Over the past 18 months, I've gone extreme in creating a personal system to be more effective using technology.Here is what I've adopted:
Gmail+Sanebox
I use the default Gmail client. The good is almost all of my email addresses are on Google apps, so dumping all my email into one inbox is a huge feature for me.
SaneBox is a not-so-cheap AI assistant for your email. It watches what I do and sorts my email for me automatically. While it has some foibles, I love that it is aggressive at deprioritizing things.
FullContact
Do you have duplicate contacts across your devices? Do you have contacts on one device but not another? With about 2,000 of them now in my contacts, I had a real problem. FullContact is a great way to sync all your contacts and keep them "clean."
Grammarly
This is a plug-in for web browsers and the desktop to help you write better. Big fan of this. It's taken my writing from mediocre to "OK" level.
LastPass
No idea why it took me until 2017 to buy a password manager. For $2 a month, this is a bargain.
Evernote+Scannable
Evernote added OCR (optical character recognition) to their app recently. So they can now search through handwritten notes.
Scannable is a free scanning app so you can use your cellphone to scan directly into Evernote.
Despite taking notes in every meeting (I have a terrible memory for details), I no longer need to carry around any paper at all. Just write it down, scan it and drop it into Evernote.
Google Trips
I'll fly 70+ segments this year. Google released their Trips app recently. It watched your email for travel confirmation emails. Then, they show up in an organized
Zoom
Zoom has to be the best business conference/dial-in software out there. We moved to it from BlueJeans, which just had some crazy UI issues.
ScheduleOnce
I don't have an assistant or exec admin, so I'm scheduling most of my stuff. ScheduleOnce allows people to book time on my calendar through a link.
Firefox
I recently gave up on Chrome as it was killing the battery on my 2015 MacBook Pro. Firefox is better in every regard.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=firefox-com
SignEasy
This is a great way to quickly sign PDFs inside of your gmail. Couldn't live without it.
Flight Search
This is a hidden gem. A few years ago, Google bought a startup called ITA Software. They are a flight search engine that powers the flight search found in many B2C sites. It still operates a free flight search engine here:
https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
And that's it for now. If you have a tech productivity product you love, tweet me at @mgirdley or (gasp!) let's talk face to face about it.