New Year, New You: Awesome Organization Apps To Try

Have you vowed to get more organized in the New Year? These apps will help jump start your resolution! 

Do you like the new Netflix series "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo" as much as I do? I've long loved her book "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up" and I'm so excited to watch her in action. And her work serves as an excellent reminder to delete older, under-used apps, replace poor performing ones with better designed competitors, and use some new apps that will help you organize your life and keep it that way. Here's what has me excited this year!

How much time do you think you spend on Twitter every day? How about email, Pinterest, or online shopping? RescueTime will let you know - but are you ready for the results?! You might be surprised to see just how much time you spend browsing on Instagram. I know I was! RescueTime records everything you do online and how much time to spend doing it. It compiles the data neatly into different categories, like business, shopping, entertainment, news, utilities, and more so you can see at a glance how you split your online time and, if curious, you can see the website composition of each individual category. This is the perfect app for anyone who vows to be more focused on work or to spend less time checking email every day.

If digital clutter is driving you crazy and you’ve promised yourself that this is finally the year you’re going to get your inbox in order, you will love Unroll.me. It gives you easy control of all the newsletters, alert services, and notifications that clog your inbox. You can painlessly unsubscribe from emails you no longer want with a simple swipe and you can compile valuable but non-urgent updates into a daily digest called the Rollup.  And, of course, you can always just keep things as they are for your favourite websites. Chances are, you’ll be stunned by how many email newsletters you have signed up for over the years.

If you've ever needed a personal assistant, consider downloading 24me, a smart and automatic task handler that can do almost everything you'd want an assistant to do. It’s like a calendar scheduling apps that bundles multiple calendars and applications in one place. I love it because you can set it up to reflect your real life - like having it send you reminders about when you should leave for your meeting, taking current traffic conditions into account. You can even have it act as a personal concierge, ordering birthday gifts for friends and automatically paying your bills. Note: This is one app where there is a huge performance gap between the free and paid version.

Few work trends have been as big as the Pomodoro technique in the past year and now there’s an app that is based on its principles. Focus Booster is perfect for anyone who procrastinates or whose average work day looks overwhelming. It maintains your focus and has you prioritize your to-do list each day. You can set a schedule and a timer for work and rest periods, say 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest, repeating. This is perfect for anyone with multiple jobs, side hustles, or several commitments that are begging for attention at the same time.

For the hyper-organized, Sortly is your dream app. It lets you create a visual inventory of belongings and supplies. This app is perfect for anyone who buys more expensive items and wants to keep track of warranty info, for families who do a lot of travelling and want to have visual lists of what they need to pack for camping adventures, or people with hobbies that involve keeping a large assortment of small pieces like quilting or fly fishing. You photograph your belongings or scan applicable QR codes, sort them into lists and categories, and add in important information like purchase date, warranty info, and reminders for when the warranty expires. You can include notes for multi-purpose items and add little arrows to photos in case you want to highlight one specific item within in a group.  Marie Kondo would be proud!