If you're suffering from digital overload, these four apps can organize your entire life—and they're all free!
To Pay The Bills
If you prefer not to use auto pay,
Mint Bills, a sister app of the popular budgeting program Mint, makes it nearly impossible to miss a payment. The app syncs with the accounts you pay each month, from the electric bill to Amex, then sends you pop-up reminders of upcoming due dates. All it takes is a few clicks to pay.
To Keep Track of Appointments
Sunrise Calendar merges your online schedules—from Outlook and Google, for instance—and pulls info from social accounts (like Facebook birthdays and events). Plus, when you input the name of the person you're meeting for a business lunch, the app will connect to her LinkedIn profile, so you can do a quick memory refresh en route.
To Prioritize Your To-Do List
When an app designer's wife couldn't find a list-making tool she liked, he created one for her. The result:
Jamie's To Do (which happens to be a favorite of
O's organizing expert Peter Walsh). It has a simple, no-frills layout that organizes errands by type (like work and home) and color-codes reminders by due date, so you can immediately see what needs to get done first.
To Do Routine Tech Tasks
Using an "if this, then that" model,
IFTTT lets you create formulas that automate certain online chores based on your actions. Example: If I take a photo using Instagram, then IFTTT will back up the image to Dropbox. If I add a new contact to my address book, then IFTTT will save the information to a Google doc. You can invent combinations across tons of apps, saving yourself hours of work.
