essential apps

I'm all about making my life as efficient and organized as possible. Luckily, we live in an age where technology makes pretty much anything possible. There are thousands and thousands of new apps and tools that can simplify one's daily life. If you're like me and you read tons of blogs, keep in touch with friends via chat and social networking sites, and love to share photos and music with friends and family, then you might want to check out these apps that have become essential to my daily life:

Digsby

So I tend to think that I'm a lot more popular than I really am. I used to be obsessed with checking my email, Twitter and Facebook in anticipation of a million new emails and post directed towards me. Unfortunately, my hopes were often shattered and I wasted a lot of my precious time.

When I started my new job last September I was introduced to the wonderful world of Digsby. Digsby is essentially a monster buddy list that keeps track of your AIM account, G-Chat and Facebook chat all in one place. Additionally, you can also sync to your email, Twitter and Facebook accounts to get push notifications when you have new emails or activities directed towards you on social media sites. This way, instead of having to go to these individual sites to see if anyone has been in contact with you, Digsby brings the conversation directly to you. Digsby also offers easy access to live Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Digsby has really simplified my desktop space, as well as saved me the time from checking various sites so often. If you spend a lot of time chatting with friends and family online or if you find yourself becoming addicted to social media sites, this is definitely a must-have tool.

Unfortunately, Digsby isn't quite available for Macs just yet. Annoying, I know. You can sign up here to learn when it becomes available though.

Dropbox

Okay, if you don't know about Dropbox, then you probably won't believe what I'm about to say. Dropbox sounds way too good to be true, but it is. I promise!

With Dropbox, you download the app; set up folders with friends or family; drag and drop files (music, movie, photo, etc.) from your computer into the folder; your friends and family grab those files from the folder and save them to their computer. Easy peasy, and it works both ways; friends and family came add files for you as well. That may or may not have made much sense, but you can take the Dropbox tour for more clarification.

I'm a huge music fiend, so I've mostly used Dropbox to share new music with friends. Let me tell you, my music library has grown rapidly with this little tool. There is a limit on how much data can be saved in one folder, but it's pretty generous. Dropbox is just wonderful. I highly recommend it if you find that you're sharing a lot of files with others.

Evernote

I've turned into the type of couch potato that spends any free moments browsing the web. The amount of hours that I spend each week browsing online shops and blogs is absurd and it's only gotten worse over the years. In my defense, I've learned about some really fascinating things from this obsession. My one dilemma was that I always forgot where exactly I saw these interesting things. That's where Evernote came into play.

There are many different ways to use Evernote, but with Evernote, I've been able to set up folders based around themes like fashion, decorating, cooking, etc. In these folders, I store photos and links to things around the Internet that have caught my eye. That way, when I want to write a new blog post based off of something I've seen online or send a fantastic link to a friend, I know exactly where to look.

You have to be a pretty organized person to begin with if you want to get the most out of Evernote, but this tool really has become my digital filing cabinet. Plus, I no longer need to use of space on my desktop and I can access my folder anytime with my iPhone app.