Over the last several months I’ve been growing increasingly more organized thanks to the internets. Here’s how:

Gmail

I have been using gmail since 2004, however, up until about May, I was completely oblivious to its true organizational powers. After deciding that my @gmail account was too cluttered and had been used too often for internet sign ups, I switched to using google apps for this domain, and upon account creation, created filters upon filters that automatically label mail from specific people and things (read: facebook, etc.) and handle them accordingly. Is it mail that I want to know about but don’t want in my inbox? Then it will skip the inbox and get labeled never the less. The point is that mail in my inbox is mail that I still have to reply to or take care of in some way. All handled mail is archived and saved forever. Any mail that I ever need to find, just use search and I can find it. That easy. It just makes handling things way, way easier. And best of all? My inbox is clutter free!

Google Calendar

I have several calendars marked with different colors. My outlook calendar at work gets synced with it so I always know when I have a meeting and can get into work at the appropriate time without having to login to the work network. I have a personal calendar that I overlay on top of it with a different color that I use to keep track of all personal happenings. And, best of all, I can invite people and schedule their time using calendar. While my friends laugh when they find a “Friend Time!” invitation in their inboxes, I’ve found that it’s a whole lot more useful for me and helps me to ensure that I’m spending time with the people who matter most. Also, I love that I can set it up to send me email reminders or txt reminders if I need to be some place. However, it lacks the ability (currently) to send a daily agenda that includes all of your calendars, which is a little annoying to me.

Mint.com

A few days ago, a coworker was talking about financial management and his issues with it. For the hell of it, I looked up “online financial management application” and found this. It’s wonderful. You create an account, connect your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, etc. into it and it will download the transaction history. From there, you can adjust the auto-categorization it does and see a pie chart of how you’re spending your money. You can also create a budget on there which is how I’m going to be handling my “financial to-do list” from now on. It’s really brilliant. I have one account for my stuff and another account to keep track of my joint stuff with my roommate. Check out the features — it’s well worth it. It’s great for helping you see how you spend money so you can make better decisions, and it’s nice to know that I’ll get alerted if there is any suspicious spending activity on any of my accounts. Plus it’s just nice to have an effective budgeting tool period.

RememberTheMilk.com

I need to-do lists in one place that I can access anytime and anyplace. My scraps of paper are getting ridiculous and hard to manage. So I found this. I can text to-do list items to it. It can send me reminders by email or txt. And I can prioritize what I need to do, assign due dates, estimate time, tag things. It’s great. I highly recommend it. It’s also linked with my google calendar so that I can see what tasks I have to complete as well as where I have to be for any given day. While the calendar is good for managing general things that happen in the day, RememberTheMilk keeps me on top of the specifics, particularly at work.

Stikkit

While this webapp does include calendar and to-do list functions, I am using this primarily as a note taking app. Whenever I have a thought I don’t want to lose, I go to stikkit. Whenever there’s a website I want to check out later, stikkit bookmarks it. Whenever there’s a contact I need to remember, stikkit handles that, too. It’s nice because then notes aren’t dependent on paper, bookmarks aren’t dependent on computer and contacts are dependent on neither. Wherever I have internet, I have my stikkits. And, now rather than sending emails to myself, I send emails to my personal stikkit address. It’s nice having a place for all my odds and ends.

pHome.us

My new homepage. You can add “presets” like Google, Dictionary, Thesaurus, IMDb, Google Maps and wikipedia to make searching a breeze, but you also can add your frequented lists and organize them by category. It certainly makes it easier to ensure that I hit all the sites I need to on a daily basis so that they aren’t ever forgotten by accident, which is great for when you’re adding new organizational tools like I’ve been lately. :)

What tools do you use to solve what kind of problems? I’m definitely still on the lookout for more!