The Weekly Review: How One Hour Can Save You A Week's Worth Of Hassle 
Take Your Ideas From Start To Finish With Wunderkit 
How To Use Springpad As Your New Personal Assistant 
Time Management For The Self-Employed 
How Turning My To-Dos Into A Story Solved My Procrastination Problem 
Five Best Meeting Minutes Services Ideas aren’t tasks, but for some reason, many of us manage our ideas alongside our to-do lists. Wunderkit, on the other hand, gives you a platform specifically for managing your ideas. It’s a great idea bank — or a place for all of your projects, goals and the things that come out of your brainstorming sessions that you catch yourself wishing you could remember later.
As you’re getting stuck into another week, you’re probably planning out your calendar and organising your to-dos. Chances are your list of tasks is pretty big, which is why the day planner manufacturer Day-Timer suggests cutting five tasks right now before your week starts getting out of control.
If you’re a fan of the Personal Kanban productivity method, you’re probably familiar with how helpful it can be to keep your focus strictly on the to-dos you have right in front of you, without the distractions of long-term projects or less important items on your list. KanbanFlow is a free web app that, as the name implies, fits right in, and even includes a built-in Pomodoro timer to help you stay on task.
As we noted last week, email is not the problem — we are. And it’s not just the productivity drain or the antisocial effects of constantly checking our phones and computers for new messages. There are psychological ramifications too. By constantly looking for new information and tasks from other people, we are degrading the importance of the things we want and need to do.
If you’re wedded to one platform, it’s a good bet you already have a tool that keeps your life synchronised and organised pretty well. For those of us who have to deal with multiple platforms, multiple computers and mobile devices with multiple operating systems, and work with people who use different ones than we do, there’s Fruux, a free service that keeps your to-dos, calendars and contacts in sync on almost any platform. Think of it like iCloud for the rest of us.
Few people actually love organising their calendars and projects — there’s nothing terribly exciting or sexy about most productivity tools once you actually sit down and start using them. The new Springpad is different, though. It’s a fantastic, easy-to-use web app that helps you organise your life, your ideas and your projects. Once you get started, it’s also a lot of fun to use. Unlike most tools of its ilk, Springpad thinks for you, working like a personal assistant to cut down on the time you spend on the less enjoyable aspects of organising information — meaning you’ll spend less time organising things and more time doing them.
If you’re self-employed and work from home, staying productive can be a huge challenge. When you’re home, it’s easy to stretch out a cup of coffee with a snack. And then that turns into a quick bite in front of the TV and next thing you know, the morning has disappeared.
iOS: Most to-do apps are full of things that we have to force ourselves to do. TaskCurrent is an iPhone and iPad app that turns your to-do list into a list of skills to learn, motivational tricks, productivity tips to work into your day-to-day life and more. So while the app models itself after a to-do list, it’s the kind you’ll actually want to use every day.
We all create stories to explain what happens in a day. A story is a tool to help us make sense of the world. But what about the future? What would happen if you turned your to-do list into a story as a rehearsal for the next day? That approach has helped me not just Get Things Done, but also boosted my memory so that I’ve been able to ditch complicated to-do lists and schedules for good.
Chrome: Streak is a new web service and Chrome extension that adds a ton of useful features to your Gmail account, including the ability to compose messages and schedule them to be sent at a later date, text expansion that works by menu or keyboard command, and the ability to manage your personal projects.
