Time is a non-renewable currency. It should be treated accordingly. Any tools that can save me time are worth exchanging other currencies for, like money. Don’t think of the money spent - think of the time bought. If you knew you had little time left on this planet, how much would you pay to buy back another day, week, month or year with your loved ones?

If there are two web apps that have made my life so much easier than before, saving me lots of time, they are Basecamp and, more recently, Highrise. Both of them are from the inspiring 37 Signals (inventors of Ruby on Rails). Basecamp is a project management tool and Highrise is a CRM tool. I could try to explain the benefits, but as they’re free to try, why not give them a go.

And - if you still haven’t read their book ‘Getting Real‘ about how to develop Web 2.0 apps, then you are missing out on a gem. Well worth the money and time (if you plan to develop web apps, that is, otherwise go read an interesting novel instead).

As I spend a great deal of my time writing very large documents, then I can’t speak highly enough about Scrivener, although you will need a Mac to run it! I have long ago dumped Word (and all MS apps), although I still need a copy on my Mac for ‘legacy’ work (i.e. so many people still use it). Apple’s Pages will open and export Word files, but can’t always handle the 1001 things that can be done inside a bloatware Word file.

The bindings in Scrivener are fantastic. They basically enable a whole bunch of documents to be handled in one session of the application (a project). This is like having lots of Word docs open, but being able to switch easily between them without multiple windows spoiling the vista (pun intended). Each document comes with a ‘notes’ panel, which I find invaluable for making those random jottings about what I’m writing about, but don’t want those jottings in the document itself. There’s also the brilliant cork board view, which enables each documents to be viewed as an index card displaying a synopsis. These can be moved around on the cork board, which is a great way to storyboard and play with ordering etc.

More recently, I have been involved in projects that require a variety of models in 3D. Here I have to recommend Google Sketch-Up as an incredible application for drawing in 3D ‘at the speed of thought.’ I love the app and so do my kids. It’s available for Mac and Windows and there are loads of models available that are shared via a web community.

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