Get Your Life Back With These 7 Productivity Tools
Organised systems and technology enable me to be more prolifically productive, present and even more creative. By minimising the amount of mental energy I give to admin tasks, I have more energy for what matters.
One of the most important things about running a one-person business effectively is using technology to streamline your operations. All the bureaucracy around my work feels like fake work. It irritates me no end, because it takes time and energy away from what I want to be doing. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I'm in a perpetual war on admin.
What I’ve learned is that organised systems and technology enable me to be more prolifically productive, present and even more creative. By minimising the amount of mental energy I give to admin tasks, I have more energy for what matters.
Your success is dependent on being in your zone of genius as much as possible. However, many gifted entrepreneurial people get stuck in their zone of drudgery, allowing their valuable time and energy to be drained by tasks and work habits that are not contributing to their business’ bottom line.
Here are 7 tech tools I use to escape my zone of drudgery so I can spend more time in my zone of genius. And the best thing is that almost all of them have a free option.
If you too are in a war on admin, your weapons just got upgraded...
Acuity
I use a phone appointment app called Acuity to allow people to book appointments directly into my calendar from my website.
Not only does it make it easy for people to reach out to me, but it really reduces the number of painful back-and-forth emails trying to align schedules. Zone of drudgery pet peeve. If you spend time on the phone or in meetings, you could save a surprising amount of time by not manually scheduling and confirming calls.
Harvest
I use Harvest to track my time. As a service-based business owner, knowing how long it takes me to do individual tasks helps me create schedules that are more accurate, price my services better and justify my prices if needed.
And I've written about it before, but tracking my time with Harvest makes me more focused, accountable and productive. By getting visibility on where my time is going at work, I tend to waste it a lot less and say no to a lot of non-urgent tasks clamouring for my attention.
Forecast
Forecast is a project and resource forecasting tool. It's handily linked to my live time-tracking in Harvest, so I can see whether I am running ahead or behind on my estimated time allowance and adjust my workload if necessary.
Every week I plug in dedicated hours to spend on core business essentials and personal projects, and then can see how many hours I can give to clients. This stops me overbooking myself whilst still working on my own goals.
Google Drive
What on earth did we do before Google Drive? It's the lynchpin of my whole business - where I present work to clients and get feedback, back up everything, and save my own templates. And it's free.
I work in G docs and then export hard copies to my computer. That means if anything ever happened to my laptop, I can just log-in from anywhere and continue without any business disruption.
I love the commenting and live-tracking feature in G drive, which saves long email chains with feedback. I love anything that keeps me out of my inbox.
Trello
I would highly recommend you get yourself a free project management tool, no matter what your work involves. I use Trello (free) to manage my projects and tasks for multiple clients, and keep a track of notes, ideas and topics.
My favourite 'board' contains hundreds of content ideas. Whenever I get inspiration on-the-go, I log my notes in one of the cards using the mobile app, and over time cards become articles or newsletters.
Using technology to making my content creation process as easy as possible means I never run out of ideas or have to come up with something on the spot.
Xero
I pay a monthly fee to Xero accounting software so I can track all the financial aspects of my business.
It’s so easy-to-use and well designed. Having visibility of my cash flow in advance and identifying any potential gaps helps me plan my personal financial life as well.
Xero allows you to create invoices directly and even send automated follow-ups for late invoices.
Using Xero rather than trying to track the financial side of my business on my own stops things falling through the gaps. Only when I was filing my end of year accounts did I realise an invoice from a reliable client was 7 months overdue. If I had been tracking my financials manually, I would never have noticed it had gone unpaid.
Whichever accounting tool you choose - others include Freshbooks and Quickbooks - it’s well worth the small monthly investment.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a free live spelling and grammar checking app that runs across all my online tools including email, social and G drive.
It saves me a ton of proofreading time and helps me be more professional. Typos happen - it’s a fact of life. In fact, last week Grammarly auto-corrected over 2000 of my spelling and grammar mistakes. Without automation, I'd have to hire a proofreader to get my work done at the pace that I do.
Grammarly also tracks your word count and sends you a writing report every week, which is fun. The most interesting lesson I’ve learned from Grammarly is that with my average word count of 70-100,000 words per week, I could absolutely write a book in no time at all if I put my mind to it...
I know it won’t be long until I hire a virtual assistant to take more of these essential but boring tasks off my hands. In the meantime, I'd love to hear what weapons tools you're using in the war on admin. Maybe I can add a few more to my arsenal.
I’m Imogen, and as a Strategy Coach, I help entrepreneurial people to be more prolific, productive and present in their life and business.
I design personalised Productive with Purpose strategies so my clients can spend more time in their zone of genius and see exponential results in their business. Book a free call with me.
Pin this blog post for later:
