6 Essential Items To Get Through The Day
Never go a day without them.
There’s no such thing as being too efficient. Here are some awesome items I recommend to use throughout your day.
Slack
Be less busy
Slack is the best communication tool I’ve come across. One of the few pieces of software out there that I truly love. What makes slack unique is how seamlessly it integrates into your work environment. For being a relatively large application, it is extremely easy to get going with their wonderful on boarding process.
Not a morning goes by where I wake up and don’t check/use Slack. It is the primary communication tool for my co-founder and I. Slack is dedicated solely to communication which eliminates the distractions of platforms like Facebook Messenger yet its chat-like nature makes it much quicker than email.
TheNews.im
Designer News + Hacker News
If you’re like me then you crave to be in the knowledge bubble. Every morning I get a feeling for the pulse of the tech world with TheNews, an awesome mashup of Designer News and Hacker News. Positioning the two feeds next to each other, TheNews makes it easy to scan the two sites simultaneously.
Each also has a full link to comments on each post and most recently launched an iOS app. If you’re a lover of either community, or like me a lover of both, than this site is your most efficient way to participate in both communities.
SmallPDF
We make PDF easy. We love it. And you will too.
While I do not deal with as many documents and PDF’s on a daily basis as people in other professions, I felt compelled to include this because it solves so many pains. Dealing with Adobe’s enigma that is the PDF format can really suck. Enter SmallPDF. It is a simple web app that allows for 8 headache-saving functions to be performed on your PDF’s.
The simple interface makes it incredibly easy to port in PDF’s and/or Microsoft Office Suite items for a quick compressions, splits, and conversions. A must have if you’re working with a lot of these documents.
Save For Later
Link saving is one of my most prevalent behaviors (thanks Reddit). I spend hours upon hours a day on the internet and with all that time I find quite a few things worth saving. Yet I had no way of capturing all these cool links… until Pocket came along.
Pocket provides both web and mobile apps with a simple interface to stash all your links. Once saved in Pocket the program renders a nice little image preview (as seen on left) to give the user a better idea of what they saved and from what platform. This has been a life saver multiple times when scratching my head trying to remember that really cool code snippet or article I found some months back. Pocket is a ‘save’ button for real life.
To Bed
There is no app to replace Mom, but when Mom is not around, this is the app to get you to bed!
Made by the awesome Tord Asnes, To Bed is a fun (and beautiful) little app that makes you feel like a kid again. To Bed’s goal is to help you get to… well.. bed. You simply put in your waking time for each day of the week and To Bed will remind you the night before when you should be getting ready for bed. The app is wonderful to break up late nights of work with a friendly reminder to take care of yourself. At 12:30 A.M. every night I am gently reminded that I need to eventually sleep. Works wonders.
Not only is the app useful, but it’s also impeccably designed. The sounds wonderfully compliment the fun nature of the app. A must have for those of us who sometimes forget to sleep.
Medium
Everyone’s stories and ideas
If you’re here than you probably already know this one. Medium, my personal favorite blogging platform on the internet, has carved out a really eclectic community of writers. While it does certainly have a tech-orientation, there is plenty of diverse content to be had. On any given day I can go from reading stories about leaving google to ones about the demons that haunt our souls. Every day the community grows larger and more diverse.
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-C
