a song you don’t like, and they won’t play it again. The more you listen to Pandora and interact with it, the more customized your own personal Internet radio station becomes.
Another tool worth mentioning is Teambox. Similar to basecamp but it's free and works with a twitter-like messaging system. Great for multi-tasking various projects and tasks at a time.
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I like http://www.rememberthemilk.com for simple list organisation. I use http://www.projectmanager.com for larger projects with team collaboration.
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