Now
that the piles of snow are finally gone and spring is threatening to arrive,
it's time to clean up and get organized. My garage looks like a hoarder's paradise
and I will get to it real soon. But first, I want to organize my digital life
and these are the tools I'll use to whip my computer, tablet and mobile phone
into shape.
I’ll
start with Evernote, a free program built to hold all of life's random bits
of information. It might be a recipe, a to-do list, a restaurant review, a
website address, PDF versions of user manuals or the plot for the novel you're
going to write someday. Toss them all into Evernote, give each one a topic tag,
or just use the search feature to find them.
The items
are stored in the cloud, so they're never lost if your computer crashes and
they are accessible from any computer (Mac or PC) and mobile device (Android or
iOS). That means you can start a grocery list on your computer, make additions
from your tablet and call it up on your phone when you're at the supermarket.
After
using Windows for decades, I have files parked in all sorts of digital nooks
and closets. Rummage will help me find and organize them. The free program inspects hard drives and
other storage spots, identifies different file types and applies tags to get
them organized.
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| Rummage |
When
Rummage is finished searching, you can type "Word" or “Excel” in its
search field to display a list of all your Microsoft Word documents or
spreadsheets, regardless of where they're stored.
The program also looks at the
text inside documents and adds a tag based on the subject matter. If you
connect Rummage with your Facebook, Twitter and Outlook accounts, it will also
attempt to tag files based on your relationships with other people.
I
love to take pictures with my phone, but I never have time to sort and edit the
best ones. Lumific is a free photo gallery app for mobile devices that will tackle that job
automatically.
The app will group similar photos together by identifying their
date and location to create one collection from an August vacation and another
from the family reunion in October.
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| Lumific |
What
about that pile of sales slips on my dresser? They will be gone after I feed
them into a free iPhone app called OneReceipt. I’ll take an iPhone photo of each receipt and let
the app crunch the numbers. I’ll add tags to tell me what I bought, where I
bought it and whether it was a personal or business expense.
Now
on to my overstuffed email inbox. Mailstrom is designed to sort through your mail and separate the
important messages from the junk. It uses message headers, not the actual text
inside, to find patterns. It marks mail that it thinks is related and lets you
act on those messages in a group.
Mailstrom
is free to try and works with Gmail, Apple mail, Outlook and many other mail
services. It will identify frequent senders, like family members or business
associates, and bring them to the top of your inbox. It can also sort and group
emails by subject.
The
program specializes in blocking junk mail and freeing your inbox from
mailing-list messages that you never read. I’m sure I will get along just fine without
all those Twitter notifications. I might even have time to clean the garage.
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Written by Ric Manning
Follow me on Twitter @ricmanning and read my technology columns at My Well Being.
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