5 ways Twitter can streamline your life and enhance productivity

Increasingly, Twitter is becoming a funnel for performing various actions that you perform in life, but have to go to different avenues to perform them. Its like this catch-all that takes what you give it and as long as you have configured things correctly, knows what to do with it and automagically takes care of the action item. Here I list out a few such available services that help you do just that.

1. Todo: Two of the most popular todo services that bring together online/desktop/mobile experience well are Remember the Milk and Toodledo. I currently use Toodledo and love it. To add a todo, I only have to send a direct message to ‘Toodledo’ and can add anything to my tasks lists very quickly. It also supports simple syntax to specify other options like priority, folder and due date from within that one line direct message.

Example Tweet: ‘D Toodledo Respond to David’s VM #Today’

2. Calendar: Google Calendar is arguably one of the most popular calendars that people use. If you want to add an event, it can be quite a task to visit the site and add an event. I use TwitterCal to connect my Google calendar with Twitter. Once set up, you just send a direct message to ‘gcal’ and quickly add events to your calendar.

Example Tweet: ‘D gcal Meeting with paul tomorrow at 7pm’

3. Notes: Evernote is one of the best services available for this. If you are not familiar with it or have not tried it, you should. From Wikipedia: ‘Evernote is a collection of software and services that allows users to collect, sort, tag and annotate notes and other miscellaneous information.’. It brings together all these notes seamlessly with mobile apps and online access. Notes can be added by sending a direct message to ‘myEN’ Imagine being able to take a quick note of something by quickly sending a direct message to the service. Very efficient.

Example Tweet: ‘D myEN January phone bill confirmation number 34529812′

4. Movies: NetFlix is my service of choice along with many other people. So many times, a friend would recommended a movie to me and I either had to remember the name to add it later (which rarely happened) or lose that recommendation altogether. Once I got the iPhone, I tried to make it better by almost always keeping one of the browser windows open with Netflix and add the movie directly by searching for the movie name and adding it to my queue. That was until I discovered AddNetflix. The service lets you add a movie to your account by sending a direct message to it at ‘addnetflix’ so now, as long as I have a twitter client open, it only takes a few seconds to add a movie.

Example Tweet: ‘D addnetflix Avatar’

5. Share Links: If you are someone who likes to share links of interesting articles and pages with your network of people, Twitterfeed makes it simple for you. Earlier, I maintained a blog where most of my blog posts were nothing but the few interesting links I found during the day. If you use an RSS reader like Google reader or Feeddemon, you can use the ‘star’ or ‘share’ feature to create an RSS feed out of all the posts you mark. Twitterfeed lets you link your twitter account with this feed and periodically tweets these links on your behalf. So now, if I find something interesting, I just click ‘Share’ and the rest is taken care of by Twitterfeed.

Example Tweet: N/A.

Summary

The biggest reason why this helps me streamline my life is because of the abundance of Twitter clients available. I use Twitlet, Twitterbar and Tweetdeck on a regular basis. Essentially, at almost all times, a textbox for me to tweet something is readily available thus making it very quick and simple for me to perform the other tasks through the services mentioned above. If you have any comments/suggestions, I’d love to hear them.