Marcus Mattsson

E-Mail & Contacts

All my e-mail accounts (personal, work & school) forward to my main Gmail account, and I use Gmail’s web interface since no application support Gmail’s labels and filters very effectively, as far as I know. Gmail also makes it possible to set the sender of composed e-mails to external e-mail addresses, meaning that I can send e-mails from my student account from within Gmail’s web interface.

I strive to have no more than 20 e-mails in my inbox. To do this I use stars for important e-mails in the following fashion:

Red Star: Needs attention today or tomorrow.
Orange Star: Needs attention within a week.
Green Star: Needs attention within 1-6 months.
Yellow Star: Needs no attention until reply is received.

Furthermore I use filters and labels extensively, also based on colors:

Reddish Labels: School-related.
Greenish Labels: Work-related.
Blueish Labels: Receipts, invoices, etc.

My contacts are synched from Google to my iPhone, I am however thinking of switching this to iCloud when it becomes available.

To-dos and Project Management

For personal to-dos I use Flow. The interface is amazing and so are the features. The service syncs automatically with their iPhone application and it has a Mac application making it possible to always add to-dos with keyboard shortcuts. My use of it is quite simple, I have different lists depending on the category of the to-do, and I use the “flagged” feature to flag important to-dos such as pressing homework.

For project work I have mostly used Pivotal Tracker. Although it’s designed for software projects, I have also used it for other project-related tasks such as writing reports.

Calendar

I use Google Calendar for all my calendar needs. Within it I have several external calendars added such as upcoming tv shows, Facebook events, and school schedule.

Note-taking

For notes I use Simplenote, another service which automatically syncs up with an iPhone application. I used Evernote for a while but found it to be too cluttered for my needs.

Bookmarking

I use several services for bookmarking. I use Google Reader for my news reading, and within it I star news I want to read later. For websites I want to look at once or twice again I use Instapaper, and for sites I want saved permanently I use delicious.