For years I had a reputation as organizationally challenged and in some quarters it’s still expected that I will turn up 5 or 10 minutes late. As a church planter, there are loads of challenges to work on and one is playing to your strengths while making sure your weaknesses don’t drag you down.

So I’ve worked hard at trying to be organised and stay organised but keep it low profile and easy-going. I’m also experimental and I enjoy trying things out, so here are a few tools, apps and websites that I use to get things done, a few others that haven’t worked out and some that are in trial mode right now. 

Plaxo is, I think, genius. The big idea is that it’s an online address book which sounds very dull. When we move country there is a big effort to tell people where you live, how to contact you and then you find out that the addresses you hold for key friends are out of date and they no longer work/reside where you thought you did and they’ve got a new number. Plaxo solves all that. You keep your contact information up to date and it updates everyone else address books for you. You can do all the usual things by linking to Facebook, twitter, importing from Outlook, Gmail etc and keep things in sync across your devices. Simple. Update one address once. Brilliant. Sadly most people I know aren’t using it, so not that brilliant yet. So my plea to you, if you know me. Sign up to Plaxo and the address book is sorted. Permanently.

 I’ve had a Twitter account for a while now and have mostly not really known what to do with it, partly on account of the technology I have and partly because, well, I didn’t know quite how to use it. I also realised that on my blog I had created a whole mass of content that just rusts undiscovered in the digital archive gathering digital dust. Buffer allows me to load up ten tweets at once (for free, more if you pay) and it schedules them throughout the day. This has allowed me to give fresh life to old posts, be more consistent with my posting and actually spend less time checking it. I can also add things from the web throughout the day by using a handy browser button.

Tweetdeck is another Twitter app I use that is my main way of using Twitter and argue with friends (mostly @tsimmonds). I use the Chrome extension although there is a desktop version. I can track conversations, retweet and all that stuff and it’s much easier than actually using the Twitter site, which may explain why Twitter just bought Tweetdeck.

This is a new one and we’ll see how we go with it. I was convinced by Evernote enthusiast Michael Hyatt. Basically the big idea is that you can ‘remember everything and access it anywhere’.With local, cloud and mobile solutions (not that I currently have a phone that works for that) it covers most bases and seems like a good way of keeping track of things. Does anyone use Evernote and if so how does it work for you? I’m still learning so would appreciate any tips.

My parents live in the UK that’s GMT but I live in Sweden that’s +1. My mother-in-law lives in California that’s -9 but my sister-in-law lives in Alice Springs, Australia which is +7.5 and one of my best friends lives in Karachi, Pakistan which is +3. Figuring out a time to call can be complicated, worldtimebuddy.com makes it so easy. Genius.

I get easily distracted when I’m working on my laptop. It’s just too easy for me to check emails, blogs, twitter, Facebook, sports and just about anything except what I’m supposed to be doing. Enter Freedom. You set how long you want to concentrate for and it kills your access to the internet. You can’t do a thing except what you’re supposed to be doing. I forgot how good it was to feel like you did something! Freedom indeed.

 Lastly, with over a thousand books in print and dozens of pdfs, sermon notes and a growing archive of discussion papers I need some form of system to organise it all and make it easy to find, note and track my research. Zotero does the job. Perfect in Firefox but I swapped to Chrome so I use a standalone version. To see if it works for you see this by Andy Naselli.

Of course in the midst of all this my life depends on Google for email, calendar, blog reading. So they should be there, but you’ve all heard of Google right? Any other recommendations or tips, what works for you?