One of the biggest complaints that people have is that they do not have enough time. They need more time for work, family, friends, to relax and for a million other things. While I do not have the secret ingredient to tell you how to make more time (although I wish I did), I would like to share some tools that can potentially save you a lot of time at work. Some of these are for automating your business and others are just to be more efficient. Either way here are some of my favorites that I recommend you check out.
Scheduling Meetings – If you are constantly scheduling meetings, then you are spending a lot of time on back and forth emails trying to schedule then you should check out Calendly. This is a tool that automated scheduling meetings. I think the image below so clearly depicts what they do that it should be a no brainer. With this tool, you can set your hours and then send people the link, or embed this as a widget or a popup on your website.
Password Manager – in today’s world, everything is online, which requires a secure password and security question(s). While a pen and paper can be used to remember all your passwords, I would recommend an online password manager. I personally use Last Pass. It stores all of my passwords and has an easy filing system to save everything. It can even generate a new secure password when I need it. I would highly recommend looking into one of these tools to save you from having to remember and enter in your passwords for every website that you go to .
Team Chat – If you need to speak to someone on your team, sometimes you just want to send them a quick chat. Instead of getting up from your desk to go and find them or calling them for a lengthy conversation that you probably are not interested in having, send them a chat. Two great programs are Google Hangouts and Slack, depending on how sophisticated you want to get.
Project Management – keeping organized and on top of your tasks is something that I think is critical to every business. No matter what you do, you have tasks that need to be done and you need a way to keep track of them. There are tons of project management tools out there that allow you to track your tasks. At Sellside Media we use Monday.com to keep all our tasks organized. Most tools have a free trial, so I highly recommend that you sign up for some of them and test them out. If you choose the right tool it should make time management and your companies processes a lot smoother.
Customer Relationship Manager – if you need to keep track of your interactions with your customers then you need a CRM. In addition to keeping all the contact information in one place, it allows you to track communication with your client. Many of them also have customer support features such as chat. A few popular CRM’s are Salesforce, Zendesk and Zoho CRM.
I hope some of these ideas will save you time so you can focus on the fun stuff!