Here is a quick list of some of the main tools I use:
- Laptop: MacBook Pro 15″ [I have the version prior to the one found in this link]
- Email: Mac Mail [I bring my Gmail and work mail into here]
- Calendar: iCal
- Contacts: Mac Address Book
- Task Management: OmniFocus
- Capture tool 1: Moleskine journal
- Capture tool 2: Jott for iPhone
- Mobile device: iPhone
- Web browser: Firefox
- Feed reader: NetNewsWire
- Keeping up with Twitter: Tweetdeck
- Twitter on my iPhone: Tweetie and sometimes Twitfire
- Office tools: Microsoft Office for Mac [but considering a switch to iWork at some point]; also use Google Docs a lot — great for sharing documents without doing attachments
- Diagramming, creating flow charts and org charts and etc.: MindManager and OmniGraffle
- Financial Management: Quicken [have to run this on Windows on my Mac — I don’t recommend the Mac version; I’ll be doing a post on financial software for the Mac coming up]
- Running Windows on my Mac: VMWare’s Fusion
- Computer backups: Time Machine
At some point I will provide more detail on each of these and how I use them, but a straight list is hopefully a good place to start in the meantime.
Note that this list is just the electronic side of things (with the exception of my moleskine notebook for a capture tool), and I’m probably leaving several things out. I also have recommendations for the physical side — what type of stapler to get, what type of physical in box, and so forth.
Note that most of the above software is for the Mac. When I was on Windows, I used Outlook for email, calendar, contacts, and task management — and was relatively happy with it because I customized things very heavily (for details, see the David Allen Company whitepaper on Customizing Microsoft Outlook for GTD).
(Thanks to one of my readers for suggesting this post!)