Practical Productivity: Work Smarter

In Automation, Project Management by KathrineF1 Comment

Throughout this productivity series, we have mentioned many tools for improving your productivity. In an effort to help you find these tools quickly (essentially improving your productivity), we have put them all on this one list.

Productivity tools to help you work smarter;

  1. Boomerang allows you to pre-schedule emails, can be setup to hide emails until you need them, and can even remind you to follow-up on emails that haven’t’ been replied to! It’s great for managing your inbox, communicating with people in different time zones, and setting reminders. It works with both Gmail and Outlook.
  2. Hootsuite allows you to schedule and plan your social media updates. Plus, you can view all social media account in one place, shrink links, and post to multiple accounts at once.
  3. ScheduleOnce is a field-proven solution for powering online scheduling with your customers and prospects.
  4. TimeTrade allows you to establish your availability, and then provide a link for clients and team members to schedule meetings with you. Plus, it syncs with your Outlook or Google Calendar and it provides a professional appearance.
  5. TeamWork is a project management site that allows you to create task lists, assign tasks to others, set priorities and due dates, track time spent on tasks, and will even send reminders on your behalf and tell you when tasks are due or overdue. This is a favorite of ours!
  6. Smart Sheet is an online spreadsheet service with built in task list and sharing capabilities. This can be used for planning marketing events, financial reports, sales, and operations. They provide templates to get you started, reports, and collaboration tools.
  7. Yesware, with its rave reviews on time management, email tracking, and analytics, this email tool for salespeople may be your answer for generating more income and closing more deals.
  8. Google Voice allows you to simplify using all your phones in one place with one number. You can choose which line is available to contact you, chose specific rings, and even has a handy option to let you listen in on voicemails before answering.
  9. Mailbox lets you put off messages until later with a swipe and a tap. Snoozed emails return to your inbox automatically, so you can focus on what’s important now, and it makes reading a message a breeze with a chat-like layout.
  10. Unrollme helps you decide if its trash or treasure then uses “The Rollup” for the subscriptions you do want to open and puts them in your inbox every day at the time you choose. One email for all of your subscriptions.
  11. Astrid is a list manager that can help keep lists in order, you can add and share tasks, and it even complements you when you’ve reached your goal!
  12. Todolist is a great tool for simple, yet effective, management and sharing. This straight-to-the-point option fulfills the job in its minimalist platform.
  13. Toodledo allows users to categorize tasks by level of importance, edit already existing tasks, and create a customized list to keep track of pressing concerns.
  14. Evernote is a way to capture everything from notes and photographs to storing documents and recording audio. Its saves and synchronizes these items across all of your devices, no matter where you are. You will stay more organized and always find what you need, where you left it, with Evernote.
  15. Microsoft OneNote, with similarities to Evernote, this go-to notebook also has a useful feature called “Inking”, where you can enjoy the freedom to take notes your way by smoothly drawing, erasing, and editing with your finger, stylus, or mouse. If you’d rather write than type, OneNote can convert your handwriting into text.
  16. Zoom is an innovative video and web conferencing solution, allowing you to meet anyone, anywhere. Zoom also provides options for local and international phone conferencing, screen sharing, and meeting recordings.
  17. GoToMeeting allows you to meet anyone, anywhere for effortless web conferencing and meeting collaboration, which also provides an option for voice and video conferencing, screen sharing, and meeting recordings.
  18. Google Hangout is another meeting tool to connect you and your team in a fun, lighthearted manner with photos, emoji, and video calls. And it’s free.
  19. Quickbooks is an accounting solution for small businesses. It helps with financial organization, creating and tracking invoices, monitoring expenses, easily creating financial reports, and more!
  20. Infusionsoft is a full service small business sales and marketing software. It will help you get organized, grow sales, and save time doing it all effortlessly and automatically. It integrates your shopping cart, ecommerce, email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), affiliate program, and more.
  21. Mail Chimp is an email marketing tool that enables you to send branded messages to your email list. It offers autoresponders, sign-up forms, archives, and other tools to help keep you and your business top of mind.
  22. SalesForce is a tool for sales teams, and offers solutions to help sales reps everywhere increase pipeline generation, reduce sales cycles, and improve win rates by automating the communication process, providing status reports, and more.
  23. Paper.li is a customizable, sharable online news resource. You can create your own virtual newspaper, pulling in articles daily from across the internet, based on criteria that you have established. You can then use your own newspaper to find relevant articles to share via social media. Plus, you can set your entire Paper.li newspaper up to be automatically published on your Twitter account.
  24. Buffer is a social media scheduling and content creation tool. It allows you to pre-schedule across multiple platforms and makes content suggestions on a daily basis.
  25. Wufoo is an online form builder that allows you to create and share custom forms. It automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. Plus, you can embed these forms on your website or send them via email.
  26. JotForm is an online form builder that allows you to create and share custom forms. This service is free for up to 100 form submissions per month. You can easily embed these forms on your website or send them via email.
  27. Zendesk is an online helpdesk that allows you to offer 24/7 support for your customers, self-help via an online database, and monitoring and reporting of results in order to correct frequent problems.

Plus, a number of these tools integrate and work together for even more productivity and automation.

Need more help? Just schedule a consultation to get started!

Finally, Know when to quit

Last but not least, don’t be so hard on yourself if you didn’t get something done today that you aimed for, just figure out why, and be determined to get it done tomorrow.

Share with us: What are your best productivity tools?

Comments

  1. Fantastic tools are listed! This list can be expand by including Proofhub. It offers multiple features like time tracking, gantt chart, proofing, to-do’s, group chat, milestones etc. More info at http://www.proofhub.com

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