We Love Productivity Apps! Part 1

Earlier this month, we shared some small business productivity apps at the Terre Haute Leadership Conference. In the presentation, we also included some great productivity apps – so many – that we decided to break this article up into 2, more digestible, chunks of information.

In this post, we are focusing on everyday life, file organization, project management, and social media. Next, we’ll talk about password management, email management, browser extensions, and a grab bag of stellar apps that didn’t fit into any one category.

Take a look at what our team has found and let us know what works for you.

Everyday Life Productivity Apps

These include things like maintaining calendars, creating and sharing to do lists, and being able to prioritize items, remember them, and keep moving in the right direction.

• Any.do
• Todoist
• Wunderlist

File Organization Apps

We are in a world where collaboration and sharing files are critical to our everyday existence. (Okay, that may be a little dramatic, but you get what we mean). Sharing files quickly, retrieving documents to edit and resend when you’re on the go, reviewing them on the fly, backups and storage are all aspects of file management that impact us daily.

DropBox – allows you to save files to the cloud, share folders or files via email or links, and collaborate in real time. Mega storage is available for about $10 a month - great deal.

Google Drive – We love pretty much all things Google. And Google Drive enables you to store files, organize by folders, share pictures, documents, spreadsheets and more. With Google Sheets, Documents and Slides you can create new pieces to share, and they’re accessible from any device with those apps installed. You can even create forms to share and embed on your website. How cool is Google, really?!

OneDrive – Microsoft’s OneDrive is another great option to store and share documents. This also allows you to edit the documents online and collaborate with others. If you have a Microsoft account, you can even have images and files automatically backed up to OneDrive from your phone or computer.

With so many options for file storage, sharing, and real-time collaboration, there’s no need to have version after version of a document, trying to go-between and identify who changed what. Productivity win!

Evernote – this isn’t just about file storage and organization. It’s SO much more – so it could really go in just about every section here. Evernote is one that we found everywhere we looked, and lots of people use it. It’s a great way to take notes, store things and organize it all in one place that syncs across all of your devices.

• Organize by notebooks – by product, customer, name,  monthly, etc.
• Sync & store notes, you can even scan documents for viewing later
• Chat with others
• Clip web pages and pdfs to share and review later – great for use with a chrome extension
• Search it all to find what you’re looking for
• Take notes by voice, write on your tablet/touchscreen or type them

Project Management Apps

We manage several awesome clients including all of their projects and work so they don’t have to. This requires organized collaboration and a way to keep track of tasks and assignments ensuring everyone is able to participate. An extra-long email chain just won’t do. Here are few of the top project management apps out there today.

Asana – we use Asana here at RED66 Marketing. It’s free for up to 15 users and allows us to easily organize things by client and by project. We can create tasks, assign due dates, upload files to go with each project, and add notes/comments on the task.

Those notes are sent via email too, and the recipient can easily reply to that email and BOOM, their reply is stored in the project task immediately. No more chasing email threads or multiple responses, because it’s all beautifully organized in one place.

Basecamp – We’ve used Basecamp before too and it’s amazing. It’s a flat rate by company, so can be affordable, and easily scalable for small, growing businesses or teams. This tool allows you to create projects, to do lists and assign them to others. It’s great for file storage related to a project and any to do, too.

And the project permissions allow you to share information at different levels with your internal team, clients or vendors as well. Fun fact: the entire team at Basecamp works remotely, they literally wrote the book on it, so they know all about virtual collaboration.

Trello – this is another great app that has web-based and mobile solutions. It’s very visual with different boards where you can create sub tasks and statuses, then drag things to the next step when you’re done. This tool allows you to add comments, email others and store files/attachments related to what you’re working on.

Social Media Apps

We loved seeing so many hands go up when we asked who manages social media for their organization. Of course, there are individual apps which are great, but if you’re managing multiple social media accounts for your business, your work, yourself, it may be time to bring in some scheduling and monitoring tools.

That way, you don't have to go from Facebook to Twitter, to Instagram, to LinkedIn, to Pinterest, and so on. That sounds very unproductive, doesn’t it?

Improved productivity in social media management can be found in creating content at one time, scheduling it out to be posted, monitoring your digital space, and being able to engage with your fans or followers.

Most of you have heard of Hootsuite and Buffer, and maybe Sprout Social. These are great apps that allow you to schedule, monitor and respond to posts.

Cyfe is another one that is great for tracking analytics and reporting for all social channels, including Google analytics and more. It’s a great dashboard solution too. We use it to provide reports and great visuals for our clients.

Download These Small Business Productivity Apps Today!

While there are more productivity apps out there for things like projects and social media management, the ones described were not only the most commonly found in our research, but what we use in our daily lives.

What works for you? Please share your experiences and thoughts in the comment section below. Have a question about any of the apps discussed? Contact RED66 today - we can help!