Handle launched out of stealth mode at TechCrunch Disrupt today to provide a rope out of this pit. Its “priority engine” supposedly raises the bar on productivity with tools that combat inbox overload and help you organize your time wisely.

In today’s world, communication proliferates faster than most of us can manage. CEO and founder Shawn Carolan is a managing director at Menlo Ventures. He struggled every day to keep up with his email, and as a result, he didn’t have the time he wanted to actually go out into the field, meet with entrepreneurs, and survey the marketplace. When he searched for solutions that would help him tackle the information overload, he found none that served his needs.

And thus, Handle was born.

“This is not just about getting your email down to zero,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “This is about finding and keeping your priorities straight and spending time on the things that matter. We all have one life to live one day at a time. There is work and there is your personal life, and all of your priorities need to be considered in one place to make decisions. We are creating an operating system for your life.”

Carolan said that most productivity products on the market, like Asana or Basecamp, are project-oriented, whereas Handle focuses on the individual. Before building Handle, the team researched behavioral psychology and built tools in direct response to their findings. In the system, people can create task lists and assign each task a priority ranking. Handle places these priorities in a daily calendar that you can rearrange or reassign as other things come up.

On the email side, it has 13 commands that you can use to “triage” your email. This goes far beyond a “later” button, enabling you to delete, archive, label, unsubscribe, and so on. It can place multiple emails within tasks and clicked into for more information. Once everything is organized, you can settle down to execute them.

“If important work is undone or unplanned for, your subconscious will haunt you,” Carolan said. “This is a source for a lot of stress and when you go home, you can’t focus on your family, relax, or be present. We realized that the only way people end up bring happy and feeling good so when they know they spent big parts of their day on the things they care bait most, and brought these things through to completion the best they can.”

As it stands, most people have a hacked together system for staying organized that involves pulling together information from multiple sources and perhaps using what Carolan described as “blunt tools” to make sense of them. Handle focuses on prioritization, with the core belief that productivity stems from there. There are “elegantly incorporated” features to help with capture, triage, plan, and focus with the ultimate goal of fundamentally improving people’s work habits.

To achieve this goal, Carolan raised $4 million in 2011 led by Menlo Ventures. Today, Handle launched web and iOS applications on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York and is now available in private beta. It is free to start, but the company plans to release a premium version down the road. There are currently 15 employees.

Photo Credit: Sean Ludwig

Do you know how many accounts you have with various websites and online services?

The answer is probably no, and that is why you — yes, you — are wide open to losing personal information.

Not knowing what data you have out there is a dangerous game. If your accounts share any common data at all, hackers who get into one of them can leverage that account to get into others. Shared passwords, shared secret answers for requesting password resets, even basic data like your address and social security number can be lurking on little-used accounts you haven’t logged into for months. Each one is a potential target.

That’s why the first step to increasing your security is to do a personal survey of all your online accounts, which at this point, you unfortunately have to do manually. Just going through your email and to see who is pushing you marketing material is a good way to get started.

If you’re like me, the number of accounts you have is far higher than you’d expect. I expected to find 20 accounts in my name; instead, I found 114.

That’s a lot of personal information I didn’t know about floating around the web. Indeed, LastPass, an online password manager, told me that the average LastPass account holds an average of 100 accounts.

“I probably have at least 150 accounts that I regularly use at least once or twice a year. I think it’s a massive problem,” said Shane Green, the chief executive officer at Personal, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We have literally infinite pieces of information about us spread out all over the Internet.”

Personal is one of Silicon Valley’s answer’s to poor account security and password management. The company offers a service to store all of your login credentials. Each credential is individually encrypted and accessible only by you — not even Personal can see your information. That means instead of 150 accounts, you only have to worry about one: Your Personal account.

The company recently released a feature called Fill-It that could help you with account organization even further. The feature lets you take encrypted information, such as your credit card and billing address, out of Personal and share it temporarily with another site, such as Amazon.com. Amazon never gets to keep that information, but instead it is able to temporarily read your Fill-It, complete the transaction, and forget everything it ever saw.

If you’re not into the big, scary encryption, however, and want something a little simpler, some simple maintenance might be the answer. Spend two or three hours tracking down all your accounts. After you’ve written them all down, separate them into categories of importance based on the information they hold.

• Highest priority: Your bank accounts and email accounts.
• High priority: Any accounts that hold credit card information is also of high importance. If you have stored your credit card on your favorite retailer’s website — or any other site — include it here.
• Medium priority: Any social media, note-taking, or content-storing apps should also be closely watched.
• The bottom rung: Those one-off daily-deals sites you’ve never used, magazines, sites that you signed up for just to enter a contest, and the like.

After you’re done sorting, then purge, baby, purge! Get rid of anything you don’t use weekly: Delete the account outright, or log into the account and delete all the personal information you don’t feel comfortable with.

If you really want to dig in deep, research what happens to your data when you close an account so you know how long your information is sitting out there.

Then come up with a password scheme: unique, difficult passwords for each site in the top tier and shared, easier passwords for the bottom tiers. You can save these passwords on websites such as LastPass if you have a lot of high priority accounts. But remember that services like LastPass and OnePassword protect all your passwords by using a password. You can also sign up for Personal’s beta.

“I do, however, think protecting all your passwords with a password [if you use a complex password] is radically better than how people do it today,” said Personal’s Green.

So, get account counting, folks. And tell us in the comments how many you find.

Created by Meghan Kelly; Original login image via Shutterstock

This month, digital notebook service Springpad has launched a standalone site in honor of National Organization Month. Each day of the month features a notebook designed by tastemakers on topics like exercise, diet, budgeting, personal organization, productivity, travel, and party planning. Each notebook contains a comprehensive collection of advice, lists, and tools to help people achieve their goals.

The initiative is part of Springpad’s own New Year’s resolution to reach a wider audience. The company recently surpassed 4 million users, primarily made up of the tech early adopter market, and is trying to tap into the mainstream. The National Organization Month site features notebooks that people can not only use as a resource, but also as an example to create their own notebooks.

“We want people to use Springpad in a way that relates to their life,” said cofounder Jeff Janer in a recent interview with VentureBeat. “A lot of early adopters don’t like being told what to do, but our research has shown that with a more mainstream audience, they do not know where to start and want templates. The other thing that we have seen from the early adopter market is that it is skewed more male and business professional. There is a big audience out there that is more female-oriented, and these themes will appeal to them.”

Today’s featured notebook is titled “Organize Workouts with Lacey Stone,” a celebrity fitness guru. It includes links to her bootcamp videos, a gym-bag packing list, six challenging treadmill drills, at-home workout moves, a music “power playlist” and tips on staying motivated. Other health and fitness themed notebooks include “organize your juice cleanse” and vegan chef Jesse Brune’s healthy-eating meal plan.

For those intending to make 2013 a neat and tidy year, it has guides to organize your workspace, messy kitchen, cluttered garage, disastrous closet, pantry, and messy bedroom. Aspiring hosts can find guidance for wine parties, Super Bowl bashes, weddings, garden parties, and cocktail soirees. Users can follow specific tastemakers and receive notifications when they make additions. The goal is to make digital organization as useful and painless as possible.

“On the one hand, organizing things is like going to the dentist, you have to do it but you don’t want to do it,” said Janer. “It doesn’t have to be painful. It can be fun and it can be social. We want to be the last organizer you will ever need. It is a very non-tech message and where we are looking to go in 2013.”

Springpad primarily competes with Evernote, a popular digital notebook that has 45 million users and recently raised $85 million, bringing its total to a massive $251 million. While Springpad-the-company is a fraction of the size, many users prefer its Pinterest-style visual layout.

You can also use Pinterest to help you stay on top of your resolutions, as guest writer Danielle Small recently wrote.

Springpad is based in Boston and was founded in 2008.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Is there such a thing as being too organized? A new to-do app called Clear aims to cut down on the amount of time you spend managing to-do lists so that you can actually, well, do things. The app is being demoed for the first time Thursday at the Macworld/iWorld expo in San Francisco.

There is no shortage of feature-filled to-do apps in the App Store. Apple even launched its own in October called Reminders, which lets you add location-based alerts to items. Many of the current apps are based on or inspired by Getting Things Done (GTD), a 10-year-old organizational book-turned-movement that lays-out a specific way of tracking and managing tasks.

“It has become the Bible for productivity nerds, and the dominant religion in the world of to-do apps,” Clear-creator Phill Ryu said of GTD. “We just think it’s all bullshit. The system is so elaborate and feature-filled that it demands you start investing a lot of work just to make sense of it all.

“GTD has turned into some perverse form of procrastination.”

Ryu’s solution is a back-to-basics graphic and fun (yep, fun) to-do list app. Clear is a color-coded list inspired by that old standby, paper and pencil. Items are organized by urgency for a look reminiscent of the Department of Homeland Security’s old threat level advisory system. Pinch and expand to add a new task, pinch in to bounce back to the master list of lists. Swipe right to mark something as done. Swipe left to delete. That’s it in a nutshell. Make a list and move on.

The app is the first project from Impending, a new design studio started by veteran app developers Ryu and David Lanham. Ryu and Lanham first met online Ryu was 16 and Lanham worked at Iconfactory. Most recently, they worked together at another app studio, Tap Tap Tap, which is responsible for big hits such as Camera+ and The Heist for iPhone, and has sold more than 10 million apps.

But Ryu and Lanham wanted to start their own shop where they could pursue their unique design philosophy.

“I think the important thing is to never take anything for granted and question everything — all the known interface design conventions, the clichés and rules of the genre.” said Ryu. “These are formulas, and to us formulas are just a fancy way of describing the rut you’re stuck in.”

The product of this approach is Clear, a collaboration with Realmac Software and Milen Dzhumerov, but other “top secret” projects are already in the pipeline. The Clear app won’t be available in the App Store until mid-February, but the duo has a video of the app in action (watch it below). Impending plans to make Clear free to download and try, but you can pay to add pro features.

By adding the “Say Mmm” tag to any note in Evernote, a shopping list will be automatically generated with quantities for each ingredient and estimated nutritional information of the recipe. Say Mmm will even categorize each ingredient for you based on grocery store sections and remind you check if you need ingredients that most people keep stocked at all times, such as flour and sugar. Each recipe with the Say Mmm tag will have its own list created, but you can easily merge multiple lists together for one shopping trip.

Say Mmm acknowledges that the list generation feature isn’t perfect and sometimes ingredients can get accidentally left out. To use the new features, all you have to do is sign into Say Mmm with your Evernote account and authorize access. Once you return to Evernote, you will see a new Say Mmm folder.

One of Evernote’s competitors, Springpad, has a similar list making feature as well. You can add ingredients to a list you’ve already created or start a new shopping list from any saved recipe. However, Springpad doesn’t categorize ingredients; every item just shows up in a list in the order it was added.

AboutOne wants to simplify the busy task of managing families with a new Web app it unveiled today at the DEMO conference.

The company offers a secure online “family management system,” a centralized location where families can store appointments, photos snapped from their cell phone, to-do lists and school-related information. Moms and dads can also scan in important documents, copies of their kids artwork, report cards and last year’s photo with Santa Claus.

The goal is to take away time parents spend filing and organizing family-related tasks and mementos, and use the power of the web and cloud computing to do it for them. With AboutOne’s system, a parent could use his smartphone to access copies of documents that might be otherwise stored in a safe, or, come holiday time, easily compile a holiday newsletter with pictures and highlights for friends and family. Likewise, parents can create profiles of their kids with photos celebrating milestones and special directions for babysitters that include insurance information, allergies and medical must-knows.

The company was founded in 2008 by CEO Joanne Lang. As a mom of four young boys and a former SAP executive, Lang wanted use her experience with cloud technology (a fancy term for software that runs over the Internet) to help busy moms manage family life. Lang says she saw at SAP how cloud computing eliminated inefficiencies for businesses, and wanted to extend the same services to busy moms. Cloud computing allows information to be stored offsite and in more efficient ways — think of Web-based banking, email, and shareable documents and calendars.

AboutOne offers 17 free days of service, after which users can opt to pay $5 a month or $30 a year. The company launched a beta version of its product in October and has almost 4,000 users. AboutOne says it is targeting a market of 82.8 million American moms, but initially focused mostly on the Gen Y “Millennial Moms” segment — roughly, mothers in their twenties. It has since expanded to include teenagers going to college, caregivers, military families and corporate customers.

It is based in Bountiful, Utah, and has 11 employees.

AboutOne competes with other on-demand information storage apps like Carebinders and Bento, as well as online organizers like DelphiVIM, Orggit, and InformationSafe. It says its competitive edge is in making information useful with applications like family newsletters, digital scrapbooks, greeting cards and invitations. It also offers shareable templates that allow users to prepare for future life events, like college applications, school forms and tax documents.

The company has partnerships with companies like Zillow and WebMD to help centralize information-gathering. So far, it has raised $400,000 from friends and family.