Lifehacker recently published an article “Five Best Startup Management Tools”, which I naively thought was a post on entrepreneurial webapps, but is in fact about autorun and trimming your Windows boot sequence. I don’t even use Windows (unless forced), so the article — which I keep seeing linked around the place — annoys me on multiple levels.

Here’s my take on what Lifehacker should have written to satisfy the other meaning of ’startup’. (Yes, it’s sort of a list post; I have another blog post brewing on that subject, and more.) The five top tools that help me run my startup, day in, day out, manage everything that’s going on, and not go insane in the process.

1. Email and Twitter

Two for the price of one. Really, the number-one ‘management tool’ that keeps everything flowing is communication, but there are platforms and webapps and gadgets galore for such a basic human act. I spend 95% of my communication time writing, reading and managing email or Twitter. Email… well, no need to go into details, although multiple inboxes, superstars, more filters than you can shake a stick at and labelling really save the day. Not sure what I’d do without Gmail.

Twitter isn’t a key internal management tool, but it has great benefits of its own — new opportunities, new contacts, quick attention-grabbing DMs, keeping up to date on trends, fostering relationships with key people and building a brand/reputation around a specific anchor. This isn’t just idle speculation, either; everything I just listed has actually resulted from my use of Twitter as a sort of mixed corporate-personal communication channel (both on @jennielees and, in August, our shared @festbuzz).

2. Dropbox

I use multiple machines, from multiple locations, across multiple platforms. Having the headache of ‘oh shit, that file’s on that computer 300 miles away’ totally removed from my life is worth the Pro subscription’s weight in gold. I mainly use this for startup work, as personal stuff is just less likely to be as vital, but I’m starting to put more trivial content into Dropbox just for the convenience. Because it’s a ‘real’ folder, I’m not worried about losing the data, but I am a little niggled by the ‘it’s all on the cloud’ aspect — I deal with uber-secure stuff in a slightly more paranoid way. Not sure how I’d transition from personal-dropbox to startup-dropbox shared with multiple people, but I can totally see the benefit of that as we grow.

3. Skype

We don’t use this tremendously much but it’s been insanely valuable when we have. Being a distributed company with the main lynchpin in the arse-end of Scotland people often assume we can meet face to face with them when we can’t; free video calling really does help to bridge the gap. (And, initially, having an 0131 number without a real phone.)

“Virtual facetime” isn’t quite the same as real facetime though, so I should probably add a tiny mention for Easyjet here, despite their monumental awfulness. (And big up the Generator hostel in London, yo.) My mileage for the year’s nowhere near Ewan’s, but I’ve still spent plenty of time on those lovely bright orange 6.30am planes.

4. Macbook Pro

My trusty laptop. I’d say “a” laptop is useful — really, required — to run a startup, but major props to the MBP (disclaimer: matter of personal taste). It’s over three years old, and although it feels quite sluggish now, and the battery life is somewhat laughable — about one and a half hours — it’s definitely served me well.

The main reason I love Macs is because I’m a control freak and command-line junkie on one level, but I also like shiny pretty things. OSX combines the best of both worlds in a way that’s well and truly converted me to the Cult of Jobs; I can get dirty stuff done quite happily in Terminal, set up a near-perfect coding environment that beats ‘four-terminal fwvm2′ into the dust, and yet also use a fantastic array of apps which are generally jolly good. And it doesn’t do games, which is great for a work machine, but it does do WoW, which is great for a junkie’s fix on the road (yesyes, I gave up for good over six months ago).

Honourable mention goes to the iPhone for keeping me connected on the move (providing there’s signal), but frankly, its call quality is terrible, the no-ring/voicemail bug is frustrating in the extreme, the ‘no service’ weirdness I’ve experienced lately is even worse, and the bewildering array of apps is entertaining yet ultimately a huge problem that’s just not being solved. Yes, it’s a great mobile email, web and SMS client, yes, some of the apps are great, yes, Google Maps has saved me more times than I can count. But international data rates, poor signal, low battery etc mean it’s usually an expensive iPod most of the time I’m travelling.

5. Other Startups

One of the things that has helped me learn, improve and generally stay on top of things has been other people — specifically other people who are, or have been, in the same boat. Thanks to communities such as Hacker News it’s easy to learn from others’ mistakes and get a quick opinion before you plunge; of course, I’ve still made plenty of my own, but I feel I somehow did so with a little education. There are a load of events that help startups in various ways, through learning, networking, presentation practice and so on, and it’s easy to get carried away and go to too many. However, having the option and the amount of information there for the taking is still great.

In meatspace, it’s also important to balance the often-isolated habits of entrepreneurship with the real world, and that’s where things like the Informatics Ventures/TechMeetup communities and EPIS have really helped. There’s something nice about the size and energy of the Edinburgh tech community; it’s small enough that you can really get to know people well and yet not too small to be insignificant.

Events like the Silicon Valley speaker series, Ken Morse courses, School for Startups and so on bring the world to Edinburgh. We still have a lot of barriers to get over to put the city on the map, so to speak, and there are plenty of times when I wish I was in London — but I do sense a force for change up here and some genuinely serious interest and investment in pushing Edinburgh’s ’scene’ further.

A side note: simply being in the right place is important to startup management, although not necessarily a deal-breaker. For example, it’s easier to manage a company if your co-founders, employees, investors and clients are all in the same city as you! However, it’s not impossible to succeed if none of them are, which is practically the case for me — you just have to think about things a little differently, and use tools such as those listed above to help with the process.

Having said that, there is a balancing act on hand. Despite the loveliness of Edinburgh and its awesome community, I’m going to be spending the next year in San Francisco simply because I feel I need to be there in person to nurture various things along, and get to a stage I don’t feel I can achieve remotely. But I’ll be back, and that’s what counts.

Photo is of Citizen Space, where I spent a happy nomadic afternoon working. Fortunately, the hot desks have power sockets.