Now, with the advent of things like smartphones, tablets, and the iPad, new applications designed for those devices are making it easier and more practical to go paperless.

Penultimate: Your iPad notepad

Penultimate by Cocoa Box turns your iPad into a notebook, allowing you to jot notes and create sketches in multiple colors, separate them into notebooks by topic or project, and then email all or part of your notes in PDF format. It even includes three built-in “papers” (graph paper, unlined and ruled), but you can import images of different backgrounds or papers — or download paper packs — to create your own texture or style. Price: $1.99.

SignMyPad: Simple contract sign-offs

The Android- and iPad-compatible PDF reader SignMyPad has built-in annotation functionality, allowing you to sign and date PDF documents right from your iPad and then email it to another party. You can also save documents into versions for gaining multiple signatures, and the app can import documents from and save them to Dropbox. Price: $3.99 for the basic version, $19.99 for SignMyPad Pro, which adds geolocation tagging.

MyFax: Fax without a fax

If you work with clients or colleagues who still use fax machines, MyFax’s mobile faxing app, available for iOS and Blackberry, lets you send and receive faxes from your smartphone and via your email account. Just snap a photo of the document you want to send (the app is optimized for sending photos of text), choose the recipient from your Address Book and send. To fax by email, attach the document to an email message, address it to the fax number plus an @myfax.com and send. To receive a fax, simply give out your MyFax number, and your received documents will be available as an email attachment. Price: Free app, service costs $10/month after a free trial.

JotNot: Turn your iPhone into a handheld scanner

JotNot lets you scan from your iPhone, email the scan as a PDF or image, and fax the scan to U.S. numbers. You can add pages to documents, creating a multi-page scan, as well as delete and reorder pages and send documents to EverNote, DropBox, or Google Docs. JotNot can scan and save a variety of documents, including receipts, business cards, and notes. Price: Free.

DocScanner: Simple scanning

DocScanner is a scanner app for the iPhone, Mac, Android, Qt, and the Symbian S60 that allows you to scan documents simply by taking a picture. It then automatically crops everything other than the document out of the picture and even detects your document’s paper size. Other helpful features include the ability to search multiple-page documents, as well as words within documents. Price: $4.99.

Business Card Reader: Quickly add new contacts

The multi-platform Business Card Reader from SHAPE Services lets you take a photo of a business card, and then it “reads” the picture, extracts the contact data, and enters it into your smartphone’s address book. The built-in browser even lets you check out a new contact’s LinkedIn page right from the app. Price: $4.99 for multi-language support, $3.99 for Asian languages only.

OfficeDrop: Scan to the cloud

OfficeDrop‘s app scans documents directly to the cloud for storage and sharing. The ScanDrop desktop app is available for both PC and Mac, but the iPhone and Android Scanner apps allow you to scan and upload documents using your smartphone. Once uploaded, the document’s text is searchable, thanks to OCR, and sharable with colleagues. Price: Free

Square: Easy payments and receipts

Square, available for Android and most iOS devices, lets you accept credit card payments directly from your smartphone and uses “smart receipts” to send to customers via email or text message. You can create a display with photos and prices so that customers can view your products directly from your iPad, for example, and then keep track of the number of sales you’ve made in a given day. Price: Free app and reader.

Image courtesy of Flickr user mattjiggins

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• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• Flash analysis: Steve Jobs

Dear Email, this isn’t working out. It’s not you, it’s me.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with email, but I know that the majority of my issues with it are a result of user error more than a problem with the technology itself.

User problem #1: Elaboration and niceties

At this minute, I have over one hundred emails in my inbox that need an action or response. Any time I get the nerve to tackle them, I think about having to read through paragraphs of explanation and niceties in order to get to the meat of the message so that I can take action.

As a regular sender of emails myself, I’m just as guilty of adding unnecessary elaboration and niceties to my messages as the next person. I feel the need to start with the typical, “How have you been” and “Here’s the latest this way” chitchat, followed by a detailed explanation of why I’m emailing, but as a reader (and someone with 100+ emails to process right now), I’d love to know I could open each one and find a simple and direct message that tells me what the sender needs. “Hi, Amber. I’m emailing to see if . . .” Ah, wishful thinking.

User problem #2: Deceptive and inadequate subject lines

How great would it be if everyone started using more helpful and direct subject lines? Even just adding simple lead-ins like “Quick question” or “Urgent” could help us hone in on those messages that need attention more immediately than others.

User problem #3: Abuse

We all have to pay the price for those who abuse email, like spammers, contacts who automatically subscribe us to their newsletters, and others who use this more personal and private medium for uninvited messages.

User problem #4: Poor filtering

One big mistake I make with my own email usage is not using filters effectively. There are many types of emails (messages from social networks, newsletters, and other notifications) that could easily be marked as read and archived without my ever having to touch them. The only reason they’re not is because I don’t take the time to set up filters to sort them.

User problem #5: Using the wrong medium

Instead of sending five emails back and forth to set a single appointment, it would be more effective to use another service that streamlines appointment-setting, like TimeTrade, Google Calendar, or SkedgeMe. As with this example, a lot of our communications could be cut down or eliminated, if we’d choose a better medium for them.

But what about the technology?

While user error is a big part of the problem, technology is not completely in the clear.

Technology problem #1: Poor spam filtering

Until we get to the point where spam is successfully filtered out each and every time (which, let’s face it, is not likely to happen), email will always be somewhat of a nuisance, no matter how effective we get with our use of it.

Technology problem #2: Inadequate sorting

Some messages are notifications, some are spam, and a tiny portion are actually important enough to warrant our attention more immediately. It would help if these messages were automatically separated somehow.

It would also be helpful to have smart sorting based on people (example, important people, new people, companies). When I can zoom in on emails from clients and important business contacts, I’m much more likely to stay on task and not get distracted, but by the same token, I’d also like to see a filter to sort out new people, which could help with identifying new prospects and opportunities.

Fixing the world’s email problems might be a tall order, but the good news is that developers are listening. Even better, they’re asking us what we want from the applications we use on a daily basis and how we would like to see them improved.

What suggestions do you have for fixing email?

Photo courtesy Flickr user ilamont.com

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Strategic Implications of the Microsoft/Skype Deal
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Today, I stumbled across a new prospect for email management, SaneBox, which can automatically prioritize and sort email. Could this new hopeful mean the end of email insanity, as it claims? Time will tell, but it looks very promising.

Works with all providers

SaneBox works with most email services that use IMAP or WebDAV, including Gmail, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird, so you can keep your current email address and software. It works within your current email program by accessing your account and adding unique folders for sorting.

Better layout than Priority Inbox

SaneBox seems to work a lot like Priority Inbox, except that sorting takes place using folders instead of using a multi-section layout, which I think makes it easier to compartmentalize and maintain focus. With Priority Inbox, you see all messages in the same pane, making it tempting to jump around or check out less important emails. With SaneBox, you view one folder at a time, and other messages are displayed as a count within your sidebar.

Smart, easy sorting

When you sign up for an account, SaneBox takes your most recent 5,000 messages and sorts them. All other messages are sent to the archive. The most recent emails are then sorted, based on importance, to either your inbox or to a “SaneLater” folder. As you go through your messages, you can drag and drop messages that you’d like to process later into folders such as “SaneTomorrow” or “SaneNextWeek.”  They’ll automatically be moved back to your inbox at the appropriate time.

Simple tweaks and adjustments

SaneBox learns from your actions. You can sort mislabeled messages into the folders where you would like them to go, so for instance, if you get mailing list emails, you can have them sent to your “SaneLater” folder instead of your inbox, or you can send them to the “SaneBlackHole,” if you would prefer not to see them at all.

This functionality works in reverse, too, so if you see that an important message got sent to the “SaneLater” folder by mistake, you can drag it to the inbox so that it gets a higher priority with future sorting.

SaneBox refers to these adjustments as “trainings,” which you can access and adjust within your control panel at any time. (Side note: Afraid you got a little trigger happy? Go to the “trained contacts” section of your account and remove any rules you’ve set so that emails are filtered based on the original settings.)

Added features to improve workflow

The main sorting capabilities of SaneBox make it worth a look, but there are several added features that help to improve workflow and email management, including:

• Social network refinement, which helps to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of sorting, based on the strength of relationships and connections within social networking platforms.
• Spam folder monitoring that acts more like a temporary black hole, rather than a permanent one like other email programs.
• Multi-level email importance, which allows you to organize emails into five levels to maximize your workflow.
• Encryption and “outside-the-envelope” examination of messages (SaneBox does not read your email) so that sensitive information remains protected and private.

A monthly subscription costs $4.95 and the app comes with a 30-day trial.

What tools and tricks do you use for managing email overload?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Evil Erin

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Cord Chaos

If you’re like me, you avoid cleaning or rearranging your office due to the dread of having to sort through dozens of cables lurking behind your desk. Fortunately, there are some gadgets on the market to help with this pesky little problem.

• Cordies Cable Organizers Cordies desktop cable management system keeps all your desktop cables straight by snugly holding cables so that they don’t slide off your desk when disconnected. Each loop holds multiple cables at once and can support power cords, USB cords, phone chargers, and audio and video cables. Cost: $12.99 from ThinkGeek.
• BlueLounge CableDrops CableDrops offer another solution for keeping cords and cables in place. They come in packs of six and in a variety of colors. Cost: $9.95
  from BlueLounge.
• Applecores. Keep cables organized and in place with AppleCores. They come in three size, multiple colors, and can hold everything from earbuds to household appliances, and the best part might be that you can simply unplug and they’re ready to go when traveling. Cost: $1.99-4.99 from Applecore International.
• Dreamfarm Jot. Jots work a lot like CableDrops, but might be a little more versatile (the Dreamfarm website shows Jots holding everything from cables to sets of keys) and are only slightly more expensive for packs of two. Cost: $4.95 from DreamFarm.
• Ziotek Color-Coded Surge Protector Keeping cords straight on top of the desk is one thing, but what about under it? How many times have you played musical cables trying to locate one of a half a dozen? The Ziotek color-coded surge protector is just the fix. It includes color-coordinated slots and cable markers to keep all your devices straight. Cost: $10.99 from CyberGuys.

Cell Phone and Charging Stations

What a difference ten years makes! I can’t remember ever needing to charge anything before cell phones and MP3 players came on the market, but charging stations are now a permanent part of our work life.

• Breffo Spiderpodium Stand. The Breffo Spiderpodium stand is a cool little gadget that holds cell phones, iPods, and other devices on an eight-leg “octopod” (instead of tripod). It mounts to car vents or mirrors, stands on desk or counter tops, and wraps around bike handlebars, backpacks, or baby strollers. It won’t leave marks and can easily be moved to another spot. Cost: $17.25 from Amazon.
• G.U.S. Phone/PDA Charging Station. If devices are taking over your counter tops, especially if multiple people in your home or office need to charge them at the same time, you might like a phone/PDA charging station. This one can stand on a desk  or counter top, or be mounted to a wall so that phones are out of the way and in one place. Cost: $39.99 from GreatUsefulStuff.
• Chargepod. For even more devices, you might prefer the Chargepod, which can charge up to six devices on one outlet. It claims to support over 3,000 devices, including phones, PDAs, cameras, and mp3 players, and it’s also available as a car charger. Cost: $49.95-59.95 from Callpod.

Notes and To-Dos

While I love technology and all the conveniences it often brings, I’m still a compulsive note-taker, and although my filing needs are nearly non-existent these days, I still use a few tools to keep paper in order.

• Dreamfarm Gripet. Another Dreamfarm creation, the Gripet holds notes and reminders using friction. It attaches to a wall, filing cabinet, or refrigerator with magnetic or adhesive mounts. Cost: $19.95 from DreamFarm.
• Tear Away Planner Mousepad. In recent years, I’ve  made use of my mousepad by buying a small desktop calendar to fit to it. Although I use Google Calendar for keeping track of dates and events, I like having a month at a glance and right under my computer mouse. If you use a paper to-do list, you might opt for a tear-away planner mousepad instead, which covers a full week of to-dos at a glance. Cost: $9.99 from ThinkGeek.
• NeatReceipts. If you hate tracking paper documents for taxes and record-keeping, NeatReceipts can help. It organizes receipts, business cards and other documents by scanning and then using optical character recognition to extract key information. Cost: $199.95 from NeatCo.

What are your favorite gadgets for staying organized?

Photo courtesy Flickr user yprime

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• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• The Case for Increased M&A in 2011: Actions and Outlooks

These days, everything is distributed: our teams and co-workers, our customers and clients, and even our networking efforts. You can live in San Francisco, have an assistant in New York, and serve clients in London. It’s also possible to have many followers on Twitter and Facebook, and tons of posts and comments written about you or your company on a daily basis around the web. Somehow, you have to find a way to manage all that interactivity, and keep your team, your customers and your followers in the loop as well. It’s a lot to handle, and it can easily become overwhelming.

Postling enables you to post to your blog, schedule tweets and respond to comments using virtually any social media outlet. You can write a post once and publish to all your social media accounts at the same time, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Flickr.

Organize and Schedule

You can group your social media accounts by brand so that you can stay organized and work efficiently, which comes in handy if you own more than one business, have multiple locations, or want to manage your business and personal accounts from the same place.

On top of that, you can also connect multiple users to your accounts so that assistants and team members can post to your social networking and media outlets, too, and with granular permissions for every person, you can easily protect your privacy by only allowing access to certain accounts.

Another helpful feature of Postling is its ability to schedule posts, which means you can write posts ahead of time, then schedule when you want them to be published.

Monitor Comments

Postling also gathers all the comments your readers leave on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms and organizes them in a single place, making it easy to respond across all social networks without having to access multiple sites.

The Postling dashboard provides an overview of your recent posts and the comments they receive, and each comment gives you the option to reply directly to the correct account. Comments are threaded, so it’s easy to understand the flow of a given conversation and chime in at any point.

You can monitor what people are saying about you and your business by tracking your streams, RSS feeds and reviews from around the web, such as Yelp and CitySearch, and with email alerts of comments, you won’t miss anything.

The Postling analytics dashboard allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your social media and networking efforts by showing which days your posts are most effective, as well as your post-to-comment ratio.

Postling currently supports integration with most social networking and media platforms — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — most major blogging platforms, as well as YouTube, Flickr, Bit.ly, Yelp and CitySearch.

The starter plan is free and includes one account per social network; if you need more users and accounts, Postling’s has plus ($9/month) and premium ($49/month) plans.

Of course, Postling’s not the only app that enables you to work with multiple social media accounts. Alternatives include tools like TweetDeck, CoTweet, HootSuite, and Engage121, but Postling’s ease of use, along with the number of platforms it supports, makes it my preferred choice.

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• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

This survey was conducted online in December 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia. Respondents were employed U.S. adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution.

We’ve written extensively on how to get more organized, how to tame your inbox, and how to improve collaboration, but the folks at Intermedia add these suggestions:

• Work off your business priorities, not your email inbox. Highly productive workers use email as a communication tool for business results, rather than responding to emails as they come in. Focus on what needs to get done for your job and prioritize email review and response with that in mind.
• Collaborate online rather than simply sending messages back and forth. Email is great for communication, but not always the best tool for collaboration. Tools for document management solve this problem and are available online.
• Unify communications to get back one hour of your life per day. Rather than use separate tools and devices to check email, make phone calls, and instant message colleagues, businesses increasingly use “unified communications” to combine them in one tool. Sage Research estimates this system can increase productivity by over 12.5 percent, or one hour per day for each worker.

The survey also found that workers resolve to respond more quickly to business communications. We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

How do you plan to get more organized in 2011?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Social Inbox Vs. the Future of Email
• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

First Step: Set Days for Set Projects

I had several main projects that were most important to me at the time, so I decided to reserve certain days of the week for each of them. Here’s a rough overview of how I set up my week.

• Mondays: Project A
• Tuesdays: Projects B and C (since they’re closely related)
• Wednesdays: Writing and Project D
• Thursdays: Projects B and C
• Fridays: Project A

Second Step: One-Stop Organization

It was important that I had one way of tracking what needed to be done, rather than using five different tools to manage bits and pieces of my schedule and to-do list, so I started condensing things down until I was left with just a couple of tools to keep me in line.

I started using Tom’s Planner (which I also use for managing my editorial calendars) for organizing my recurring weekly schedule: those things I have to do every week on a set day (for example, write my WebWorkerDaily article every Wednesday).

At the start of each day, my first stop is Tom’s Planner, which gives me an overview of the “big rocks” that need to be moved that day.

In addition to Tom’s Planner, I use Google Calendar for managing set appointments and events (for example, phone calls and birthdays), and I try to only book phone calls and other set appointments during specific time frames on certain days of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 1:30 to 3:30 PM, for example). This makes me far less likely to overlook something or get my days mixed up.

Great News, It’s Working!

Immediately, I can say that my mind is a lot clearer lately, but there are several other advantages I’ve found so far for compartmentalizing my days.

1. I’m focused and staying true to my priorities. A quick glance lets me know what my top priorities are, as well as the rough percentage of time I’m giving each one. If I want to take on a new project, I quickly think, “What do I have on my plate right now? Well, Mondays I have…, Tuesdays I have…,” which keeps me from over-committing and straying from my top priorities. If I want to take on something new, something else has to go.
2. I’m not constantly shifting gears. Before I started using this method of organizing my time, I jumped from one project to another and felt like I wasn’t giving enough time to any of them. Now, I don’t worry about not giving enough time to any one project. I know, for example, that I will work on Project A tomorrow, so there’s no rush to take my attention off the project I’m working on today.
3. I’m getting more done. At first, I was worried that this strategy might leave me working less on my top projects, and while that has proven to be true in terms of the absolute amount of time I spend on them, I’m actually getting more done for each project, since I’m a lot more focused.

I’m also way more particular about the things I do for each one. On a given day, I know I have to pick the top tasks and hustle to get them done, since I’m not going to pick this project up again for a few days. I’m a lot less likely to get distracted by email, lower priority to-dos, or other things vying for my attention.

The proof is in the pudding. In the past three weeks, here’s what I’ve accomplished.

• Designed a new logo/banner for a new project
• Created a business plan for the new project
• Built a website for the new project
• Wrote and published 13 articles
• Created and published seven audio pieces
• Created and published two newsletters

In the three weeks prior to starting this strategy, here’s what I accomplished.

• Wrote and published 12 articles

Big difference! Plus, I’m spending far fewer actual hours working on any given project, and I feel like I’m working less, even though I’m getting more done.

So, what’s your strategy? Do you have a set way of working to help you move more rocks in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Helico, licensed under CC 2.0

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The solution? Develop a system around your blogging efforts. Here are the steps I took to create a system for producing and managing content for my own site.

About a month ago, I was approaching yet another week of blank canvases, so I set out to find a way to be more intentional and focused with my content. The first thing that came to mind was an editorial calendar. Big magazines and newspapers have used them since the dawn of the publishing industry, so I was fairly confident the solution would work for me, but I didn’t want to just throw together a calendar in spreadsheet form and think that all my problems would go away. I really wanted to approach this as a big magazine would, so I started by thinking in terms of a single magazine issue and how an editor might produce and manage its content.

Step 1: Choose a Theme

If you think about a single magazine issue, there’s generally a theme to it, a common thread that ties together the articles within it, so that was my first step — develop a theme. I decided to have “focus months” on my site to guide the content for a given month. This would help me accomplish a couple of things.  First, it would make my content more intentional. It would center my efforts around keywords and information that was relevant to my target audience. Second, it would help me better anticipate the content I was going to create, which would allow me to line up guest experts and interviews that were relevant to the content. I was immediately able to come up with themes for the next six months.

Step 2: Choose Your Sub-Topics

Once I had a theme in mind, I was able to think about sub-topics within that theme that would deepen my coverage of the content that month. At first, I just listed out the possibilities for sub-topics without thinking too much about them, and created a list of ten or twelve ideas. As I created the list, I noted possible guest experts who might provide greater insight into the sub-topics than I could provide on my own.

Step 3: Establish Your Schedule and Content Needs

With my topic and sub-topics ready, I had to decide on the frequency I would publish. I settled on publishing one content piece per day (could be an article, an audio piece, etc.). I decided to interview guest experts within the sub-topics and then spread out the content over the course of the month. My plan would be to line up and interview guests the month before I intended to publish the content. That way, I would avoid last-minute scrambling to produce content and could instead focus on quality well in advance of publishing. This would also help when I got sick or took time off, since I would already have content on tap for the given week or month and could simply schedule it to be published (or, even better, hire someone else to do it for me).

I decided that the number of weeks there were in a given month would be the number of guest experts I would line up for that month (five weeks, five guest experts). And to make things simple, each guest expert would produce one week’s worth of content (five content pieces per guest).

My site has a mix of articles and audio, so I decided to do one-hour interviews with each guest (and then each interview would be divided into four shorter content pieces) and then have each guest contribute one article in addition to their interview. That made it really easy on my guests, since they only had to show up for a one-hour interview and create one article. Plus, that little bit of effort on their part would equate to weekly promotion for their businesses, since I would be spreading their content out over the course of the month.

The great thing for me was, instead of having twenty to twenty-five separate content pieces to create on my own in a given month, I would simply do four to five interviews (depending on the number of weeks that month) and knock out four content pieces in one hour. Of course, that meant a lot more planning on the front end, but then the actual content creation part would become very easy.

Step 4: Produce the Content

So, I knew how many guest experts I would have (the same as the number of weeks that month), and I knew how many content pieces I needed from each of guest (always five), so that let me know how many titles I had to create for the month. Say, for instance, the month’s theme was “balance.” I knew I needed five content pieces, so I created five generic titles.

• Stress-Reduction Tips
• Personal Renewal
• Food and Mood
• Balancing Home and Work Life
• Disconnecting from Technology

Then I could create more interesting titles from the generic ones:

• 60-Second Stress-Busting Techniques
• The Importance of Personal Renewal
• Is Food Affecting Your Mood?
• Creative Ways to Balance Work and Home Life
• Cut the Cord: How to Disconnect from the World

This part was surprisingly simple. While I normally could sit and ponder blog post titles for what seemed like hours, I was immediately able to think of several ideas when thinking about picking the brains of experts on a given topic.

Step 5: Create an Editorial Calendar

I had my theme, my sub-topics, and even the specific post titles for the content I wanted to create. All that was left to do was actually create the content, edit it, and publish it. That meant that I actually had to conduct the interviews and then lay out exactly when I was going to edit and publish the audio and articles contributed by the guests.

Tom’s Planner is actually a great tool for organizing an editorial calendar (as mentioned by Simon just the other day, you have until SUnday to sign up if you’d like to get a free premium account for a year).

The first step was getting the content and editing it. Within Tom’s Planner (see image below), I created a place for each contributor and all of the content he or she would be creating. Next to each content piece, I put when we would be recording it and when I would be editing the content.

The second step was then organizing and publishing all the edited content, so at the very top of Tom’s Planner, I created an “ALL” group and listed out the types of content I had available for publishing and then evenly distributed it across the month (see image). I knew I would have one article per person, four audio pieces per person, plus a few other pieces of content. The thing I didn’t know, at least until everything was edited, was where I would use the content, so for instance, lesser quality audio pieces (say, if the sound wasn’t as good as with other pieces) might be used on the “Conversations” section of my site instead of within my premium audio program.

As I would edit and publish, I would be able to move content up from the individual contributor sections.

This has been a really great system so far. I have all of my audio content recorded for September, and with the exception of a few articles, I’m all set on content for the month. Now, all that’s left is editing and publishing, which makes my job a lot easier.

Why a System? Why Not Just Blog?

If you’re running a business blog, there’s generally an underlying purpose behind it. Maybe you want more clients or to create a fan base for an upcoming book. Whatever the case, there’s a reason that you blog, and the content you create should help you reach your end goal. By being more intentional and focused with your content, you’ll achieve greater success in a much shorter period of time and make sure that your content is, in fact, serving the audience it’s intended to serve.

My favorite things about having a system?

• Content has become so much easier to create
• My efforts are more focused and are helping me reach my goals
• I’m more intentional when it comes to guests, which means greater cross-promotion, back links, and visibility with new audiences.
• I’m no longer staring at a blank screen wondering what I’m going to write.

So, what’s your system? How are you staying on track and organized when it comes to your blogging efforts?

Photo by Flickr user Gustty, licensed under CC 2.0.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Here are my personal favorites; the tools I’d definitely hate to have to work without:

1. Gmail. Although there are plenty of times I wish I could avoid email altogether, it’s still a fairly decent tool for keeping me organized, especially by using Gmail. The “Superstars” feature (available in Labs) helps me to highlight and flag emails that require some sort of action or attention on my part. Labels allow me to organize types of communications and information for quick sorting and recognition. The advanced searching functionality helps me find things quickly and easily, and canned responses (also available in Labs) save me from having to reinvent the wheel when sending routine messages. So long as I make sure Gmail is working for me, instead of the other way around, it really keeps me organized and productive.
2. Google Calendar. I keep all my time-sensitive appointments and recurring to-dos organized in Google Calendar. On a busy day, it’s very easy to forget about phone calls or other items on my schedule, but customizable alerts keep me in check. If I anticipate an overly busy week, I’ll set myself multiple reminders to make sure nothing slips by me. I also love the ability to create multiple, color-coded calendars. I’ve created three primary calendars to organize specific types of activities and tasks: A “personal” calendar (color: pink), a “work to-dos” calendar (color: blue), and a “booked calls” calendar (color: orange). This provides me a quick overview of the week, and if, for instance, I see an orange appointment block, I know I have a call scheduled with someone.
3. TimeDriver. I used to attempt to manually coordinate my schedule with that of clients, interview guests, and other business contacts, but it became a nightmare, and several times I came close to double-booking myself. Although I’d love to have an assistant handle a lot of these types of tasks for me, tools like TimeDriver are a good substitute. I simply set my availability for the coming weeks, and when it comes time to coordinate appointments with others, I send them a link to my calendar, and they pick slots that work with their schedules. I know Google Calendar could provide this functionality in some ways, but I prefer TimeDriver for this purpose.
4. Zoho (Writer and Spreadsheet). Lately, I’ve been in the mood to simplify my organization. One thing I’ve been doing is creating a simple weekly to-do list, organized by day, within Zoho Writer. As I work through the list, I strike through tasks, making it really simple to see what’s left to do. I also like being able to see my accomplishments at a glance; I can look back over the entire week and see the tasks I’ve completed, which really helps me maintain focus. I used to create my to-do list on paper or within Backpack, but the paper list tended to get lost under notes and other items on and around my desk, and the Backpack list seemed to be ever-growing (more like a catch-all, master to-do list). The new system is simple and also keeps me from having to rewrite the list as things get moved around.
5. Pen and Paper. I know there are tons of note-taking tools available online and within different gadgets, but my personal favorite is a simple, 5″ x 8″ notepad and a good pen. I have to be able to catch notes and ideas on the fly, and paper is a good way to physically organize things into the right order or priority. I used to use (and occasionally still use) index cards, along with every size and shape notebook on the market. I eventually settled on the 5″ x 8″ since it seems to be the perfect size to capture and divide thoughts without wasting a lot of paper or running out of room. Although I’ve gotten away from paper-based systems in almost every other area of my work, I think pen and paper will always have its place in my organizational toolbox, even if it is old-fashioned.

With the right mix of applications, it’s much easier to stay on track and prevent things from being overlooked or forgotten, and with all the great tools available online, it’s possible to stay productive no matter where you are.

What tools keep you on track and organized?

Photo by Flickr user brdwatchr1, licensed under CC 2.0

The best time to deal with this situation is at the start of a relationship. “I treat my consultant/contractor work like a regular job, and set expectations when I first speak with a prospective client. I explain what my work hours are and that I’m not available in the evenings or weekends,” says Deborah Edwards-Onoro.

Like most web workers, you may be flexible and accept occasional out-of-hours work. Still, it could snowball into a regular thing. “Frankly, if you don’t set the parameters ahead of time, you’re setting yourself up for expectations that aren’t going to be acceptable,” says Michele Wilcox.

What if you have multiple clients and they all decide to call on you at the same time, or you bite off more than you can chew? Draw a line under your time by being proactive with these tips.

• Discuss work hours at the start of a relationship. Specify your hours of availability and your flexibility. Set guidelines for special projects and emergencies that require out-of-hours work. These guidelines could include number of days or hours of advance notice for after hours work, list higher rates and how to handle emergencies. Get all of this down in a simple contract template that you can re-use.
• Keep separate phone lines. Web workers should have separate phone numbers for home and business. It’s not professional to use one line for both, especially as there are plenty of telephony options available that can make it possible without a big expense.
• Find a voicemail tool with features you need. Some voicemail providers offer features that give you more control over how the service handles your calls.
• Let calls go to voicemail. Your client may be calling to share a thought without expecting you to answer. Let voicemail take the message and then check to see what the client has to say. Answering every time gives the impression you’re “always on.”
• Turn off the phone. The phone should be there for your convenience. Despite this, some people struggle to ignore a ringing phone.
• Set email guidelines. Tell your clients when they can expect an email response. You can set a rule that you reply within two hours during working hours and then a different rule for after hours and weekends.
• Post your business hours. List your hours on your web site and in your voice mail, or indicate the best time to reach you. Prospective clients will respect your hours if they see your schedule before hiring you.
• Turn off instant messaging, Facebook chat and similar tools. If clients contact you by instant messaging (IM) or on other platforms such as Skype, remember to switch your status to “away” as needed — or turn off the service.
• Be proactive and present. Some clients don’t think to ask if you’re available for after-hours work. Rather than waiting for it to happen, tell the client that you’re flexible and would appreciate advance notice if something comes up. “If a client feels taken care of, he or she may hesitate before picking up the phone on weekends or after hours,” says Michelle I. Zavala.

Some people believe “always on” is the way to stay ahead of competitors, but it can harm your health and work quality. “How can you give your best to a client if they’re calling you, say, in the middle of the night and you’re asleep?” asks Teresa Nolan Barensfeld. “Another point is that your clients won’t see you as a professional if you don’t set any boundaries about your availability.”

Some freelancers say they compromise with after-hours work by taking time off during the day. You may run into clients who need 24/7 support. Steer away from such a set-up by asking questions and understanding their expectations. “Not everyone needs to set these boundaries for themselves and not every business model allows them. However, I have found that I am far more productive if I have a clear distinction between my office hours and the time I spend with my family,” says Laura Sultan.

How do you manage after-hours work?

Photo by stock.xchng user Hans Thoursie.

#1 Organize the Priorities

The first area I wanted to tackle was my big-picture view of things. Although I had a pretty good grasp of what was most important, I found myself struggling with two main distractions: sub-projects and outside pull for my attention.

Sub-projects

I already had my income divided into three main “buckets,” but within each of those buckets, there were usually at least a half a dozen sub-projects competing for my attention at any given point, and I was constantly getting new ideas to add to the list. That made it really difficult to stay on track and make sure that the most important things were actually getting done, so I needed to decide on my top three priorities within each bucket. That way, when I sat down to work on a given bucket, I wasn’t wasting time trying to figure out what sub-project to work on next.

Outside Pull

Another common distraction was people approaching me to help me with their projects or to collaborate on joint ventures of some sort, which can be a good thing, but not if it keeps me from working on my top priorities. It can be tempting to want to drop what I’m working on in order to make room for a new and exciting opportunity, but the reality is, there are only so many hours in a day, and if I tried to do everything, nothing would ever get done.

It’s a very slippery slope, so I had to figure out a good way to track these outside distractions and make sure I didn’t allow othem to pull me away from my top priorities. I revamped my schedule a bit (a constant work in progress) and set aside three hours a week, in one-hour blocks, for “outside stuff.” For now at least, that’s going to have to be the limit, so when someone contacts me to write a guest post, for instance, or contribute to their project in some way, I can look at my schedule and see how many blocks of “outside stuff” time I have left. When they’re gone, they’re gone. That’s the only way to keep myself disciplined, while still allowing a little wiggle room for those shiny distractions.

#2 Organize the Environment

Another constant source of frustration was my work environment. There were all these little things that were just not working well, either from neglect or poor planning, so I decided to fix those while I was at it. Some examples:

• The desk organizer where I keep my calculator, which I use quite a bit, was filled with scrap pieces of paper and business cards. Every time I grabbed the calculator, the entire mess of papers would come with it. It’s been that way for a year!
• My desks had very little empty space for writing or organizing projects. I like to plan on paper, and anytime I do this, I end up bumping into phones and books and other unused clutter that is just taking up valuable real estate. I actually would regularly think about going to work at my kitchen table so that I’d have room to spread out all my notes!
• My desktop file bins had become overtaken by takeout menus, magazine clippings, and stray notebooks that weren’t being used (because I forgot they were there). Instead of holding project-related notes, which is what they were intended for, they had become junk bins.

All those little aggravations and areas of clutter were just slowing me down and adding to the chaos, so I started cleaning out and organizing in a counter-clockwise fashion until I had the entire room cleaned back up.

The funny thing was, when people came over, they always commented on how organized everything in my office was, which is probably why it took me so long to realize I had a problem. It doesn’t really matter how organized it looks. Neat does not equal efficient or effective.

Stop and look around your work space. Think about the little inefficiencies that always make you shake your head in frustration and say, “One day, I’m going to have to organize that.” Set aside some time this week to tackle it. I was able to get everything done in two or three hours, and I know I’ll save that much time in improved focus in the coming week alone.

What are the little inefficiencies in your setup, system or schedule that could be improved?

Photo by Flickr user orphanjones, licensed under CC 2.0

Divide and Conquer

To get started breaking down what needed to be done so that I could effectively delegate or outsource certain responsibilities, I first had to figure out what I did all day. (Oddly enough, this wasn’t exactly easy, at least not at first.) How do you name all the things that have to get done in a business each day?

To get a handle on it, I started at the top. What did I do immediately after coming into the office each day? From there, it would be easier to move through my day and week.

• First, I generally did a quick check of my email to see if there were any time-sensitive to-dos or messages waiting for me, but there was nothing there to delegate, really, at least not at this point.
• After that, I went to my Backpack account, where I keep all my recurring to-dos. (I have a template that houses a weekly checklist sorted by day that I simply copy each Monday for the new week.) Within my checklist, I had a variety of tasks. Some of them had to do with things like planning and accountability, others had to do with my writing, but most of them were administrative in nature (prime territory for delegation).
• At some point each day, I had to go back to my email box to sort through any new appointments and book guests for my radio show, magazine interviews, and podcast, which meant adding data to my calendar, as well as other locations to keep my content production schedule running smoothly.
• I also needed to sort through pitches and press releases each day, figure out who I wanted to book, and coordinate interviews.
• Then there came the actual production of content, which included things like editing down recordings and transcribing some of the interviews.

On and on, I went through my days, figuring out all the steps required to do every job I do. I noted each task on a separate index card and then divided them into groups based on context (grouping scheduling/booking tasks together, editing and publication tasks together, lead generation tasks together, and so on).

Once I had all the roles and responsibilities divided, I could decide what would be most beneficial to outsource or delegate at this point, but that required me to break things down a little more.

Focus on Highest and Best Use

To keep everything in perspective, I had to think in terms of “highest and best use.” There were certain tasks that were absolutely the most important things for me to be doing in my business. They weren’t the urgent fires. They weren’t the tasks that needed to somehow get done by someone at some point. They were those tasks that directly generated income or interest in my business, and there were only a few of them. Those few tasks were my “highest and best use” tasks, and I knew that they should have the majority of my attention each day.

In an ideal setup, I would only focus on those tasks 100 percent of the time. Of course, perfection was out of the question, but I could at least organize my workload, as well as the workloads of those who work alongside me, to focus on our individual highest and best use tasks as much as possible.

Obviously, the administrative tasks were not my highest and best use activities. I could quickly eliminate around 25 percent of my workload by delegating those to someone who charged 25 percent of what I made, so that had to be the top priority.

Organize and Execute

I decided to start with getting help in two main areas — scheduling and editing/transcription, but before I could do that, I had to organize all the tools and resources and develop a specific system around each role. That included things like:

• Setting up a branded email address for my scheduling assistant.
• Creating an email signature to clarify to guests her role within my organization.
• Creating canned email responses within that assistant’s email account to communicate in a consistent way with guests
• Creating a step-by-step checklist of “how-tos” that outlined each and every task the assistant had to do.

Once I had all that in place, the rest was pretty easy. Each time I got a new appointment confirmation email, for instance, I simply forwarded it to the new scheduling assistant with the following action in the subject line, “[Book].” There are only five or six actions that my scheduling assistant takes care of each day, and I start each email type with one of those actions so that she immediately knows what to do.

Until I know she has the hang of it, I’m saving all of the emails I send to her in a separate folder. Once a day, I’m running through them and making sure that nothing is fallen through the cracks. There have been a few hiccups, but nothing earth-shattering, and I’ve already seen a major reduction in admin time each day.

What steps do you take to make your outsourcing and delegation as painless as possible?

Photo by Flickr user Wonderlane, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Maybe it starts with the long-awaited end of a project, a move, or even the reorganizing of a closet or the rearranging of a room.

For me, it started with the re-installation of my laptop’s operating system. Simple, right? But fifteen minutes into the process, I felt relief, “Thank goodness this thing will finally work as it should.” I immediately wanted to re-install the operating system on my desktop computer as well, just to have a completely blank canvas to work on; how nice it would be to have both my computers functioning like they were new again.

I started thinking about clean slates. Imagine if you could make every part of your life feel new again.

Maybe you get back to exercising and eating better every day. Maybe you eliminate your debt and cut all the fat from your spending. Maybe you move to a place you’ve been thinking about or paint your office that bold color that always catches your eye.

Sometimes we need to hit the reset button on our lives, not to forget or undo where we’ve been or what we’ve done, but to get a new lease on life, a new perspective, or a breath of fresh air that’s just enough to motivate us to live our lives and run our businesses in a better way.

Spring is just around the corner, and what better time to make a little room to clean a few slates?

Start in the Most Obvious Places

For me, that was my laptop. I had been aggravated with its performance for several months and had gotten to where I rarely used it, because it was too slow. That meant I was bound to a desktop, which seems crazy to me as a web worker.

There are other obvious areas that need my attention, too. My desktop computer is probably next, as well as my archaic filing cabinet that’s filled with junk I don’t need or even use. In fact, I could almost take the entire thing to the curb to go out with next week’s garbage, yet I keep it, and it’s just another reminder of the various canvases and slates that need to be cleaned in my life and business.

Be Inspired to Keep Going

As you clean out one area, a junk drawer or your desk, you’ll most assuredly think of other areas that need your attention. Don’t feel like you have to tackle it all in one day or weekend. Maybe set aside two or three hours every Saturday or Sunday for as long as it takes to get to the bottom of it all. How motivating could that be to think, “What will I tackle next? What will be the next clean slate in my life?”

And, you know, it doesn’t have to stop with junk drawers and computers. You might need to clean up some relationships in your life. Maybe you don’t call your mom or siblings or best friend as much as you’d like and could make some time to make those relationships stronger. Then again, you might need to tackle your health, spirituality, or areas within your business.

So often, we become hoarders, hanging on to all kinds of clutter and excess baggage that crowds our lives and our thinking. Clean slates are very liberating and make you start thinking of all the possibilities that are available to you, if you only make room for them.

Sometimes I get on what I call my “crazy cleaning sprees” and get rid of all kinds of excess clutter and junk. What’s the most outrageous cleaning spree you’ve gone on? Were the results good or bad, liberating or costly?

Photo by Flickr user John Loo, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Here I go again, writing about organization. This time, though, it’s not because I’ve found a great new app to help me. You see that picture? It’s my inbox, aka my “to-be-dealt-with” pile. And there are two more like it. If only there were an app that could help me!

It’s so much easier to stay organized when everything is virtual. Or, if the files on your hard drive aren’t organized, at least you’re not tripping over them on your way to the kitchen. The moment I have to deal with something tangible these days, I seem to get in trouble. I used to be organized, but my life changed. So I need to get re-organized.

Part of the problem is that when I came to Paris from the U.S., the physical space I could use was drastically reduced. Another part of the problem was adjusting to the organizational methods — if they can be called that — of my office mate (husband).

Just as I was reaching the point where I could no longer tune out the chaos around me, when it was getting really oppressive, I discovered the 5S methodology. You may have heard of it if you’ve ever worked in a place with lots of equipment and people. It’s a five-step program that originated in Japan and was designed to get a work environment organized and keep it that way, all in the interest of maximum efficiency. I’m going to see if I can apply it to the occupational hazard I currently call my office.

The 5S Process

The five steps of 5S, and their approximate English translations are: seiri (sort), seiton (straighten), seiso (shine), seiketsu (systemize), and shitsuke (sustain).

1. Seiri (Sort): Get rid of anything in your work space that is not absolutely necessary for your work.

This first step is supposed to enable you to simplify tasks and use space effectively. It’s also supposed to help you be more selective about what you introduce into your work space and keep the number of work-related items around you to a minimum.

Frankly, for a personal office, I think this is a little extreme and bad for morale in any circumstances. I have a couple of things on my desk that are just there to give me something fun to look at. They’re staying. But the rest can go: the Advil, CDs, business cards (the bane of my existence), masking tape, Christmas postcards I meant to send to the two people I know who haven’t discovered email… There are a few other trouble spots I need to hit too, like the top of the filing cabinet, and that box of cables taking up space I could use. Step one is going to take me a full day at least.

2. Seiton (Straighten): A place for everything, and everything in its place

This step is about efficiency. It encourages you to make optimum use of your work area and to outfit your space with functional storage. It is also important for everything you use for work to have a convenient and appropriate home to which it is returned when you’re done using it.

This is how I used to operate, back when I had a lot of space. Once upon a time, I knew where everything I owned was. The fact that I couldn’t find a recipe last night, despite having paper files for my old, pre-computer recipes, may be the very reason why I’m writing this today. (Getting them onto the computer is on my to-do list. I have gotten as far as comparing recipe management software.)

3. Seiso (Shine): Clean up after yourself

This third step is about being responsible for keeping your own space neat. Most importantly, it doesn’t work unless everyone who shares the space does the same. The idea is to treat your office as if you might have a client drop in at any moment.

OK, once I get all the junk off of my surfaces, I will clean them. Regularly. There’s no way I can begin to do seiso without getting through the first two steps. Until then, no clients allowed.

4. Seiketsu (Systemize): Make it a habit

This fourth step is about establishing standards and a system for organization, and integrating them into your workflow in order to maintain a high level of neatness.

Some time last year, I stumbled across the concept of the “unpleasant task day” on the blog of a management consultant, and thought this would be a good way to approach this step. Michael Wade, the author of that blog, suggests you pick one day a month to do the things you hate to do. But since the 5S process is about neatness and efficiency, I’m thinking it should be more frequent. Maybe I’ll have a weekly “terrible task afternoon” for cleaning up and filing instead.

5. Shitsuke (Sustain): Prevention of backsliding

This last step is more accurately translated as “discipline.” It’s about making yourself maintain the neatness standards and system you’ve put in place.

Because I was once very organized, it shouldn’t be too hard for me to get back in the habit. I’m not so sure my husband is going to like this whole 5S thing though, even though he has the most organized hard drive I’ve ever seen.

The Reality

Clearly it’s unlikely that any of us could strictly adhere to a system like this, especially given the constantly changing nature of our work. Plus there may be uncontrollable factors (like husbands) that can toss a wrench into the works. But I’ve always found that a little structure never hurts when it’s used as a guideline, so I will try it out and see how it goes. Then I’ll try to apply it to my computer files, emails, etc. Anyway, it’ll be fun to say “Seiton!” the next time my husband puts the pliers down on the corner of my desk.

How do you stay organized outside of your computer?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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1. Plan for a successful New Year. Do a review of your work and see how you can make the next year a better one.
2. Clean your email box. Challenge yourself to reach inbox zero, or if you have thousands of messages, shoot for half. Delete newsletters, unsubscribe to newsletters you never read, file emails that require no further action on your part and address those that do. Don’t put it off. Make it a goal to complete the to-do emails by December 31.
3. File papers. Not all of us have every bill, invoice and paperwork in electronic format. It’s easier to file paperwork on an as-you-go basis rather than let them pile up. I have folders for bank statements, credit card statements, business contracts and printed pay stubs. If you receive any other paperwork on a regular basis, create a folder. You may need folders for items related to health benefits, stocks and retirement.
4. Update your resume and bio. It helps to update these on a regular basis as you take on more challenging projects or work with new clients. It’s easy to let these slip that when someone asks for a resume or bio, we scramble to provide an updated one. Do it now while you’re not rushed. It also helps to have a short, medium and long version of your bio. While you’re at it, review your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social media profiles to ensure they’re up to date.
5. Organize your workstation. Take a look at your work area and see if there are improvements you can make. You may already have a great office set up, but it never hurts to make sure it’s optimal.
6. Clean your computer(s). Cleaning includes both the inside and outside of your computer. Thursday gave some tips on how to clean the outside of your laptop and Simon addressed the cleaning the inside.
7. Take care of administrative tasks. The tasks depend on whether you have your own business or work for someone else. For those who do the invoicing, take a look at your accounts receivables to make sure all of your invoices have been paid and take care of those that have not. You may also need to collect 1099s and W-2 forms.
8. Review your address book. Consolidate your contacts, back them up and archive old contactd. Verify you have contact information that you need and put those business cards into your address book.
9. Review your social media strategy. Whether you blog, tweet or update your statuses in Facebook and LinkedIn, having a plan in place ensures you remember to provide value to others rather than focus on you. Your plan doesn’t have to be formal; just one that gives you direction to keep you on track. Also, think about how much time you spend in social media, which is more about return on relationships than direct ROI. This might be a good time to review Aliza’s 10 Golden Rules of Social Media.
10. Assess your marketing strategy. What’s working? What’s not working? How do you land new business or projects? You may need to up your marketing activities in one area and drop them in another.

Think about how great you’ll feel when you return to work after the New Year more organized and ready to take charge.

What are you doing to prepare for the New Year?

Photo credit: Jeff Hire

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Some Monsanto executives learned the value of safeguarding their data the hard way when they couldn’t access key information they needed during the chaos after 9/11. So in 2003 they founded Morgan Street Document Services to help individuals and businesses protect their important documents from disasters. Orggit was launched recently to bring this service to a wider consumer audience through a user-friendly interface.

Unlike storage and sync services such as Dropbox and Sugarsync that are just storage space for files, Orggit has a user interface that allows for organizing various types of information records.

After logging in, users are greeted by four tabs across the top of their Orggit home page:

Wallet: This section stores information about all the cards you might carry in your wallet. It is organized using tabs down the left size for various types of cards, and each tab’s contents appear in the main area of the screen when selected. Each card type’s fields are customized to hold standard data types for those cards, including customer service numbers. Images of the cards can even be added. A “wallet report” can be printed containing details of all of the stored cards to use as an offline back-up or for reference in filing a police report or canceling stolen cards. This section of Orggit is similar to a Palm app that I used to have that is now available for a variety of mobile phones called SplashID. However, SplashID syncs only between a desktop and mobile device with no cloud backup of data; that redundancy is a key feature of Orggit.

Medical: This section contains a service I’ve never seen offered by any other back-up or storage service: 24/7/365 ICE (in case of emergency) medical record forwarding. It allows a user to create and store a complete medical history for themselves, including scanned documents. This history can then be downloaded in a nicely formatted PDF form for sharing with healthcare providers. Orggit will also fax or email it 24/7 to healthcare providers that request it in an emergency if they provide Orggit the member ID number found on the ICE wallet card that is mailed to every Orggit member. The card provides instructions on how to call and retrieve the records, or report a lost wallet.

As someone with a complicated medical history involving several chronic conditions, I love the idea of healthcare providers being able to access a comprehensive healthcare record for me if I have a problem away from home. My one complaint about this section is that the date fields for items require complete MM/DD/YY date entries and it can be hard to be that specific about things that were a long time ago. It would be helpful to be able to enter an incomplete date, such as just the year, or just month/year. What I’d like to see added would be more fields for recording routine doctors’ visits, and events such as routine illnesses or symptoms. Perhaps a calendar or journal function in this section could serve for those purposes.

Accounts & Codes: Designed to store logins, this is the least robust of all the service’s sections. It keeps a single alphabetized list of your logins. Clicking on the item will take you to an entered URL but won’t log you in. For day-to-day password retrieval, this can’t compete with applications like 1Password for Mac or even Firefox’s built-in password manager. But it has some advantages those sorts of programs don’t, such as the cloud storage of the data and being able to make it visible to other family members in case of emergency.

Filing Cabinet: The filing cabinet is designed to store scanned copies of important documents, similar to Dropbox and other storage services. However, unlike Dropbox, it doesn’t sync files with edits in another location. This lack of file syncing to an offline source in Orggit’s filing cabinet is not as big a deal as it might seem. Most of the files that Orggit is intended to store are scans or PDF’s of static files such as legal documents that would require creation of a whole new file if they were changed. They also aren’t documents that are typically updated that often.

Using the filing cabinet is simple. There are buttons for its drawers across the top of the page. Six drawers are already named and come configured with pre-named folders to suggest contents for them. Users can add a seventh drawer or tailor the existing ones to meet their needs. Basically, the drawers and folders are just a user-friendly way of representing a file storage structure to users.

The iPhone app is a nice addition to the service but not a key component of it. It has the ability to trigger the faxing or mailing of medical reports from its emergency section. The iPhone app also gives you the ability to use your phone’s camera to take pictures of your ID cards rather than having to scan them or use your camera. The camera can also be used to update family members’ profile pictures. You can also create a custom home screen for your phone using one of your pictures that includes a banner with instructions for accessing the Orggit ICE service.

The app is very limited in function beyond those nice features, however. Information cannot be added or edited (besides adding the photos), only read. And there is no access at all to the filing cabinet.

Orggit has the capability of holding virtually the entire identity of a user if they use the service to its full potential. The site obviously requires a high level of security. So before I commit a large volume of my data to the site, I wanted to know what security measures are in place to protect my data — and me.

The Orggit’s representatives that I contacted say that the site uses the same standards of security as the National Security Agency to secure customers’ data. They have servers in multiple locations, and those servers are behind a firewall and use the highest-grade Extended Validation SSL Certificates from VeriSign. Orggit also says it encrypts all member passwords, security questions and phishing images with AES 256 bit encryption, “rendering brute force attacks unfeasible.” They also use the VeriSign Extended Validation green address bar to signify to users that they are connected to a legal web site.

Although at first glance Orggit may seem oriented towards personal use, it can have several important business applications. The wallet tab and the ICE service can provide extra security for road warriors. One of the filing cabinet drawers can be configured to hold work documents (an especially critical mission if you are self-employed and have documents like tax returns and articles of incorporation to protect).

Orggit costs $49.99 for an annual subscription. The subscription includes the company’s free iPhone app ; the addition of up to nine family members on the account; auto-reminder service for expiration dates of credit cards, drivers license and passport; 24/7/365 ICE medical records forwarding service; and 5GB of storage space. Added family members must have an email address and get their own “wallet,” medical and accounts/codes section; the filing cabinet is shared between all users. The primary member controls whether family members can see each other’s data or not, and whether they can see the shared file cabinet.

It does take time to enter all of your critical data into an application like Orggit. But in an emergency, having access to that data via Orggit will make the investment of that time seem like a tiny price to have paid.

Do you keep important documents safe with off-site backups?

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