I came across a post about a week or so ago by Rob at http://thelifedesignproject.com. Its an excellent collection of all the resources he’s found since starting his Lifestyle Design journey. The list includes books, blogs, and tools both functional and research based.

There are heaps tools way to many in my opinion to hit at once so I wanted to highlight a few that I like most and add in a few I use that he didn’t mention.

My Favourites:

Evernote: This tool is amazing. It allows you to manually enter notes from your PC, iPhone, Blackbery or Web Browser in voice, photo or text. It then syncs all your devices together and stores them on the web. You can search, tag, group and do a whole bunch of stuff. There is a plugin for Firefox so you can dump straight from web pages, great of off-line reading. It also has image scanning capabilities to scan text from photos of business cards or receipts. You get a free 40mb upload per month, which is loads if you mostly use text but can fill up quickly if uploading high-res images or voice.

The Google Suite: I’m not going to go through all the Google tools, but if your not using them, use a fool! Gmail, Docs, Analytics, Adwords, Calendar, Apps, Webmaster Tools, Reader, Picassa etc… I’m sure there are plenty of resources on how to make the most of these tools. They will save you loads of time and stress. Check em out.

The Four Hour Work Week: This book simply kicks ass.

Elance/oDesk: Outsourcing sites. Ebay’s for services. I haven’t tried oDesk, but I hear good things.

My Additions:

Dropbox: Dropbox is an application that creates a folder on your computer where you can save any kind of file. It then automatically syncs everything in that folder to the web, giving you a real-time backup of your files. You can access these from any web browser or from your iPhone. This app really gives me peace of mind and the great thing about it is once its installed, you don’t have to do anything! Its just like using your documents folder. plus you get 2 GB of storage for free!

Shopify: I currently run my online store using Shopify. Its a great site, really (relatively) simple to use and removes the most difficult and technical aspects (besides finding customers!) of running an online store. It has great support, loads of marking help, integration with many apps and tools such as Google Website Optimiser and Google Product Search.

LinkedIn: I talk about LinkedIn here and here. Its a great tool for personal branding, networking and marketing.

Amazon Kindle: This thing is awesome. Its an eBook reader. It allows you to store 1500 books and download new books from Amazon in over 100 countries. Bookmark, highlight and take notes, its a library in 6″. And its really easy to read. I don’t like reading books on a computer, but this is like a normal book. You can also read pdf’s and word docs on it. There is lots of hype around the iPad becoming a Kindle killer, but the iPad has 10 hours batter life and the Kindle has 7 days. Hard to compete if you want to use it to read books and not watch YouTube videos.

What are your favourite tools?