I had a short list of applications across my Macs, iPhone, and iPad that I use every day to keep my work and personal projects on schedule and organized Unlike past years, my list has shrunk in size to some trusted favorites:

Todoist

Task lists run the professional and personal projects that sometimes dominate parts of my life. I’ve been through a lot of iOS and Mac to do lists in my time. Todoist checks all the boxes for me because I can sync tasks between my iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Over the years, I spent time using OmniFocus, Things, Outlook, and a few other apps.

Trello

There’ve been points in my career when I’ve been managing loads of smaller projects that stop and start — articles, blog posts, and smaller documents — so I came to Trello because it lets me create and manage workflow. I can also leave notes to myself as to why a project got blocked, or I had to stop working on it.

The other net benefit of Trello as a project management tool for technical writers is that programmers, engineers, and solution architects understand because it lets you manage a content project in much the same way they manage their software development projects.

DropBox Paper

After spending so much of my writing life with Microsoft Word, I came to DropBox Paper for personal writing projects (like this post) because a minimalist word processor gives me a blank canvas.

OneNote

I’m a longtime Evernote user, but I found myself using OneNote more often this past year. Whether it was keeping notes for my day job or using it to keep track of some personal project planning it home, OneNote knocked Evernote back to being just an archive for articles interviews and the other random bits and bytes I accumulate while researching articles and blog posts.

Honorable mentions

I want to say I’ve found a calendar application that I swear by, but I can only say that I’m OK with Fantastical as my calendar application. It beats the Google Calendar interface, but some of my favorite calendar applications died through acquisition or loss of startup funding.

The Alexa app on my iPhone and iPads got some attention this year as I spent more time pursuing my smart home hobby. I have high hopes for this app to climb my list of go-to apps in 2019.

What are your go-to applications this year?

Header image by Daniel Cañibano on Unsplash