Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

[juliend2]

I can't live without Freshbooks. Recently i subscribed to BaseCamp (and loving it so far).

What are Your web apps that you can't live without that boost your creativity/productivity?

Thanks in advance.

[edw519]

Hacker News.

This is not a joke. I realize that hn is not a web app in the classic sense, but I get far more value from hn than any webapp. Let me explain...

I learned long ago that increasing productivity was like "striking out the pitcher". You got small, easily measured, and much appreciated improvements. But the real improvements come in major shifts in thinking and processing.

I once had a choice of 2 projects to work on, each about the same amount of work for me. One would save 8 people 10 minutes per day. The other would change an entire business process, potentially saving millions of dollars. Believe it or not, I chose the first because I didn't understand the ramifications. Until my first mentor stopped me and pointed all this out (That's how he became my mentor.)

I have looked at several web apps and desktop tools but eventually rejected them all (except for Textpad which rocks). I'm just not interested in saving a few minutes here and there. (I also realize that there may be many web apps that go beyond simple productivity improvements.)

Hacker news, OTOH, changes the way I think all the time. Once or twice a month, I come across something that improves my work by magnitudes, not percentages.

I also get my creative juices flowing simply by participating. It's hard to place a value on that.

[mixmax]

This is so true, if I could upmod you again I would.

Micromanaging your productivity, trying to find out if you use a few minutes too much on facebook, or whether you could save some time having only one cup of coffee instead of two during a workday will only help your bad conscience. Not your actual productivity. The real booster comes from having a good overview, experience, knowledge and knowing what to work on. Hacker News is great for this.

I remember reading an article (posted here of course) about the guy that programmed Chrome's V8 engine. He works on a farm in the countryside, he only works 8 hours a day and goes home at 5 o clock. No long hours, and no micromanaging of time. I don't think anyone questions his productivity.

I often have whole days where all I do is think. This is time well spent because once I get coding I know exactly what to do, and have thought out many of the problems that I will eventually run in to. The more experience, overview and broad knowledge you have the better you are able to do this.

[huherto]

  "...But the real improvements come in major shifts in thinking and processing."

Or as Alan Kay put it "Perspective is worth 80 IQ points." The more I think about it the more I agree.

[ryanvm]

Oh brother - what a circle jerk

[Hexstream]

I'll go for HN too, but for another reason: it points me to the good stuff (among them, incidentally, webapps that increase my productivity).

Things I found via HN because it's been mentionned a few times as something great that I now use:

github.com (git repo hosting), slicehost.com (VPS), namecheap.com (registrar), lighthouseapp.com (issue tracking).

Things I'm looking into: aws.amazon.com (cloud stuff), freshbooks.com (invoicing).

And certainly other stuff I'm forgetting...

[crocowhile]

I am new to this place so I am not sure I know what you are talking about. Is it about motivation? Reading about successful stories makes you less procrastinating or what?

[9oliYQjP]

What's interesting here is that a lot of the commenters -- myself included -- are blurring the definition of what a web app is. I wonder why that is? I don't have a point other than to ask that question, because my gut tells me it would be an interesting thing to investigate.

[racerrick]

I had the same initial reaction. Then I thought "well it's not an application".

[GavinB]

Dropbox. I don't have to worry about backing up files, and I know if I screw things up I can revert to old versions. Not to mention, sharing files is as easy as dropping them into a folder.

I've been using BackPack for to-do lists, but it doesn't have the depth of features I need. Can anyone recommend a to-do list app with good nesting functionality?

[blurry]

If you have gmail, you can add Google Labs Tasks. Nesting, one-click add from email, etc.

[embeddedradical]

I've been using VitaList, and the best part is that they have an API (JSON or XML). I made a small app that fills in the one thing Vitalist doesn't have, auto scheduling. I know there's calendars, but I like for some things to just show up in my todo at certain times of a month, or once every few months, or every other week and putting 'Do Laundry' on every friday in my calendar is no good. Calendars don't auto roll tasks onward too, and I might not do my laundry on Friday, but by fridays its time to do that in the upcoming few days, so a rolling todo is better. VitaList is iPhone friendly as well, so I get my todo to go.

Once I thought they had lost my data. Turns out if you change your password and log back in with your old password, you get some weird old data from I don't know when -- this resulted in my recreating about 75% of VitaList on a Friday, and then realized I had not lost my data and stopped. I'm keeping that code around, just in case they start charging for the API or something... :).

edit: one more thing, i find the view by context feature really handy - my contexts are "home" "work" "errands" - and being able to quickly group by that (or by project) is nice.

[youngian]

I've been using Tracks (http://getontracks.org/) now for quite a while and am pretty happy with it. The downside is that you have to host it yourself or pay a small fee for a hosted version. But it's pretty powerful, implements the general GTD stuff without being slavish, and has some nice new features like recurring tasks and a iCal link. Not sure what your needs are for nesting exactly - most to-do apps allow categories/lists/projects, but most don't let you do true hierarchies.

[lamnk]

Nothing beats Rememberthemilk. Its UI is very well designed and has integration for many services/devices.

My only complaint is pro version doesn't offer much except syncing.

[greengirl512]

Doris lets you organize your tasks into groups, and it has some cool features like email integration: http://beta.dorisapp.com/en/

[Tagith]

For todo lists, I've been very happy with Toodledo (http://www.toodledo.com/). The free version suits me just fine, and I use it in combination with the free webapp for the iPhone. Unfortunately, the iPhone native app isn't free... Good luck!

[xsc]

Agreed. Using Dropbox and batch files to automate backups saves me a bunch of time.

[codemechanic]

Try Tonido Workspace. It has horizontal information schema and nesting feature u are looking for.

[9oliYQjP]

I'm going to adopt a liberal definition of web app here. The only web app that appears to increase my productivity is Twitter. But I use a desktop client to access the service. I use it for live-searching of programming problems I need to solve. Why is this so funny? Because I didn't comprehend Twitter at all, so much so that I originally joined only to leave my account languishing for months before actually beginning to use it.

I tried Basecamp and it just got in the way of things. When your app is so simple that it can be replicated by email, a calendar, and some shared disk space, don't be surprised when clients refuse to use Basecamp and "degenerate" to using email, a calendar, and some shared disk space. At least, that's been my experience, so I cancelled my account.

Most of the other web apps are pure fluff and/or not productivity enhancers. Freshbooks et all appear to be exceptions to this rule. Online accounting web apps are so much better than their desktop counterparts. If I had a nickel for every time somebody has asked me about an Intuit software problem they're having, I'd be rich.

[prpon]

I'd be interested in knowing how twitter increased your productivity. For me twitter is a great tool for networking, increasing visibility for your product/project.

I am yet to see any real networking benefits myself, I find having to put up with 'I am running now', 'I am eating a burrito' more than anything of significance from people I would like to network.

[rjurney]

Thanks for this link: http://www.freshbooks.com

This is really something I can use.

[thorax]

Assembla

Google (if that counts)

Featurelist.org (our own site) -- specifically the user feedback widgets that dump all the feedback from all of our different sites into a handy place (per-project) so I can respond/escalate/investigate/etc.

Google Apps / GMail

Defensio (for avoiding having to manually inspect spam comments on our apps)

__ These aren't in the "can't live without category", but still quite helpful:

Feedback Army (for quick usability/sanity checking)

Paypal

Jing (both a tool and a web service)

Amazon S3/EC2 (once you get over the initial hurdles, it pays back in productivity)

Authsmtp (is that a web app?)

StackOverflow

bug.gd (another of our sites, in the process of renaming to ErrorHelp.com) -- since I log every error/solution I ever run into, often I run into my own errors again later and the solution is waiting for me even if I don't remember how I solved it before. Often enough someone else solved an error I had, too.

[santacruz]

Skype has screen sharing from now ( download beta)

[teej]

Rescue Time. It's hard to cheat, it "just works", and it's dangerously good at picking out my unproductive spurts.

[Herring]

Anyone else find that it needs a lot of micromanaging?

[rjurney]

Thanks, signed up immediately. Am over-stretched and want to see where I can improve my time use.

[rjurney]

EC2. I run an XL instance and do any actual program execution on it while I code.

How often are you waiting on your computer? How much is your time worth, compared to $0.80 an hour?

[xsc]

Google Calendar.

Saves me from calling my fiancée at work to see what we have going on.

[Mintz]

I can't even remember how I managed my life before Google Calendar. Texting reminders to myself, settings tasks that need to be checked off, having a simple interface to see how my week/month is laid out... it's a lifesaver.

[madmotive]

This changed my life: http://freeagentcentral.com

Biggest benefits if you are UK based. Blew Freshbooks out of the water from my perspective.

[cousin_it]

Ask the commenters in this thread: What webapps decrease your productivity? Preferably those we haven't yet heard of? I imagine the answers could turn out much more interesting :-)

[rokhayakebe]

Youtube. I have to type in the track I am searching for. I would like some sort of Voxli hack for Youtube that will allow speech input (Hold Y + Say the name of the video you are looking for/or say Repeat).

[IsaacL]

StumbleUpon. Faecbook, as well, but not so much. There's not as much to do on there. StumbleUpon is a potentially infinite time sink.

In fact, I'd say Google Reader has increased my productivity, since once I've skimmed the days articles from Slashdot/TechCrunch/etc, I crack on with some work, and I'm not as tempted to use SU.

[mrduncan]

I'd like to pose a follow-up question to that also (maybe we should just start a new thread) - Why do they decrease your productivity?

[iron_ball]

Hacker News.

[skmurphy]

Skype, especially combining text chat with voice for telcons

Central Desktop for developing/managing documents and meeting agendas, minutes, specs.

Webex Office for calendar & contacts

123SignUp for registration management

Spellr.us for spell checking blogs/websites

iContact for e-mail newsletters

There is also a great list for startups at http://startuptools.pbworks.com/

[jasonlbaptiste]

I started using Evernote. Few reasons I like it and continue to use it:

* Can capture whiteboards and make data searchable. Was very useful after brainstorming this weekend. * Has multiple options for using: Web, Cocoa App, iPhone * Easy to use for simple things such as todo lists, jotting notes, voice recordings,etc.

[veritgo]

I've also been using it to compile technical notes. The iPhone client is pretty slick too. Comes in handy when at the command line of a server without internet access in the datacenter and you need to remember the format of some config file.

[tremendo]

Of the many to-do apps I've tried, the one I actually use is UnTodos.com, with the somewhat loose categorization of tasks into "Today", "Soon" and "Whenever", and easily moving tasks about, it's one that I haven't given up on (vs. ta-da, rememberthemilk, etc.)

And I also find PivotalTracker.com really usable. At first the terminology (story, icebox...) was a little uncomfortable for me, but I keep coming back to it to handle projects, along with co-workers.

[greengirl512]

Remember the Milk...If something's not on my Remember the Milk to-do-list, it often does not get done. Also, Less Accounting-it's similar to Freshbooks, but I found it first. I'm not sure which is better, but I'm too lazy to switch at this point. And of course, Google, Gmail and associated apps. ReQall is another handy scheduling/reminder service. If they made it easier to organize tasks with tags and to add time estimates for each task, I might switch over from RTM.

Incidentally, the website I write for is a great place to discover new web apps. We try them out and review them for you, so you can decide if they'll be helpful to you or not: http://www.usefultools.com/

[jcapote]

Our shop runs effortlessly thanks to a combination of google apps, freshbooks, github, basecamp, and heroku

[jbrooks]

We too use Basecamp for our project management.

Also, I tried using Freshbooks for invoicing, but it's restrictions with multiple currencies made me to look out for an alternative solution.

Recently, I found CurdBee for invoicing which turned out really productive to me. It allows managing unlimited clients with multiple currencies seamlessly. Also, their UIs are so intuitive making the whole process very simple. If you are budget conscious like me and also want to get your work done you should try CurdBee.

[MonkeyMachine]

I've been recently trying out apps to help better synchronize multiple 2 man (developer/artist) teams for casual game development, and this is what we've found so far. (All of these are free, we're not yet big enough to need heavyweight features that are worth paying for, but when the time comes, I'll happily cough up the cash for good 'robust' tools)

I am checking out some of the other suggestions for possible 'upgrades' :)

- Google Docs - for Design Documents where we can both edit/view and see modification histories.

- Toggl - for off the cuff task based time tracking, a bit finicky, and won't let you view details of tasks from other team members, but it's dead simple to use so that's a big plus.

- Subversion - This doesn't count as a web app, it's a lightweight install on a machine in my home office, but it's a necessity for any coding I do, and crucial for keeping the team synchronized.

- Skype - for remote brainstorming and quick Q&As when a face to face meetup isn't possible.

- Unyte - free Skype plugin for screen sharing. Beats the hell out of having to say 'now click Window menu, then library, then go here, etc...

- Basecamp - not often used anymore, but did a decent job of task planning, scheduling and note making... something about it felt a few degrees off, can't put my finger on what though. Is probably a good fit for most people.

[zaidf]

Gmail. When its ajax is not acting up.

[kirubakaran]

http://smacklet.com/

Wrote it for myself. 'Productivity through consciousness'.

[Raphael]

The under-construction pages are really annoying.

[greengirl512]

cool idea! I'm going to try it out!

[carbon8]

Redmine. It's not perfect, but it resolves all of the shortcomings (IMHO, of course) in the other major project management / issue tracking apps.

[nuclear_eclipse]

As a developer of MantisBT, assuming that you've looked at it, mind giving me a summary of what Redmine has that MantisBT lacks?

[adrianwaj]

Not an app, but buy a larger screen, or add a second if you don't. Keep them at head level.