10 Apps by Nathan Wampler

ou’re a busy person. Whether you’re running your own business, working a corporate job, or maybe even doing both, you’ve got a million things to do, and your time is valuable. So you need tools and apps that will keep you organized, help you better communicate with your coworkers and customers, and make you more efficient. But there are SO MANY tools out there and you don’t have the time to test and try all of them. We’ve already established that you’re frickin busy! So I’ve compiled the 10 most valuable tools that I use to maximize my productivity so you don’t have to search for and test each and every tool. I’ve tried many apps and these are my favorite. These tools help me better manage my time, create easily, communicate with my teammates and customers, search for information efficiently, and just make me more productive. I hope they help you be more productive too.

Table of Contents

The Pomodoro Technique and Tomato Timer for productivity and time management

The Pomodoro technique has been an absolute gamechanger for my productivity.

The Pomodoro technique is a time management process where you work for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break, and repeat these intervals throughout the day. To time these intervals, I use a simple Pomodoro timer called Tomato Timer.

That countdown timer is relentless.

During your 25-minute work session, you have to focus solely on the task at hand, and there can be no distractions. You can’t check Facebook or Twitter, and your phone should be silenced or better yet, in airplane mode.

It should be 25 minutes of pure concentration and productivity.

During your 5-minute break, you should do something relaxing that isn’t related to work. Sometimes I’ll stand up and stretch, refill my tea and water, and grab a snack. Other times I’ll get a load of laundry started or play with my daughter.

This technique increases my mental agility, concentration, and productivity, and it has been very effective for a couple of reasons: 1

It helps break up my day into more manageable, bite-sized pieces, instead of one long, nebulous chunk of time. This helps me better concentrate on the task at hand and the time I have to complete it, and minimizes the amount of time my brain spends wandering away on some distraction.

There’s something about seeing that Tomato Timer clock tick down and racing to complete my task before time expires. When I complete my task before the clock hits 0:00, there’s a feeling of accomplishment and euphoria that really gets me going for the next task.

While it’s sometimes tough to stop working after just 25 minutes, the cumulative effect of the 5-minute breaks really help toward the end of the day and I’m often just as fresh around 6PM than I am at 8AM. Unfortunately the Pomodoro technique has absolutely no effect on the food coma I get after lunch. :)

It’s even changed the way I think about time. Instead of saying “I have an hour to work before lunch,” I’ll sometimes say “I have two Pomodoros to work before lunch!” The Pomodoro Technique, in combination with Tomato Timer, is so powerful and so simple to implement, it will change the way you work immediately. Try it now! Product Name: Pomodoro Technique, Tomato Timer What it is: Productivity method and timer How much it costs: Free! Alternatives: • Productivity method - Getting Things Done, Don’t Break the Chain, and others • Pomodoro timers - Marinara Timer, Online Stopwatch, or any countdown timer

Google Apps for Work

for email, document creation, collaboration, and more I have no idea what I would do without Google Apps for Work. I’d probably just sit on my couch and do nothing. Or even worse, I’d have to use Microsoft products. Just kidding, Microsoft. I know you do good things, but nothing comes close to the ease and flexibility of Google Apps for Work. I’m cheating by lumping a bunch of tools into one. But the Google Apps for Work suite is so well integrated, it only makes sense to mention them in one fell swoop. And all the apps run my business and life.

I use:

• Gmail for email

• Docs, Sheets, Forms, and Slides for document

creation and collaboration

• Calendar for organization

• Drive for file storage and sharing

• Hangouts for communication

Look at all the goodies! And although it’s not officially in the Google Apps for Work suite, I check Google Analytics pretty much everyday to analyze the traffic coming to my websites and how I’m acquiring visitors and listeners. Their mobile apps are also awesome, which allows me to get plenty done while I’m on the move.

Google Drive is where I store everything. Google Apps for Work is amazingly simple to set up and easy to use, with all of the features and flexibility you need to stay productive. Product Name: Google Apps for Work What it is: Productivity suite How much it costs: Free for first month, then $5 per user per month Alternatives: Microsoft Office 365, Zoho, others

Streak

for customer relationship and email management S treak calls itself “CRM, inside Gmail.” While that statement is true, Streak is so much more than just CRM.

Yes, Streak has all of the components of a customer relationship management tool that you can access right from Gmail. You can track sales leads, assign ownership of each lead, take notes, add tasks, and execute all of your typical CRM activities. But the integration into Gmail is what makes Streak so powerful. The smart folks at Streak realized two things about sales reps of small businesses and startups: 1 2

The vast majority of selling is done through email The vast majority of these companies use Gmail/Google Apps for Work as their email client

So they built tools for this specific environment. You can create sales pipelines, such as those for specific products or services. For instance, I have a pipeline for guests that I’d like to have on my podcast, one for sales leads when I do business development for one of my consulting clients, and another to track potential consulting clients to whom I’m selling.

Streak allows you to link emails to “boxes” (the equivalent of a lead or opportunity in a traditional CRM system) so you can easily track email activity as you sell. The most powerful part of Streak is what you can actually do with your email.

I use Streak to manage my pipeline of podcast guests. First, you can “snooze” any email so that it gets archived until a date that you specify, then it pops back into your inbox. So if you want to follow up on an email in two weeks, it doesn’t have to sit in and clog up your inbox for that entire time. Rather, it will disappear until two weeks expires. Another great thing about Streak is the “snippet” feature. I often write many similar emails; for instance, whenever I reach out to a potential podcast guest, a good chunk of that outreach email is repetitive. So instead of typing out those similar emails one by one, I can create a snippet (i.e. a template), and populate a new email with that copy with just a couple of clicks. I can then customize that email for the recipient.

Snippets help me easily recreate emails that I send frequently. You can also track when a recipient opens an email you sent. Yeah, it’s a bit creepy, but it’s so helpful to know if and when others have viewed your email so you can follow up appropriately. There are other helpful features such as the ability to send email at a later date, mail merge, split out emails from threads, and more. As you can see, Streak is such a powerful tool built into an app, Gmail, that I use everyday. Product Name: Streak

What it is: CRM and email management How much it costs: Free! Pay for add-ons and premium plans Alternatives: • CRM - Salesforce, Zoho, and many others • Email management - Boomerang, SideKick by Hubspot, LetterMeLater, others

Trello

for project and task management Trello is a simple but powerful project management application based on the kanban board that Toyota popularized in the 1980s and used for their innovative supply chain management process.

Trello’s user interface is a board (which typically equates to a project), filled with lists (categories) of cards (tasks or ideas). The default board has lists that are named “To Do,” “Doing,” “Done,” but you can organize and rename each board and list as you please.

My Trello boards don’t look as nice, but you can see how visual this tool is! The card is the atomic unit of Trello, and here’s where you can create and assign a task or idea, build checklists, add notes, upload attachments, type comments, and more.

I’ve also used it as a lightweight CRM tool, where I track the progress of sales prospects all on one board. Trello is also very visual and interactive. When you complete a task, there is just something so satisfying about moving that completed card to the “Done” list, instead of just checking off a box and having that task disappear. At the end of the day, you’ll have a nice list of everything you’ve accomplished!

Oh yeah! Task done! I not only use Trello for work, but all of my personal projects as well. Trello is amazingly flexible and can be used to keep track of anything you can think of. That’s why it’s such as critical tool that helps me stay organized and productive.

Product Name: Trello What it is: Project and task management software How much it costs: Free! Pay for add-ons and premium plans Alternatives: Asana, Basecamp, Podio, and many others

Evernote

for taking notes I use Evernote to, you guessed it, take notes. I write down ideas, make shopping checklists, jot down call notes, and much more with Evernote. I organize my notes in notebooks, grouping notes together by similar topic. I can add tags to better organize the notes for easy searching. And using Evernote’s Chrome browser extension, I can save articles to read and reference later with just a couple of clicks. All of the information seamlessly syncs across my MacBook, iPad, and Android phone, so I’ll always have my notes with me anywhere and at all times. Evernote is essentially my second brain, and without it, I’m sure I would forget everything.

Evernote - my second brain Product Name: Evernote What it is: Note-taking app How much it costs: Free! Pay for add-ons and premium plans Alternatives: Simplenote, Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote, and many others

Time Doctor

for time tracking

U nderstanding how you spend your time is critical to your

productivity. Seriously, do you have any idea how you spend your time? If you’re a freelancer or consultant, you probably know where your time is spent, as you have to track your time to bill your clients. In this case, Time Doctor is a great tool to use to track your billable time! But if you’re not consciously tracking your time, you probably have no idea how many minutes or hours you spend on different tasks and projects, or unproductive activities like looking at social networks and reading random articles. That’s where Time Doctor comes in.

Time Doctor allows you to create tasks and log how much time you spend on each. It then provides reports that lets you see how much time you spent per project, daily, weekly, or however you’d like to view the data.

Time Doctor’s desktop app helps you easily track how much time you spend on specific tasks. But Time Doctor also has a few features to keep you on track and productive. For instance:

• The Time Doctor desktop app views my screen, recognizes when I might be diverting attention away from the task that I was working on, and asks via a pop-up whether I was still working on said task. This feature really keeps me focused and doesn’t allow my mind to wander.

• Also, whenever I step away from my computer while working on a task, Time Doctor tracks the time I’ve been away and asks whether I was on a break or working on that task, and logs my time accordingly.

• Another nice feature is that the app sends me a daily email

of the time I spent working so I can see how much I’ve been slacking off. That’s a pretty good motivator.

Time Doctor also integrates with many project management platforms like the aforementioned Trello, Asana, Basecamp, and more, to track the time you spend on specific tasks that you have logged in these tools. I haven’t used the team feature yet, but Time Doctor allows you to manage and monitor the time your teammates spend on tasks and projects. As management guru Peter Drucker said,

“If you can’t

measure it, you can’t

improve it.” Time Doctor is a great tool that helps you measure your time spent on tasks so you can improve your productivity.

Product Name: Time Doctor (note: this is my affiliate link) What it is: Time tracking software How much it costs: Different versions ranging from free to $9.99 per month Alternatives: RescueTime, Toggl, Harvest, and many more

Rapportive

for contact info search R apportive is a great way to stalk people online. I’m kidding, but I’m kind of serious. Rapportive, which is owned by LinkedIn, is a plugin that lets you view information about your contacts right inside Gmail. Just type in someone’s email address into an email and you’ll see his or her social network accounts and LinkedIn information, such as titles, location, and mutual connections, on the right sidebar. You can even connect with that person on LinkedIn without leaving Gmail.

Here’s my Rapportive profile in the right rail of Gmail

Another great use of Rapportive is finding the email addresses for someone you’d like to email. If you have an idea of what this person’s email address might be, but you’re not sure, you can type in a few email addresses into the “To” field of an email to find out. For instance, if you wanted to reach out to John Doe who works for Acme.com, but you weren’t sure of his email address, you could type in “john@acme.com,” “jdoe@acme.com,” “johndoe@acme.com,” “john.doe@acme.com,“ and any other possible version of his email address into Gmail. Once you type in John’s correct email address, his Rapportive profile (assuming he has a LinkedIn account) will pop up in the right rail, and now you can send him an email!

Rapportive is an invaluable tool to gather information about and connect with people via email. Product Name: Rapportive What it is: Contact management How much it costs: Free! Alternatives: FullContact, Discoverly, and others

Hootsuite

for social media management B eing active on social media is very important. I love having conversations on social networks, and they have allowed me to connect with people all over the world with whom I may have never met digitally or physically. But man, managing your social networks can be a major timesuck! First, you have to create content or find content to curate to your audience. Next, you have to post this content to multiple social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and others. This entails writing posts that fit character limits, finding relevant hashtags, tagging the right people, and more. Then you have to respond, comment, retweet, share, repin, Like, and do whatever else. Then you have to grow the number of followers on each platform. And you have to do this over and over and over again. Luckily there are tools like Hootsuite to help you manage all of this. Hootsuite is a social media management tool that aggregates all of your social media accounts and helps you engage your audiences in one platform.

Sooooo….much...social…. If you find an interesting article about your industry or profession, you can post the article link to multiple social networks at once or schedule messages to publish in the future. Hootsuite can suggest articles relevant to your interests, which you can post to your accounts. You can view your feeds across all your social networks in one screen. And Hootsuite’s analytics tools tell you if your social media efforts are working. There is also a Hootsuite Chrome extension, which makes it very easy to share a webpage or article right from the browser. Hootsuite is a great tool to help you manage multiple social media accounts and save you time. Product Name: Hootsuite What it is: Social media management How much it costs: Free for up to 3 social profiles, then $8.99 per month and up Alternatives: Buffer, Sprout Social, and many others

Slack

for team communications C ommunications with your team can take place in many different

places. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sure youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve experienced pages-long email threads, tons of text messages, and never-ending Google Hangouts chat sessions.

Slack is a simple yet effective messaging platform that essentially replaces all of these communications tools. Slack helps keep your conversations organized with channels. You can create channels in Slack to separate discussions on different topics and invite only the people who need to be involved in each conversation.

The Go and Grow Podcast Slack Instance on the Mac Desktop App

For example, if you’re working on your technology startup, you might have channels for #development, #security, #design, #marketing, #customer-service, #sales, and more. Sales reps may be included in the #sales and #marketing channels, but most likely won’t be involved in #security. You can also create private groups or have one-to-one conversations. Slack integrates nicely with important services that I’ve mentioned already, such as Trello, Google Drive, and many more, so you can access documents, tasks, and other important information without having to leave the Slack interface. The app’s search function is very powerful and allows you to quickly and easily find any piece of information you’re looking for within any channel. And the Slack mobile app is awesome and just as easy to use as its desktop and web app counterparts.

There are a million tools you can use for team communication but Slack is definitely one of the best out there. Product Name: Slack What it is: Team communications How much it costs: Free, with premium plans starting at $6.67 per user per month Alternatives: HipChat, Salesforce Chatter, and many others

The Great Suspender

to speed up your computer I f you’re like me, you have 86 Chrome browser tabs open while you work. This does a number on your CPU and can slow down your computer to a crawl.

Enter The Great Suspender. The Great Suspender is a Chrome browser extension that automatically suspends tabs that you haven’t used for a while. This frees up system resources so your computer runs smoothly and doesn’t overheat. To “wake up” a tab, simply click anywhere on that tab’s screen and the webpage will be restored.

Tab suspended, system resources free!

You can whitelist certain websites so that The Great Suspender doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t suspend them. I whitelist Gmail, Trello, Hootsuite, and Tomato Timer because I use them so often. Before finding out about The Great Suspender, my computerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fan would huff and puff and I would see the spinning rainbow icon on my MacBook all the time. Chrome would drag along, other apps would take forever to open and use, and my productivity would plummet.

With The Great Suspender, my computer runs much more smoothly and keeps up with me! Product Name: The Great Suspender What it is: Browser memory management How much it costs: Free! Alternatives: OneTab, TooManyTabs for Chrome, and many others

Conclusion

T ime is your most precious resource, and tools that help you save time

at work and in your personal life are invaluable. These 10 apps have been so helpful for me to be more efficient, better communicate with my team, and increase my productivity. There are so many productivity tools out there, and I’ve tried a bunch of them! These are my favorite, and I hope you like them too. Now go on and be more productive!

About the Author Mike Chan Founder and Host Go & Grow Podcast

H i, I’m Mike Chan, and I’m an entrepreneur, startup guy, marketer,

podcast host, blogger, community organizer, and expert power napper. I’m the Founder and Host of the Go and Grow Podcast, where I interview inspiring entrepreneurs and industry leaders to learn how they launch and grow products and companies. I’m also the Chief Marketing Officer of Thorn Technologies, a software development firm that specializes in building engaging mobile apps, mission-critical enterprise software, professional websites, and cloud computing solutions. I’m also a blogger at mikewchan.com, Facilitator and Organizer of Startup Weekend DC, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, and ex-marketer for the Washington Capitals. And, of course, a power napping expert. Feel free to email me at mike@goandgrowpodcast.com or tweet at me @mikewchan or @GoandGrowPod.