- I’m a dabbler. Always dabbling. I have no qualms about handing over my username and password to any webapp that looks useful / worth 5 minutes of my time. As a result i have A LOT of member accounts all across the internet. Most of these new sites or services get tossed aside, either immediately, or in time. But a few persist. These are the web apps that are really using web technology to make life easier and fore fun to live. Yes, a website CAN do that!
- In an attempt to try and brain-dump some of my workflow i’ve decided to write a series of posts on my favorite web apps and how they have touched my life…
HARVEST — The single best business expense i’ve made has been my subscription to Harvests time-tracking and invoicing web app. I use Harvest to log ALL my time spent working, coding by client and project as i go. Then, when it comes time to invoice the client, a couple clicks generates a professional-looking invoice, and a couple more to send the invoice off to the client, No paper, no postage. They include an option to receive Paypal payments on your invoices, if you’re into that.
Harvest has also recently gotten off their duffs and released an official iPhone app that is just a delight to use! The old un-official app never quite synced right, so i would end up with timers running overnight. If only those were billable hours.… *sigh*
One great tip i heard from a fellow Harvest user was to set up your workday in Harvest, create a timer for each task you plan to accomplish that day. As you complete a task, stop the timer and just start the next one, like a chess timer.
Another productivity tool that has become more and more useful is
Dropbox - Too lazy to reach into your pocket to pull out your flash drive? Then you need Dropbox! This little swiss army knife is little more than a secure, personal, 2GB flash drive that lives on the net. Where it gets interesting is the companion software (available for Mac, Windows, and Linux) which makes your Dropbox folder appear as a folder in your Home directory. Just drag & drop. Love it!
I even have mine set up to allow me to trigger downloads on my home computer from anywhere. Very cool/handy.
If you want to check out Dropbox, consider using my referral link, as we will both get a nice little storage bump on our accounts 
Please feel free to share your faves too. i’m always interested in new and cool web technologies so share in the comments!
Hi Joel, from the way you describe using Harvest, you might be interested in a web app I’ve created for planning out your work schedule, called HourPatch. It’s intended as a complement to time tracking… it’s more about time planning. Take a look if you can, and if you’re interested, I’d be happy to trade a Pro account for some feedback!
holy wow been waiting for the harvest update for so long. no more double-launch to sync? sweeeeeet! also, I’m digging drop.io for storage and collaboration. thx for this, j. ciao. ~ e