LifeIO Basically Brings it All Together

LifeIO is a service currently in private beta that allows you to handle everything in one place. One of the primary reasons we begin to feel overwhelmed is because we have too many inboxes and too many open loops. Even though you may not be looking at them, all those unread emails, Twitter replies and DM’s, Facebook notifications and messages, and unread items in your feed reader weigh on your mind. Your brain carries them around like baggage and wastes energy thinking about them while you’re trying to focus on something else. This is why it’s important to keep your inboxes clean and dump all actionable items into your task list or whatever productivity system you have (you do have one….right?). With LifeIO you have many of these things accessible from one service.

• Now - This is the first section of the interface. It shows you everything that’s going on right now. This includes any RSS feeds you’ve imported,  messages from your social networks, emails, and calendar events. It provides an overview of what’s happening now. One issue I noticed with this view is that tweets don’t include who wrote the tweet, making them totally useless.
• Mail -This is where you access your email inbox. AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and any other POP or IMAP account is supported. I would recommend not using the standard Gmail setup because it uses POP by default, which may confuse you if you also access your inbox via the web. Also, you have to give up your actual GMail login/password and I could swear Gmail provided a better authentication method. The interface here is decent, but who can compete with Gmail’s interface?
• Calendar - Here is where you put all your appointments, events, and whatever items have a fixed date that they occur. Basic features accounted for here.
• To-Dos – This is your task list. All the basic features that you would expect are here. I would put it’s functionality well below Remember The Milk, but slightly above Google Tasks.
• Notes - Random notes go here. Anything that you might otherwise write on a napkin, your hand, scratch paper, or the back of your mail.
• Feeds - Put all your RSS feeds here. LifeIO provides a view of your feeds updating in realtime on the right side of the page. This is actually one of the coolest features of the site. Adding a feed is as simple as pasting the feed URL. You can also easily add feeds from Feed Search. Hulu, Bing, Twitter, YouTube, and Stock Feeds. LifeIO comes with a bunch of feeds already populated, but you can get rid of them by hitting the little trash can next to the feed name.
• Social - This is where all the magic happens, kinda. The only service currently available under the social tab is Twitter. For many, that is enough, but LifeIO will be much more useful when they start pulling in and interacting with other social sites. You can view your timeline, respond to tweets, and post new tweets from here.
• Shopping - This section works much like the feeds section, except that it allows you to subscribe to a search related to shopping across Yahoo Shopping, Amazon.com, the iTunes store, Craigslist, and Fandango. Pretty nifty feature to help you find exactly what you might be looking to buy.

Other Features

There are a few widgets also available on LifeIO that allow you to access a Clock, Chat, and a Scratchpad. Setup your IM service of choice and handle your IM’s right from within LifeIO. It appears as a nice little popup window, something like Meebo. From the Scratchpad you can quickly add tasks and notes from a popup as well, although I’m not sure why it require 2 clicks to do so when 1 would be sufficient.

All in all, this is actually an interesting service. I’d need to include GMail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Evernote, Remember The Milk, and PeopleBrowsr just to cover the basics of what LifeIO has to offer. I have no problem hacking things together and bending them to my will. I actually kind of enjoy it, but everyone isn’t like me and LifeIO could be quite useful to those who simply want to get things done.

A couple of things that would make LifeIO more useful to me:

1. It needs to be more ubiquitous.  A system for getting things done is useless if you can only access it from one place. Adding tasks and events from a mobile phone would be a start.
2. It needs to interface with the stuff I already use. This might just be a “me” deal, but I like the tools I’m using now. I like the interfaces and features they offer. LifeIO could interface with your Google Account to pull in your calendar items and contacts. It could also interface with Remember The Milk and other services that handle tasks.