This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
Small business owners may have more of a need than most to be able to access their chosen suite of productivity tools from more than one computer or platform. As a business or startup owner you may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go.
Choosing primarily online tools for your productivity workflow is a great way to address the issue of source agnostic accessibility. It’s also a convenient method to ensure you have a backup of your important day-to-day items and files in case a particular computer or device fails. One other not insignificant factor in selecting cloud-based tools to keep you and your business on track is cost: the online equivalents of once desktop-bound applications are often much cheaper in both raw cost and maintenance cost, as tool upgrades usually happen behind the scenes and don’t require an in-house IT staff to keep up and running.
With the tools on this list, you should be able to check in on your current workflow stack regardless of which machine you happen to be in front of, what operating system it uses, and what browser it’s running. Plus, if you have a smartphone as your trusty mobile companion, chances are you’ll be able to access your tools from there as well. Check out our previous guide to mobile productivity tools as a logical companion to this piece, and consider your phone platform and setup and how well it may integrate with particular tools as you build out your productivity arsenal.
To-do Lists
One of the favorite and often-mentioned entrants in the to-do list category among productivity geeks isRemember the Milk
Far from being the only game in town, however, Remember the Milk has a number of online to-do list peers worth checking out. Toodledo
If your to-do tastes run on the simpler and less cluttered side of the spectrum, there are several options worth looking into. TeuxDeux bills itself as a “simple, designy, free, browser-based to-do app” and embraces a minimalist interface accordingly. Task.fm is another interesting option in the minimalist category, with a source agnostic and natural language approach to getting items in and back out to you at just the right time with various reminder options. Ta-da List is a product from 37signals, makers of other popular web project management tools like Basecamp
Note-Taking
Two other good choices for cloud-based notebooks that integrate well with their full-featured office suite counterparts are Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook. Both feature a typical web-based WYSIWYG note-taking environment as well as sharing and collaboration options for your notes and documents that need to be socialized. If you already routinely use either Google Docs
A couple of online note-taking options based on wiki technology include Springnote and Luminotes. They feature easy methods of linking pages and concepts together, and if you’re already familiar with the wiki concept and looking for a lightweight notebook that uses similar concepts you may want to check out these two. Springnote also promotes collaboration via notebook sharing as well.
Information and News Gathering
When it comes to staying on top of developments in your industry and trends that might affect your business, it can seem daunting to make sure what’s most important crosses your desk and your eyeballs. Several related categories of online tools can help sift through the noise and help you pull out the signal, plus safely store information and concepts you may need to retrieve later.
In an earlier article we covered how to choose a news reader for keeping tabs on your industry, and by far the most popular web-based offering in that category is Google Reader
A couple of tools can help with the latter problem of specifically storing an article and helping you remember to read it later, perhaps when other duties and tasks have quieted down and you find yourself with some spare moments to catch up on the things you knew you should make time to read at some point. BothInstapaper
For longer-term storage of important articles, social bookmarking tools come in handy for preventing your bookmarks from being “trapped” in a single browser on a single machine. One of the original pioneering web services, delicious.com, is still flourishing (and now owned by Yahoo). Using a browser bookmarklet you can send articles and web pages you want to refer back to later to your delicious account, plus a short personal note and topic tags. The net effect of collecting many users’ individual bookmarks also creates a valuable discovery engine that can turn you on to even more relevant material in your business’s industry or niche. Two other options worth checking out include Diigo
Going Further
The above are just a few of the productivity categories in which online tools can help your current workflow stack stay accessible from almost anywhere. Other web-based tools can help with mobile office needs from calendaring to document collaboration, file-sharing to collaborative presentations, from start pages to contact management and more. Other tools, like Jott Assistant, are out there to help you tie those tools together and access them via other applications you use regularly.
It’s helpful to keep a flexible and open attitude towards your workflow and the tools you use, and occasionally take stock of what’s working, what’s not working as well as it should, and areas where your productivity seems to suffer. If you’re willing to spend even a modest amount of time being periodically adventurous with new tools, you could open workflow channels you weren’t even aware were blocked, and even infuse your day-to-day and your business with new ideas and new energy.
More business resources from Mashable:
- HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
- HOW TO: Use a Start Page to Stay Organized
- The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration
- 5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest
- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
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