The productivity problem

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Kevin Sonney

As is so often the case, I’ve let myself get behind on all of the tasks and projects I need to keep up with. Between work, hobbies, volunteering, &tc it’ REALLY easy to do. Once upon a time, I used the Franklin Planner system, which was pretty awesome. With the advent of the smartphone, though, the need to carry around a paper binder full of calendars and todo lists and project organization seemed silly.

And for a while it was AWESOME. I could put most of what I need into things like OmniFocus, Evernote and Remember the Milk. All these great tools centered around GTD.

But times change, and tools change, and I find myself in a bind with the tooling. I have something like 11 streams of incoming tasks/information, each it’s own “silo” :

Not Work
– GMail
– Google Calendar
– Evernote
– Github
– Trello
– Remember the Milk

Work
– Exchange Mail
– Exchange Calendar
– Jira
– Salesforce
– Confluence
– Sharepoint

And those are the ones I remember of the top of my head. Now, short moving BACK to a paper system just to centralize everything, is there a tool out there that can/does integrate ALL these input streams and will help me organize them all? Some basic requirements :

OS Support :
– Mac (both home & work)
– Linux (home mostly)
– Android
– iOS
Integrations :
– Google/iCal
– Exchange
– Bonus for any of the other listed streams above

Price : Reasonable. Free and OSS preferred

Am I out of my mind in thinking that somewhere there is a tool that can do all that? Or am I going back to the dark ages and going back to killing trees (i.e. paper)?

About Kevin Sonney

Kevin Sonney - who, contrary to popular opinion was NOT raised by wolves - grew up in central North Carolina. He fell into the technology field by accident in 1991, when he gave up the wild and crazy lifestyle of an on-air AM radio DJ to become a mundane technical support monkey. The technology industry has never really recovered from this. Kevin has worked for such names as IBM, Red Hat, webslingerZ, and Lulu Technologies (we won't mention the ones that didn't survive the experience). He currently works as a Linux Administrator for Apptio. In his spare time he rescues stray animals and plays video games with his two sons. His wife, we're sad to say, helps him get past the really hard bits. Kevin is still not very mundane, he just got better at hiding it.
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One Response to The productivity problem

  1. Joseph Tate says:
    March 2, 2015 at 12:11 pm

    I haven’t been able to work with it much, but have you looked at the IFTTT.com stuff? It’s supposed to be able to take all kinds of things and mash them up.

    Other than that, I’ve moved a lot of my todo lists and evernote type notes/reminders to Google Keep. GitHub has a bunch of nice integration stuff. You just have to enable them for your repositories (one at a time unfortunately).

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