I’m one of those people who’s always on the lookout for good web apps. From Basecamp to Campaign Monitor, I’m always looking for a better way to get things done.

Yesterday, I followed a very helpful link from 43 Folders. It’s a web app called Sandy, an automated online personal assistant. Seeing as how it’s a free service, I signed up immediately. In the process, I also discovered Jott, another free service that allows you to call a 1-800 number where you can record messages and reminders to yourself. The really cool thing is Jott and Sandy interact with each other. So if you need to send something to Sandy, you can call Jott to do it. There’s also another service called Remember the Milk which is along the same lines as the Sandy app, but set up similarly to the David Allen method of Getting Things Done.

So far I’ve been very impressed with all of these services. I’m still trying to determine which service (either Sandy or Milk) work for me. I should be able to give a better overview in a week.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a really great web app to help you stay organized, I highly recommend trying any of the services I mentioned above. I can already tell you they’re innovative and really well done.

I received an email today from 37Signals announcing the new Backpack features. A few of the things they listed are:

• Movability! (Is that a word? You can now move anything anywhere on the page. This is definitely a plus. I hated the fact that lists were only at the top and notes were only at the bottom. But now you have the freedom to move things wherever you want within the boundaries of the page. Yay!
• Drag ‘n Drop Items Between Pages. Yes, now you have the ability to move information between pages. I’m glad they integrated this feature. Imagine stopping in the middle of writing this really long note only to realize you just started writing it on the wrong page. Oops!
• Search! I don’t even think I have to express what a great improvement it is for them to add this feature.
• Page Dividers. Another level of organization.

They’ve added some other minor features such as new toolbars and multiple photo galleries. Since learning about some of these new upgrades, I’ve seriously considered reactivating my subscription. It’s only contender in my book is iGoogle. While Backpack works on my mobile (somewhat), iGoogle is offered at the right price (which is free!). Decisions decisions…

Off and on, I’ve spent the last 3 months trying to tame my inbox. Prior to this “getting organized” movement, I’m in right now, I was letting my inbox act as a holding cell for everything. When I started, I had somewhere around 3,000+ emails in my inbox, but now I’ve whittled it down to…

2,435 emails in my inbox!

Which isn’t too bad considering I really only spend about 10 minutes a week on this particular project, if any at all. Let’s see if I can get it down to 2,000 by the end of the month.

One of the things I have to do as part of my job is to create these behemoth reports for clients about their website. Quite frankly, I enjoy this part of my job about as much as I would enjoy a simultaneous root canal and lobotomy. They’re that painful. And I’m not ashamed to write about how much I hate those reports because everyone at work already knows how deep my river of hatred runs for these things.

Today, however, I think my hate for them may have been mitigated by a simple but ingenious invention by Avery.

One of the things I have to do with this report is create tabbed dividers. Because it’s still kinda in its prototype stage, I’m having to do a lot of this by hand until we can solidify the actual format. Before I used to have to print a sheet of labels and apply them to each divider by hand.

Honestly, I would probably waste about 1-2 hours applying and reapplying labels so that they’re perfectly straight.

But now? Those guys have completely re-engineered the whole label applying process so that you can label ALL the tabs at once. AND you can label the reverse side too! You can view it here. And you know how long it took me?

15 minutes!

Thank you, Avery label company, for making my life (and the world) better.

In an attempt to streamline my life, I’ve subscribed to a lot of helpful resources on decluttering an getting things done. There was a fantastic post at Unclutterer.com about getting rid of books you don’t need anymore. It’s well worth a read: here’s the link.

In the comments section, there’s a link to Paperbackswap.com which is a club you can join where you can swap books with other people. This is even better because you can get new books without having to grow your collection! Well worth a visit if you’re a book hoarder like me!