I spent a lot of time looking for tools to make my life and workflow productive and efficient. There are not a lot of resources out there to find this info, and I was inspired by both TA McCann and The Setup Interviews. Here's my attempt at tracking the tools/services I use regularly:
Software
Dropbox – hands down my go-to tool for organizing and sharing media, information, and deliverables with our team and organizing my personal life across platforms (PC, Android, Mac, iOS).
Gmail – it’s ubiquitous, all of my close contacts are on gchat, It’s cross platform. It handles and routes all of my various email addresses.
Boomerang for Gmail – schedule emails to send at a certain time. Great for getting something in front of a busy partner during their morning email time even if you write it over the weekend.
LastPass – secure password manager for all platforms. $12/year and totally worth it. It took a little bit of time to set up and transition old, reused passwords with extra characters and random numbers tacked on the end, but it removes all security concerns for the moment.
FullContact – contact aggregator across devices, phones, everything with extra features too.
Grid Paper – Like real paper. Seriously. I track to-do lists at the weekly and daily scale and grid paper keeps these lists from getting lost on my desks and is great for sketching things out while ideas pop into my head at random times.
Github – It’s a great place to share snippets of code and full projects. As a grad student it was by far the easiest way to collaborate with other scientists on projects. Admittedly I don’t use it quite as much as I should.
Trello – great team organization, fun release notes with the updates, cute dog mascot. Turns out I’m not a digital task list person (yet).
Keynote/Pages/Numbers – great, beautiful apps with all the functionality of office. Unfortunately everyone needs things in .pptx or .docx format and the associated export formatting errors are maddening.
Technology
Huawei Google Nexus 6P - I gave into the Google machine and dropped Apple. It’s been amazing. Better camera, better reception, all contacts synced across devices. And it’s huge. Like inappropriately big.
Surface Pro 4 - Bigger, better, faster. Does work all day without a charge.
MacBook Pro 13” – bought for grad school, still chugging along. Haven’t had any major issues yet and appreciate the aluminum case keeping everything intact after dropping it >.< twice.
iPhone 5 – my very first smart phone (I stayed on the flip phone train a few stops too long) and I don’t know what to say about it. Battery life is terrible now.
Other tools my friends use
Check back later – they’re bad at responding...