40Tech

A recent article on Lifehacker has me wondering if I’m using Evernote all wrong. I only have two main notebooks in Evernote: Work, and Personal. There are a few other random ones that are automatically created by apps, such as the notebook that Scanner Pro, an iOS app, creates. I also have an “Inbox” notebook where notes reside until they are moved into one of the other notebooks. But by and large, all of my notes go into my two main notebooks. Am I in the minority with how I use Evernote notebooks?

I’ve been using Mailbox on my iPhone for over a week now, and one of the features that I like the best is the ability to defer items in my email inbox. With a swipe and a tap, I can temporarily get an item out of my inbox, and set it to reappear at a future date (yes, I can hear the GTDer’s out there screeching in horror that I don’t just move it into my GTD system). I like the feature so much that I longed for the ability to do the same on my desktop at work, where we use Microsoft Outlook. The hunt was on.

Mailbox needs a monetizaton strategy. For my sake. And yours, if you use the app.

If you follow tech news, it’s been hard to miss mention of Mailbox. Mailbox, as described insome glowing reviews, looks to be a new way to handle email, with a focus on Gmail. The general concept behind Mailbox is to help you get to inbox zero by letting you perform full and half swipes to the left and right to archive, delete, and defer messages. The current problem with Mailbox? There’s a long line to get it.

Is voice dictation finally ready to be a viable alternative to typing? When I first used Dragon Dictation several years ago, I was impressed, but thought that it wasn’t quite ready for primetime. Whether because of limitations of the software, my own mistakes, or because of limitations of the hardware, Dragon made just enough errors to really slow me down.

After a couple of years as a mostly satisfied Android user, I recently switched back to the iPhone (the reasons might someday be the subject of another story). I was eager to try out location-based reminders, which reminded me of a stripped down (but easier) version of Tasker on Android. I liked the idea that I could use Siri to say, “remind me to take out the trash when I get home,” and I’d have a reminder added to my list in the Reminders app. Thanks to geofencing in iOS, that reminder would automatically fire when I pulled into the driveway.

Timesavers that I love, but don’t use enough, are an operating system’s keyboard shortcuts. OS X Daily recently covered four pretty basic ones involving the trash, of which I was unaware.

Right now, I’m up to 128 snippets in TextExpander. There are several that I have committed to memory, but even more that I hardly ever use. This is because I can’t remember the shortcuts to launch them, so it is just as quick for me to type normally as it is for me to open TextExpander and find a particular shortcut. I recently learned of a quicker solution, however.

I’ve found myself plenty busy lately. The new job, new baby, and newly four have been making it difficult to get sleep, let alone writing time. As a result, however, my obsession for to-do apps has flexed its brawn and muscled its way back to the forefront of my thoughts — especially after I accidentally discovered Any.DO.

Which is awesome!

The other night, I glanced over as my wife was using her laptop in bed. I couldn’t help but notice a number that jumped out at me: 7000+ unread items in her email inbox. I think my wife uses her inbox as a holding pen for her messages. She also isn’t too strict about using a second email account as a bacon address for her less important messages. While never as, um, interesting as my wife’s email practices, my inbox was out of control last year. Four changes helped me bring sanity to my email inboxes.