Do you ever feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day? Do large, important tasks get waylaid by frequent, trivial disruptions? You’re not alone!
The great thing about the information age is you can get news and information at any
moment of the day. The bad thing about the information age is you can get news and information at any moment of the day. Frequent disruptions are just a part of the day in a highly connected world. So here are five tools to improve your organization and efficiency:
Trello
What is it?
Trello is a to-do list that can function as a fairly robust project management system. Based on the Kanban philosophy, Trello offers a card-based, visual to-do list that allows you to visually organize your lists.
Why we like it…
Trello is highly visual, easy to set-up and use. It offers the ability to set due dates, assign color codes to cards and tasks can be assigned to others. Trello takes to-do lists to the next level, allowing you to integrate your Trello due dates with your calendar app. Best of all, Trello’s free version is very robust and has many of the tools you need, at no cost!
Less Meeting
What is it?
Less Meeting is a meeting facilitation tool that allows you to schedule meetings and follow-ups, send out notes/follow up items and track action items generated by your meetings.
Why we like it…
Have you ever been in a meeting where you have nothing to add? Ever been in a meeting that was about an entirely different subject than what you thought? Or a recurring meeting where you discuss the same issues over and over with little progress to show for it? Less Meeting is your answer.
Less meeting ensures that participants are prepared for the meeting. It helps keep meetings on task and ensures that action items that arise are captured and assigned. Less Meeting eliminates the “meeting that should have been an email” and long, rambling ones where there appears to be no clear agenda.
Boomerang
What is it?
Boomerang is a powerful and versatile email add-on that allows you to better manage your email activities. It allows you to schedule email sends into the future, and schedule emails to reappear in your inbox so you don’t lose sight of follow-ups.
Why we like it…
Boomerang is a very powerful tool that works great if you want to establish and maintain Inbox Zero. It helps you to stay on top of follow up items by bringing emails back into your inbox and flagging them for follow-up. Best of all, there is a free version that offers good functionality and a free trial of the full version you can try with all the bells and whistles.
Cyfe
What is it?
Cyfe is a dashboard tool that allows you to track all of the important metrics of your business in one place. It offers configurable modules that can be used to build a dashboard where you can see the performance of your organization in a single view.
Why we like it…
Cyfe is flexible and customizable. It allows you to integrate with many common software solutions you may already use such as finance, search engine optimization, social media, advertising, marketing (e.g. QuickBooks, MYOB, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Google Adwords, Analytics, Webmaster tools, Salesforce, Infusionsoft). The great thing is it’s in real-time. so you can manage in a more responsive and nimble manner.
HubSpot CRM
What is it?
HubSpot is one of the most powerful marketing automation tools on the market, and they also offer a FREE Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Every organization should be using a CRM system, and HubSpot’s is a powerful platform that’s easy to use. Track your interactions with contacts, new deals and customers. You can also track sales, conversion points and estimate sales volumes.
Why we like it…
HubSpot’s sales platform is free, powerful and cloud-based so it’s always online. The company has put a significant investment into their CRM product and they’ve made it free, even if you don’t use their marketing platform. HubSpot CRM helps your sales team stay organized and provides management with great visibility of sales activities.
Check out these tools and let us know what you think! We hope you find them as useful as we do. Have questions? Feel free to contact us.
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