Tools Designed to Enhance Your Business Productivity

The thought of productivity tools probably conjures up images of apps and technological tools. Such tools are not the routes to greater productivity though, unfortunately. In fact, technology consumes more time than it saves. Instead, you should be thinking about the following productivity tools that don’t need technology and will increase your productivity.

Trello

When you need to get organized, you should use Trello’s lists, labels, and tasks that you can drag, drop, and play with like a Pinterest board. This is great for visual organizers who like to look at Post-it notes with important information on them.

Chrome to Mobile

Forbes says the Chrome to Mobile extension for Chrome lets you move the things you’re working on directly to your mobile phone, so you can continue working on them while you’re on the move.

Pocket

This app lets you save content (e.g., articles, images, and videos) that you want to look at later. Simply click the Pocket button in your bookmark toolbar, and you’ll send the article directly to your Pocket. This then syncs across your devices, so you can read these articles and look at these videos from anywhere at a later date and time.

Unroll.Me

Straighten up your inbox by compiling all the newsletters you select into one rolled-up email bundle that you can look at when you want. This helps hide email clutter and makes it easier for you to see all your email subscriptions. When you want to unsubscribe from some of them, simply use the Unroll.Me unsubscribe option.

Google Alerts

Instantly know when someone mentions your business or brand anywhere online. This helps with PR and getting links from anyone mentioning your business.

UpWork

Sometimes, you’re not the best person for the job. When you discover this, you’ll find that UpWork is a great place to start looking for the person who is. You can sign up with these sites for free, then you give them 10% of each payment on each project. You can also find freelancers in places like LinkedIn and then determine how good the work is that they provide simply by checking their profile and doing a little digging. Regardless of where you find someone to hire, remember that you’re not skilled at everything, nor are you expected to do everything yourself.

HootSuite

Although this tool has been around for quite some time now, it’s still a very helpful way of managing various social media accounts and their activity in one easy-to-use dashboard. From here, you can also do things like schedule posts, delegate social assignments to team members, organize Twitter lists and followers, and measure performance. 

Buffer

With Buffer, it’s really easy to share web articles via social media. Simply login, connect your social media accounts, and schedule specific times for sharing your content. There’s also a bookmarklet button you can use when you’re out surfing the Web and find an article you know your followers will love. This places the article in your queue so it’s shared at one of your designated share times. It’s a great way to share some of the great content you find from around the Web without cramming these articles down the throats of your followers at one time.

Google Drive

The combination of Google Drive with Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets makes it easy for you to edit and share an array of files and documents. Members of your team can also chat and share notes from within a document.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools

Many people consider these things necessities, especially when it comes to your company’s productivity. These online marketing tools will give you some really valuable insight about your website’s performance, traffic, referrals, and conversions once you’ve set up conversion tracking. The combination of these tools will help you monitor and maintain your website, so you can make sure that it’s Internet-optimized and Google-friendly – two things that are basically one and the same today. While it’s easy to get lost in the digital marketing world, these tools help make sure that this doesn’t happen because they take the time to map everything out for you in a way that takes the guesswork out of everything.

Evernote

Notes (both audio and text), photos, and reminders are an important part of doing business today. Unfortunately, they can easily get scattered around unless you’re using Evernote - a handy and versatile app that saves, organizes, reminds, and syncs all these things across your various desktop and mobile devices. There’s also a bookmarklet that makes it easy to clip web articles and store them so you can read them later.

Asana

When you’re working with a team, you may need a productivity tool that’s built for teams, like Asana. This will help everyone stay on-task and be well organized. You can almost think of it as a complicated version of a handwritten list in that it keeps all your projects and tasks in one location, from which you can assign various jobs to different users.

A Calendar

Word Stream says that what’s better than all this is having a calendar you can use. When opting for one, make sure it has small boxes, so you don’t kid yourself about how much you can accomplish in one day. This works better than a to-do list because it’s better rooted in the reality of the 24-hour limitation we live in – something none of us can change.

Dialpad

Nexogy says this is a great cloud-based business phone system. Costing you much less than an expensive, traditional landline, you’ll appreciate the fact that you can use this phone system anywhere and expand on it almost limitlessly. It also helps your employees get more done, as they can communicate with each other faster, since they’ll know when the person they need to talk to is available to talk to them. This is much better than playing “phone tag” or leaving voicemail messages that must be returned or followed up on later. Other features like audio and video conferencing are also great because they make it possible for your whole team to communicate at once, regardless of their location.