5 Online Apps to Maximise Time, Money & Fun!

The digital age has brought us some incredible technological enhancements, but they also consume a lot of our already limited time. We are all emailing, calling, texting, tweeting, liking, sharing, pinning, instagramming, and snapchatting everything and everywhere. On the other hand, digital systems have introduced efficient tools for us to get a handle on our infinite amounts of documents, photos, articles, etc, and have the ability to make our lives a little easier.

With an endless array of tools out there to organise our lives, it is a matter of picking the right ones. We thought we’d help and have selected 5 intuitive ideas that could literally save you massive amounts of time and also encourage collaboration.

1. Using Software to Pool Ideas for Events with Friends & Family

 

 

Do you always feel rather uninspired when phoning up your friends to arrange a meetup? Why not

set-up a group board with your friends on Pinterest to start collecting and storing ideas for future activities? Whether you are planning a family trip or throwing a dinner party for your friends, Pinterest is a fun way to get all your ideas organised. The things you can do with this visual social network are only limited by your own imagination!

Pinterest allows users to post images on their own theme-specific pinboards, browse other users’ boards to get inspired and/or invite others to view their collections. Group boards provide an easy way to use Pinterest as a collaborative tool, as they allow more than one ‘pinner’ to pin to the same board. To add your friends, go to the board that you would like to share, click the ‘edit’ button and type in the names of all the people who you would like to add as contributors. 

2. A Personal Travel Assistant for a Carefree Journey 

  

Summer is just around the corner, which means it is time to get ready for the summer holidays. If you’re lucky, you’ve already made plans to go somewhere fun or exotic. The not so lucky ones haven’t had the time to figure it all out and have an agenda that still looks like a deserted island.

Do you wish you had a personal travel assistant who could whip up a nice getaway for you? Well, then you might want to consider using Tripit! From giving you driving directions to finding the perfect airplane seat, this free travel service provides you with everything you need to get where you’re going at your fingertips. Simply forward all your travel confirmation e-mails and Tripit will do all the heavy lifting for you. It will generate a coherent online itinerary and create lots of additional information such as a calendar, maps, weather forecasts and online check-in links. It also automatically updates new aspects of your journey and enables you to share your travel plans with friends and family or fellow travellers. Simply brilliant.

 

 3.     It’s Time to Organise and Achieve all those Goals of Yours

 

There are some things that individuals hope to accomplish over the course of their lives; however, it can be useless daydreaming about it without a concrete plan for execution. We all know the feeling: you seem to be crazy busy, but it feels like nothing really gets done. At least not the things you needed to get done. Do you also wonder how other people reach their goals? Let me introduce you to their secret weapon: Evernote.

Evernote is an easy-to-use app that allows you to store emails, notes, pictures, webpages, recordings and pretty much everything you can see or hear into a searchable database. Once it is captured, you can tag, annotate and categorise your notes to easily retrieve them later on. It also allows you to create notebooks with all your visions, goals and plans. To get started, create a notebook called ‘goals’, set a new note for each goal you want to achieve and list all the stepping stones that are needed to reach your goal by using checkboxes for each stone. This way, Evernote will help you remember and act upon all your ideas, projects and experiences across all the devices you use.

4.     Keep Your Career Moving Forwards ‘On the Go’

 

 

We all have a regular medical check-up and, ideally, go to the dentist every six months. Just as in many other aspects in our life, career planning is not a one-time activity; it also needs an evaluation once in a while to get the most out of your career opportunities.

As your career is a work in progress, so is your CV. When looking for a new opportunity, you have probably been told more than once to tailor your CV for each application. Fine tuning your information for each individual job ensures that everything that appears on your CV is interesting and relevant for the prospective employer and role. Also if you have a job, it is important to keep a record of your work accomplishments as it’s now very common for employers to search for new candidates with specialist skills using LinkedIn.

Does this all sound rather time consuming? Not with the right tools! For all tech savvies, The IT Job Board recently launched CV Anywhere, a great mobile service that allows you to create, edit and manage your CV wherever and whenever you want, on any device. Find your perfect job on www.theitjobboard.co.uk, import your CV from LinkedIn, select a template, and then keep your CV updated on the go.

5. Smarten your Finances by Tracking those Elusive Pennies

 

 

Does the idea of getting your financial life in order sound completely overwhelming? Don’t worry, you are definitely not alone. Luckily, there is one reliable tool to help you track every penny you spend: good old spread sheets. You can find some great templates to track your expenses, including those sneaky little £3 coffee purchases, and estimate your monthly income.

The next step is to go paperless. Many smart phones have applications that make it easy to scan documents using the integrated camera. By storing both your spread sheet and your documents in the cloud, it not only prevents it from loss or theft, it also makes it easy to synchronise all your information on all your devices and share them within your family.