These days everybody is so busy! Time is seriously short when you’re working all day, going to gigs at night and cooking for 6 on the weekend (not to mention guest editing for Flavourmag).
We can’t clone ourselves (yet) but I can give you the next best thing. 5 apps that I can’t live without. These apps save me so much time on a daily basis that I think anyone would benefit from at least trying 1 out. So in reverse order of importance (of can’t-live-whithout-ness):
5: LastPass
This is a browser extension & phone app with one specific function… PASSWORDS
At the moment I have access to far too many social media platforms for various different clients, the only way I manage to switch between them quickly is by storing the passwords on LastPass which remembers which logins belong to which websites. Now I know certain browsers now have that capability, but where LastPass really shines is the ability to share access to all your assets with your team without making the passwords visible, and similarly being able to change the password and only having to update it on LastPass instead of sending it to 20 different people. There’s a free which should suite most people’s needs, and a premium version with additional features…
https://lastpass.com/features_free.php
4: Feedly
Feedly is like an old school RSS reader on steroids. The concept is simple… you go around to all your favourite blogs and enter their URLs into Feedly, which then gives you a feed of all the latest posts. Additional to that you can organise the feeds into categories which helps to separate your proper music news from your hot juicy celebrity gossip, as well as share to a number of networks from within the app itself. Another great thing about it is that it syncs across all your devices and accessible through any browser.
I use this a lot on daily basis to discover new music and what’s buzzing from the top 100 music blogs from around the world. I also use it to keep on top of any new developments in Social Media which I can share with my team by email or onto my social networks.
http://www.feedly.com/about.html
3: Pocket
Now pocket is another one that I really love… and what’s cooler is that it integrates with feedly perfectly. So now that you have your feed set up, you’re lost in the midst of a really interesting article about KimYe and you realise you need to leave to make it to that meeting which is a 20 minute tube ride away. Save the article to pocket and you can pick it back up even without an internet connection. You can also install it as a browser extension to save any articles you have open at any time. It comes with a handy tagging function for organising your saved articles too!
Find out more here: https://getpocket.com/about
2: IFTTT
This is a bit of a tricky one to describe, but once you give it a go I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it. IFTTT stands for IF THIS THEN THAT, you are basically setting up triggers that set off a reaction.
Confused? Ok let me give you an example…
Right, so what this does is every time I post a photo on Instagram, IFTTT it will automatically post it to my Twitter account as a NATIVE image and it will also include a link back to my Instagram.
LOL at the typo.
One word of warning though, the exact text will be carried over from Instagram, so it won’t be able to figure out if the @handle for your tags is different on Twitter. However you can set up a rule that it will only post Instagrams with a particular hashtag and not others.
Another way I use IFTTT is to collect all the Soundcloud and YouTube content I like onto a Tumblr.
But with 141 channels there are a lot of possibilities ranging from updating your phone’s wallpaper live from a Flickr account, to Yo’ing the lights in your flat off.
1: Evernote
This app is so useful to me, that I’m actually using it right now to draft this article! Evernote has been an absolute lifesaver for me for years now. It’s an app that helps you organise all your notes into one place and sync across all devices. I must admit I don’t even use most of it’s functions, but to quickly jot down ideas when I wake up in the middle of the night, or to collect research and quotes for an article I’m working on. One of the most useful functions for me is being able to share notes via URL as well as the powerful search function which lets you search through text on images. So imagine if you’ve quickly taken a photo of a newspaper article, add it to Evernote and you’ll be able to find it later by searching for any of the text from the article. Similarly it will work with hand written notes, but I guess that really depends on how legible your handwriting is! I’m always surprised that it recognises my particularly horrendous (but unique) scrawls.
I also use it a hell of a lot for storing E-Tickets as I find the email search on phones can be a pain in ass, especially when you have to go through mail from over a month ago. This way I’m confident I’ll be able to find my reference number / confirmation quickly when I need it.