We’ve rung in the New Year, set our goals, and come up with a plan. But did you know most New Year’s resolutions are abandoned in the first 6 to 8 weeks of the year? To help you stay productive and on track in the first quarter and beyond, the Solutionistas wanted to share our favorite productivity tools with you.
Asana
“Ahhh!” That’s the sounds of the heavens opening up whenever Chief Solutionista Rosalie thinks about her favorite productivity tool, Asana. Asana is the project management tool that keeps the wheels on the Origin Smart Marketing bus. Everyone knows what their tasks are and when they’re due. We use Asana to keep track of other people’s progress on shared projects, too.
Asana has helped all the Solutionistas work more efficiently. It’s also reduced the number of times we’ve pulled our collective hair out. It helps us prioritize tasks and projects so we better manage our workday and workweek, too.
Buffer
Ask Heather, one of our Inbound Marketing Solutionistas, what her favorite social media management tool is, and she’ll quickly reply “Buffer!” Updating every one of your social media platforms individually is a full-time job. With Buffer, you can schedule content and review analytics all from a single dashboard. It saves Heather a lot of time and makes it easy to see what posts are performing well and which messages we need to tweak.
Buffer syncs with all of your existing social media accounts. Draft a post in Buffer’s editor and decide when and to what platforms you’d like to publish it. Buffer’s best party trick is that you can instantly rebuffer high-performing posts to keep your social media platforms content-rich without constantly reinventing the wheel.
Evernote
Amanda, our other Inbound Marketing Solutionista, is a compulsive notetaker. So it’s no wonder one of her favorite productivity tools is Evernote, a cloud-based notetaking, web-clipping, remember-everything application.
Download Evernote for desktop, your tablet, and your mobile phone. A note you take on your phone during a meeting automatically syncs to the cloud, so you can bring up the same note on your desktop later. Add the camera, audio recording, search, and share functions, and you have an organizational and productivity power tool.
Typeform
On its face, Typeform doesn’t seem like a productivity tool, just an awesome web form application. But once you invest an hour or two setting up your Typeforms, it’ll save you boatloads of time in the long-run. Plus, it’s easy to use and incredibly engaging for form-fillers.
Sync Typeform to your website and its possibilities are endless (just ask Angela, our Web Design Solutionista!). The Solutionistas have used Typeform for contact pages, registration pages, surveys, and even to take payments. Typeforms are great for lead generation, too. The robust dashboard makes it easy to understand and use form responses.
StayFocusd Chrome Extension
We’ve tossed in a freebie that the Solutionistas haven’t tried yet, but looks intriguing. When Wednesday afternoon hits and all you want to do is browse the web and ignore your to-do list, StayFocusd has you covered. It’s an extension you install in your Chrome web browser. You tell it what websites you’d like to block and when, and when you try to procrastinate, you get redirected to a “Shouldn’t You Be Working?” page instead of Facebook or Twitter. Frustrating? Perhaps. Effective? Oh yes.
We hope our favorite productivity tools will help you stay efficient, focused, and balanced in 2018. Have questions about how to use these tools? We’d love to help! Let’s talk!
