They’re free or cheap and they’ll keep you amazingly organized.

BY MINDA ZETLIN, AUTHOR OF ‘CAREER SELF-CARE: FIND YOUR HAPPINESS, SUCCESS, AND FULFILLMENT AT WORK’@MINDAZETLIN

For Inc.

Illustration: Getty Images

In our ever-more-complicated lives, it’s easy to lose track of important information. Ideas you want to remember, websites you want to check out, articles you plan to read, even recipes you want to try. Not to mention tasks you don’t want to forget, and who-said-what during important conversations.

I’m one of those annoyingly organized people who always keep track of nearly everything. How? After years of experimentation, I’ve assembled a set of tech and nontech tools that keep me–and other members of my family–completely organized. They’re all easy to use and free or low cost. The only risk is, you might turn into one of those annoyingly organized people too.

1. Note-taking and web-clipping software

For me, it’s important to both be able to write notes to myself to keep track of important information and conversations and be able to quickly grab webpages so I can find them later. In fact, it’s so important that I have three apps that I use in different ways for these functions.

The first, and most important for me, is Evernote, which I’ve been using for years. There’s no denying that Evernote has had some reliability and speed issues over the past few years, although those may be improving. But there’s still a lot to love about Evernote. The app also works across all my devices, and also as a webpage in my browser. It allows me to organize things any way I want, I can dump pretty much anything in there, and most compelling of all, I can swiftly capture any website I want to remember. Most of the time, that takes only two clicks.

So why do I need anything else? For one thing, I read a lot, and Pocket captures online articles and saves them in a format that’s easy to read and works even if you’re offline. It’s the easiest way to grab reading that I want to do later (on a plane, for instance). Pocket isn’t the only app that does this. Here are some other choices that should work just as well.

My final note-taking tool is Google Keep, which duplicates many of Evernote’s functions. Being completely honest, I probably wouldn’t have tried it if Google hadn’t kept it front and center on all my Android devices. But Keep has a few things going for it: It loads quickly, it works across all devices including my web browser, and it has a simple and clean interface, which Evernote very much does not. So I use Google Keep for anything I want to capture very quickly and not necessarily keep forever–maps of hiking trails, parking space numbers, Wi-Fi passwords. You get the idea. Using both Evernote and Keep in different ways works for me, but you would absolutely be fine with one or the other.

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