My Three Favorite New Productivity Tools

It is rare that I ever write about technological solutions here, but there are three tools that I am using that are absolutely worth your time.

Sanebox (affiliate link): I still have an enormous problem with my email. Email literally pours into my account. At some point, someone placed a curse on me and my inbox resulting in two emails appearing in for every email I archive or delete. I have prayed for help, but no mercy has yet been granted.

Sanebox helps. It reviews your email to decide what’s important enough to be in your inbox, and then it sorts the rest into a folders (or labels) called @sanelater (which means you don’t need to see it right now), @sanebulk (spam and bacn), @sanenews (for newsletters), @sanenextweek (won’t pop up in your inbox until next Monday), @sanetomorrow, and @saneremindme (you tell it when you want to see the email again). You train Sanebox by dragging things into the folders where the belong, but it gets things mostly right without you doing anything.

My favorite Sanebox folder is @saneblackhole. You drag the email into that folder, and you never see an email from that sender again.

Evercontact: All of those emails come from contacts. Evercontact looks at the email, copies all of the contact information, and automatically adds the contacts to my Gmail accounts.

I don’t want to have to add contacts to my contact database by hand. The value that I create is not as a data entry clerk, but it is all about relationships. This is a drop dead easy decision if you want to automate keeping your contact records updated at all times.

Here’s the affiliate link.

Contactually: I didn’t get it. Then I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to have to drag my clients into buckets. So I left Contactually. Then I came back. Then I left. Then I came back and spent enough time to set up my primary contact relationship categories (called buckets in Contactually).

Contactually allows you to set reminders as to how often you need to communicate with different categories of relationships. I started with my little family (the big “why” in everything I do), then extended family, then friends, then acquaintances, and then clients and prospects. I sorted clients and prospects into some other buckets based on some relationship criteria (but that’s double top secret stuff).

Every morning Contactually sends me a note as to the ten communications I need to make to deepen my relationships. Then it gives you a score (I have an A+). You can send emails from within Contactually, and you can log your communication there or on your mobile phone.

Here is an affiliate link for Contactually. I highly recommend it!