My Favorite Digital Tools in 2014

Every month, I put together a newsletter about new digital media tools I’ve discovered. (Subscribe.) Here I’ve rounded up my favorites that I started using in 2014. They’ve enhanced my productivity, creativity, and digital-life sanity.

1. Zoom

Zoom is my go-to online meeting service. I use it to host and record roundtables (that later get published in Scratch), to pipe in guest lecturers for my UVA course—especially since it allows screen sharing—and to host virtual office hours for my online classes. I’ve found it nearly foolproof since participants can join on any device, including a phone, using video + audio, or audio only. Find out more about Zoom. You’ll find both free and paid plans, depending on your needs.

2. Canva

Even though I’m an expert user of InDesign and intermediate user of Photoshop, I love Canva to brainstorm ideas and put together quick visuals for social media. (See image at the top of this post!) This free service smartly recognizes that more and more of us need easy tools to design things that look halfway decent, and don’t have the time or resource to hire a professional. While Canva has serious limitations, for lightweight work, it’s perfect. (I can’t wait to see if Adobe comes up with a competing service.)

3. Evernote

I resisted using Evernote for years, but in 2014 I finally found its purpose in my workflow. I use it primarily for research notes, interviews, and web clippings when I’m writing longform pieces (or books), or researching and outlining a conference talk. I also use it as a “compost pile” of ideas. If you’re the kind of person who has a million stickies on your desktop, or multiple documents where you’re dumping notes, then take a serious look at Evernote.

4. CrashPlan

This is my continuous back-up system for my computers. It runs faithfully in the background, 24/7, and I don’t have to think about backing up, ever. The annual fee is worth it—check it out.

5. Scrivener

Similar to Evernote, I finally took the leap and started using Scrivener when I began assembling my book, Publishing 101. I will never write a book in Word again. Of course, the big drawback is that Scrivener is not at all intuitive, so you’ll have to carefully go through their free tutorial; you can also find online courses available to turn you into an expert user. I recommend you download and use the free trial version for 30 days as you decide if you’re OK with the learning curve.

Scrivener for Mac users
Scrivener for PC users

6. Asana

Asana has taken my project management ability to a whole new level—with Scratch, with my personal projects, and with clients. The most critical reason to use it? To get your project communication and facilitation out of your email inbox. (As someone once told me, “Email is where projects go to die.”) It’s fairly intuitive to set up, and ideal if you’re working on a team to accomplish deadline-oriented tasks or efficiently wrangle large projects with lots of moving parts.

Early Contenders for 2015

I just started using MightyBell, a service that allows you to create an online community, for the backend of my Social Media Bliss course. It has a beautiful interface, and—best of all—no learning curve for me or the students.
When I redesigned my site this month, PageBuilder (for WordPress) was critical to achieving the look I wanted. I would love to see the WordPress core system adopt some of its functionality.

Long-Time Favorites (pre-dating 2014)

Dropbox. I couldn’t function on a daily basis without this cloud-based storage of my work files, especially since I change machines so often and need to share files with clients.
Paprika . This is where all my recipes go. Paprika helps me meal plan during the week, generate shopping lists, and categorize recipes according to my own criteria.

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