The mobile app revolution has put personal assistants in our pockets. And while there are thousands of apps that focus on trying to simplify things, many of them end up taking up more of your time than the task itself. The below apps are my personal favorites and are the best in the field for their specific categories.
1.) Evernote This is the last organizer that you will ever need. You can keep all of your notes in one place and they can be be packed with pictures, web clippings and audio files. It organizes all of your multimedia and then syncs the data across all of your devices. There is a powerful search tool within the app to help you find specific notes as well as words within notes that you have created.
2.) Flipboard This is still the prettiest app in the entire app store. It was designed by the team who built the first iPhone and this is evident by how seamlessly the app functions. Flipboard is your personalized digital magazine that is populated with your social network data as well as any relevant publications that you like to read. Personalize it by filling it with the newspapers, blogs and magazines that you love and the app will push relevant stories to you. It is a single place to view all of the stories, feeds and photos that are important to you.
3.) Mint Mint is the one stop shop for all of your finances. It aggregates your banking accounts and investment accounts as well as any credit card and loan data that you may have. It provides a snapshot of all of your finances and gives you real time balances. Mint also provides you with budgeting tools and analytics so that you can see if you’re spending too much money on late night tacos or are not saving as much as you should be.
4.) Hipmunk Booking trips can be a painful process. And while I still do not think that there is a perfect app for searching and booking travel plans, Hipmunk is the best that I have found. It has a simple, sleek design and it searches multiple travel sites and only provides you with the output data and best available flights. Hipmunk also has a proprietary “Agony” metric that they use to filter flights which combines price, flight duration and number of stops.
5.) Pocket Pocket lets you bookmark webpages, articles and videos to view at a later time. I used to constantly email myself links to articles that I wanted to read but did not have time to read at that specific moment. Pocket is the solution to that problem and it syncs all of the content across all of your devices.
6.) Checkmark This is a location based reminder application that works better than Apple’s existing reminder function. You can set specific location and time reminders so that when you are walking past your dry cleaner it alerts you to grab your clothes. Or you can set an alert to go off 15 minutes after you arrive home. The app is $4.99 and worth every bit of that.
7.) Buffer – Buffer allows you to enter your social media updates into a queue to be released at specified times. If you have great content that you want to share on Twitter or Linkedin but you want to share it at different time intervals, Buffer lets you manage this process and edit your updates as you wish.
Coffee & Closers 
Love the short and concise format of your list. Thanks for providing good ideas.
I really like checkmark it is a great substitute for apple’s default app. I also think you should check out Documents and Calendars+(if you use google calendar) both by “Readdle”. They are both well designed and super helpful.
Thanks Brendan! Looking forward to checking those out.
Pocket sounds like an awesome app. I constantly email myself links, videos all day long. Knew there was an app for something like that, but never looked. Thanks for the tip!
Pocket is great! Check it out and let me know what you think! Thanks for the note.