12 new must-have productivity tools for the small business owner
We all know Slack, Dropbox, and Evernote as the tools for boosting different productivity aspects of your life as a small business owner. It is now 2019, and they have all been around for nearly a decade now.
But what is new if you are looking for ways to boost your business? This article lets you know how the best new apps can help you as a small business owner boost your productivity.
- Boost your business: How to make your business life more professional
- Personal time management: How to manage your time so you become more efficient
- Manage your projects: What are the best ways of managing your project in an easy way
Four new apps to boost your business
Workspace
Facebook decided to enter the enterprise market with a product called Workspace. They position it as an enterprise social networking platform. This means that the platform enables employees to collaborate instantly, much as Slack does.
Workspace has video and text chat options and comes with a separate phone app for both IOS and Android
Facebook makes a great deal out of explaining that you get the look and feel that you know from your personal Facebook experiences, but in a way where there is no link between your professional and private account.
The big question here is whether or not enterprises trust Facebook to be the carrier of their potential business-critical knowledge. Knowing how Facebook always seems to uses data in their favor.
Canecto
Canecto is the easy to read automated web analytics report, that lets you boost conversions. Powered by A.I and Machine Learning they analyze your entire website and your users’ behavior.
It provides unique insights into how you should improve your website according to user behavior and preferences. The great thing about Canecto is that you don’t have to spend time doing any web analytics or looking at tons of data. This is all taken care of.
It tells you exactly how to convert more users by giving actionable recommendations within areas such as User Journey, User Experience, Content, and Marketing strategies. The best thing is that it predicts the outcome of all the recommendations. Thereby, you will know how much can be gain from individual efforts.
Canecto saves you an enormous amount of time, money and wasted effort by calculating what is best for your business.
As a business owner, we all need to have material to promote our business. Most often through online channels, but sometimes on print too.
Canva
Canva is an excellent tool for helping you do this. It is a free online tool, that comes with a lot of pre-designed templates for the most used design productions. Such as Facebook ads and posts, Adwords banner or poster design. This makes it easy for you to produce professional-looking material easy without using expensive tools or by hiring an expert to do it for you.
The platform lets you upload and save your designs, photos, so you have easy access next time you are doing a design project.
Canva is free to use, but it does come with build in a feature that lets you order a print of your design at a cost.
Boostnote
Boostnote is a note-taking application for developers. It requires that you install it on your computer. This makes it possible to run the app offline.
What makes the application special is its ability to take notes in the same format that you code. This makes it easy for you to convert your notes to actual code at a later stage. It also makes it possible for you to keep track of your notes in a more organized way.
The program runs on Mac, Windows and on Linux.
Four new personal time management apps
Forest apps
The theory behind it is called the Pomodoro Technique (it is a time management method). The idea is that you need a focus period (about 25 minutes) and then a break where your brain can online. So the app tries to help you time-box the 25 minutes that you need to be productive.
The idea is that your smartphone takes too much of your productive time, and it means that you do not reach your full potential.
So the Forest apps monitor the time you do not use your phone. The longer you do not use it — the more trees you grown. And that is your motivating factor.
The growing process stops as soon as you pick up your phone. This should motivate you not to touch it. They even support Trees for the Future foundation — so there is a link to the real world.
The App is free and comes in a paid version that cost about $5 depending on your local app store prices.
Simple note
Sometimes simplicity is key. Simplenote is a back to basics program that is made by the people behind WordPress. It does what it says and it does it well. Lets you take simple notes that can be accessed via all the platforms that you use.
The simplicity is also the platforms biggest drawback. If your needs expand more then taking notes, then the limitations of the platform start to show. Also, the design is not top of class compared to others in the market.
Zenkit
Zenkit is a Swiss army knife productivity tool. By this, we mean that the strength of the application is to select the best workflow process view, that fits the task that you need to do. So if you brainstorm you use the mindmap view and if you need to project manage a job then you use the kanban view.
The different views that are available are lists, kanban view, table calendar, and mindmap.
This concept means that Zenkit is more a personal planning tool with team integrations than a conventional toll that starts with an overall project view. It does not say that Zenkit doesn’t have team collaboration features, it is just not a core strength.
On top of that, the tool is easy to use and has a beautiful design. It runs on all platforms as well.
Chaos Control
The Chaos Control app is a personal management app based on its own method. It claims that setting a goal and striving to achieve them it the key to successfully manage your time in the best possible way.
This concept has dictated how the app is designed, which features it has and how the looks. There is a strong focus on setting goals, breaking them down to tasks and following upon them. The app also builds an interrelationship between your responsibility to help you decide the best order that they must be accomplished in.
Chaos Control works across all digital platforms and comes with a free 14 days trial. The depends on your region, but expect it to be around $ 10 for premium access.
Four apps that let you manage your business
Monday.com
Many project management tools look like an engineer has designed them. This is not the case with Monday.com. It looks like a designer has created it.
Monday.com is a new project and task management platform. It stands out as a tool that is very easy to use, simple and flexible. It also runs across all platforms. The main features are its design, its visual presentations of your task and projects, and its ease of use.
The simplicity and design are also its most significant drawbacks. They put a natural limit on how much you can customize workflows. So for more demanding project type works, there are better alternatives.
Intercom
Intercom is a sales, marketing, and support tool. It stands out by not being a conventional CRM system like Freshchat, Zoho, Crisp, or Zendesk because of their tech focus and their focus on the needs of their different roles in a sales set up.
They are big on letting bots do a lot of your customer communication. This approach is cheap, efficient and does not require many resources on your side.
You should be aware of their price model. It could tend to be on the high site as soon as you start getting volume through the platform
Parabola
Parabola helps you automate your manual data processes. The platform is designed to help you automate your marketing data, which you will often find in silos, because of the many different systems and sources that you are probably working with.
Parabola helps you automate this by building your own workflows in a drag and drop interface. You can then schedule them to run as it fits your routines. All this is done without code or spreadsheets.
You could say it works the same way as a Zap does from Zapier — only the focus here is more cumbersome data processes.
Discord
Discord is known as a gamers communication tool that works the same way as a Slack-Skype hybrid. So why consider it a business tool?
For once, it covers both voice and text. This makes it a more obvious choice than Slak for managing remote or distance workers since the voice part brings a dimension that Slack does not do well. And it is much better on the text part than Skype.
Another reason why you should consider it is because of its user interface. It is more comfortable to set up groups than Skype and Slack.
Unlike Slack that can cost you $8 per team member, then you should know that Discord is free to use (their business case is ads). So that would work if you are on a budget.
Originally published at www.canecto.com on January 18, 2019.
