An Apollo Program for Personal Productivity

Apps that I have to open in my mac to get anything done every morning: Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Omnifocus (to-do list) and Evernote (notes and more). I don’t have to open Dropbox (files) because it starts automatically but is as essential as the others. This an excessive number of different apps to handle the same basic, routine workflows, and it creates a lot of inefficiency and complexity.

A single data can be in any of those places. For example, a particular phone number can be in a Contact entry, inside an email, in a scanned pdf in Dropbox or in Evernote, in a Calendar appointment or Omnifocus to-do item. A picture of something important that needs to be fixed can be stored in four of these apps: Mail, Evernote, Dropbox, Omnifocus. Perhaps I should keep four different copies?

I wonder if there is not a good business opportunity do develop a innovative PIM (Personal Information Manager) for Mac that could handle all this stuff. A Super Outlook, perhaps. Or Dropbox, Evernote and Omni could join forces and create the “PIM Avengers” (or the “Guardians of the Productivity”?). I would be the first customer.

And perhaps there is even place for for a premium version with RSS reader, Twitter client and Read-it-later (Pocket) built-in as well. This is all stuff that fits in the PIM world. Tweets, mail, RSS, ideas, tasks — this stuff is all very related.

I am sure this integrated workflow could be quite nice in a iOS device too, eventually.

Here I should note there is in an important debate to be had about the relative merits and demerits of specific and multifunction apps, but the workflows issues are real. And I don’t know which complexity is worse: the potential one within a multipurpose app or the existing one in-between several independent apps.

Only after the challenge of building and testing and refining and rebuilding and retesting and re-refining such an ambitious app we will know if it will be helpful. This could be the Manhattan Project/Apollo Program for personal productivity.