One of the most fascinating topics to me is what tools we all use to accomplish our everyday tasks. Some writers use OmmWriter, some just plain Word. Programmers and designers live and die by their specific toolset, as well.

In my case:
- Macbook Air 13" + Thunderbolt display
- Freedom or SelfControl apps to limit internet usage
- Google Docs + Dropbox
- Wordpress for blogging / Word in Focus View for writing
- IFTTT to automate certain boring administrative tasks
- Reeder app to catch up on awesome blog content
- Things app for personal tasks + Trello for team tasks
- 1 cup of coffee in the AM, 1 cup of coffee in the PM

What are your preferred work tools to get your unique work done?

Oh neat.
I use:
- Macbook Air 11" (whatever was before Thunderbolt)
- Google Docs+Dropbox
- WordPress
- Postbox for mail
- Pages to write offline
- Mindnode to mindmap

On the iPad:
- Posts (a wordpress blog tool I'm trying out)
- Mindnode
- Bamboo (note pad thingy)
- Zagg keyboard case
- Pages

I tried being a solopreneur, Mancavepreneur etc., too lonely for me. I like having my team around, at least half the time.

@Chris, Pages is that good, huh? Will have to try it out. I'm a big fan of Sparrow for mail, but will look up Postbox.

@Hugh, apart from surroundings, what tools do you use? Amazing how much more efficient we can all be if we recommend tools to each other, no? I find this fascinating.

I use:
- 13" Air + Thunderbolt
- Time Out to encourage breaks dejal.com
- Pages
- IFTTT (new starred item in Google Reader = save to Pocket)
- Reeder app (iPhone + Mac + iPad) for blogs
- Tweetbot (best Twitter client by a clear mile)
- Buffer to tweet at the best times (essential)
- Pocket to save articles to read later
- Zite (iPhone + iPad) ~ amazing for finding new content from blogs other than the ones you already follow
- Sparrow
- Reminders app (comes with Mountain Lion) for general tasks management (syncs with iCloud so I have it across all devices)
- Skype
- iCal
- Coda2 for web development (highly recommended and well worth the cost)
- The 'Spaces' feature on OS X (essential for productivity)
- Dropbox

- Asana for managing company/project tasks
- Workflowy (a fantastic improvement to the pen and paper, it's amazing)
- Cornerstone for SVN (don't get better really)
- Divvy (great tool to quickly organise Windows on your screen)
- Evernote for storing receipts, tickets etc etc that I don't want to have to keep in my inbox
- Flux to automagically adjust the contrast of your screen at different times of the day
- Found (one place file search across computer, Gmail accounts and Dropbox)
- Growl for desktop notifications (less important with the new OS X)

Hope that helps :)

D

Almost forgot an absolute gem for me: Clipboard for indexing online content e.g. articles you liked, videos etc.

My boards here: clipboard.com

@Dan these are amazing, and so many I had never heard of before — but all so time-consuming & useful. It will take me a while just to go through all those names & download them.

Question: how do you disconnect?

With difficulty and I always have a backlog of things I want to read with no time to read them.

My Pocket account has 575 articles unread, however I've just discovered an app to add to the list above: Read Later for mac (itunes.apple.com) that is a Reeder like app that connects to Pocket. It makes getting through/organising articles a hell of a lot quicker so that number will hopefully now go down over the next couple of weeks.

The reason I use Pocket btw is that you can also connect Tweetbot to your Pocket account to save articles the people you follow have tweeted out. This means – in combination with my IFTTT recipe – everything goes to one place.

@Dan that's a great tool to keep reading in order. Can you read them while offline? Disconnecting is always such an important tool, too.

You can, that's the idea. Synch when you have an internet connection and then you can read on the tube etc etc. I'm currently on holiday in Cornwall and managing to disconnect a little.. I really enjoy the combination of the chilled atmosphere and being able to read up on stuff though. I choose articles over novels.

Hi,
I use many of the things @Dan uses.
- 13" macbook
- Buffer
- Pocket
- Asana (i'm trying Do by Salesforce - do.com right now)
- clipboard.com (now there's a iphone app :( i'm an android user, so i'll wait)
- evernote
- bitcasa for offsite infinite storage and sharing
- google tools - gmail, drive, etc
- bitbucket for code hosting - private git repos
- sourcetree - git client
- pathfinder for file managment
- sublime text - coda2 is good too
- and a million other tools and tools to unistall tools ;)

Thanks @Jorge. Not heard of bitbucket before - have just signed up since github isn't free for private repos :)

Another question: Who do you use for your hosting? I need to be able to run PHP but support for other platforms is desirable for future proofing..

Heroku's (heroku.com) model of 'pay for what you use' is what I'm after, the only downside is they don't support PHP.

Hi @Dan.
I'm currently using dreamhost.com. It's the most reliable i've used till now. And dreamhost allows you to host your own private svn repos. They were failling a lot so i've moved to git and bitbucket.com.
I've tried pagodabox.com and i'm considering it very seriously for next developments and migrating old ones. It's like Heroku for PHP and let's you import your files directly from Bitbucket, Github, etc

Great, thanks @Jorge I'll look into them!

Someone recommended Workflowy and now I can't operate without it! Great, great tool.

@Dan and @Jorge, a few additional design/dev tools

Codekit is a great partner for Coda allowing for Sass compiling, auto browser refresh, image optimization and code compression

incident57.com

Liveview broadcast your Mac screen to iOS. Amazing for seeing PS/AI design changes in real time on an actual device

zambetti.com

Invision lets you create easy (but basic) clickable prototypes from pngs/jpgs.gifs. Great for mobile too

invisionapp.com

Slicy makes creating CSS Sprites much easier

macrabbit.com

And CSSHat allows you to generate CSS or Sass code from Photoshop layers

csshat.com

@Marcella Ye that was me - I use it daily :)

Thanks for the list @Eric, I'll check them out!

@Eric, thanks for the list.
I'm also using CodeKit (forgot to mention) and I recommend it.
SpriteRight for sprites is good too.

I'll check the other tools toot. Thanks.