4 Apps to Improve Your Morning Catch-up Routine

One of the things I think about quite a bit at Cloze is my daily catch-up routine. By this I mean how I consume information across the four major media screens (TV, web, phone and tablet) as I move through my day. For roughly the last couple of months I’ve been logging my patterns to keep track of where I get my news, how often I check my email and social media and generally what I use to monitor everything. What is immediately obvious after I step back is that I’ve gravitated toward apps that work without ongoing maintenance and curated content—curated by algorithms or by my personal and professional network. Here is a look at what I use especially first thing in the morning.

Sunrise.im (https://www.sunrise.im)

The calendar, especially if you manage multiple calendars, is still an area that is due for some innovation. I recently started using Sunrise.im – it is a dirt simple product that emails you a summary of your calendar for the coming day every morning. With a quick scan I know exactly whom I’m going to be meeting later in the day across all of the various calendars that I use.

Cloze (https://www.cloze.com)

We all have to sleep, work and attempt to have down time, but when we do, we miss things. I’m obviously biased, but Cloze helps me quickly catch-up with the people that are important to me. Cloze is an inbox of sorts that consolidates email, social posts and tweets in one location making it easier for me to stay up to speed and respond without bouncing from app to app.

Unroll.me (http://unroll.me)

I religiously opt-out of email, but for some retailers and organizations I still value their email, I just don’t want it mixed into my inbox. For things like newsletters, retail offers, app notifications etc. I’ve been using Unroll.me to consolidate all of my lower priority content into one morning email that I can scan. Unroll.me is also helpful because it moves all of these emails into a folder I can view separately. I particularly like that I didn’t have to setup or maintain unroll.me – it just runs without any extra work.

Prismatic (http://getprismatic.com)

There is so much content out there these days it is impossible to read everything. Since my first iPad I’ve been using Flipboard for curated news, but for the last several months I’ve also been using Prismatic – mostly on my computer and my iPhone. Prismatic is particularly good at learning what I like to read and then pushing content to me that I’d otherwise miss in one consolidated stream. After I’ve caught up with my key contacts in Cloze I’ll switch over to Prismatic to catch-up on news.