Productivity Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed

These productivity tools are perfect for business owners. But, for the purposes of this article, you don’t need to own a company of 100+ staff. Or even 5. If you are a one-man (or one-woman) show, a freelancer, or a consultant, you are a business owner.

Many of the tools mentioned here will probably be more applicable to the latter. But I’m sure you’ll come across something useful. Whether you’ve been running your business for 5+ years, or only just started.

As an entrepreneur, you’ll know that growth and improvement are continuous. And we always have plenty of opportunities to fine-tune our processes and productivity.

These are just some of the tools I use daily. Or in some cases weekly, or monthly. They greatly improve the efficiency of my output.

Whether that’s allowing me to structure the days to be more productive.

Or to make me a better writer.

Or to make sure I get around to all those urgent and important tasks. Or those not urgent but important tasks that tend to sit on your to-do list for months until your enthusiasm dies.

The tools listed here all have free versions (many of which satisfy my needs).

For full disclosure, some of the links below are referral ones. I’ve noted that down for each relevant link. You can use them if you do wish to upgrade and get the additional benefits of the premium version of one of the tools. Usually, that means we both get some kind of a kick-back in a way of a longer free period, a discount, or some other perk. Win-win.

So as a Russian saying goes, let me stop yanking the cat by its tail and get to the list.

Trello

When you are selling your services at scale, you can lose track of some ‘smaller’ tasks. That’s why you need a system to help you manage them. While lots of designers rave about Notion – keeping all their eggs in one basket, so to speak, personally, I’ve always disliked anything that tries to be everything. Trello on the other hand has always kept the core offering simple – track your to-do’s (or projects) in a clean place. I use the Kanban-like layout for mine (but you can change the layouts). Keeping track of projects on the go, my personal to-do’s, list of people or clients to follow up, passion projects, and more. When running a more ‘serious’ business or projects that require tracking of more complexity, you can always upgrade to a premium account for things like timelines, Gantt charts, team management, and more. When I was running bigger teams, we had more complex tools like Asana for managing the overall projects’ workflows, but I still relied on Trello for managing my own workflow.

ProofHub

As I mentioned above, with larger teams it will still make sense to lean into a full-blown project management tool. I used Asana. And I ‘kissed plenty of frogs’ to get to it, including Wrike, and Monday. The former two were powerful, but that’s also what made them extremely bulky and complex to integrate into our studio workflow. I was also never fond of the UX/UI for most of the tools used. Recently, to help a client of mine who’s growing a larger team, I’ve been searching for other alternatives and come across ProofHub, and it looks like a great alternative to the ‘bigger’ players mentioned. Especially due to their clean interface (pleasing to a designer), and a distinct pricing model – charing a flat monthly fee, regardless of the users you have.

Pomello

This nifty little app for your Mac or PC will help you reclaim those hours ‘surfing the web’, or hours you don’t even remember how/where you lost. Pomello is essentially a time-tracking device, that uses the Pomodoro Technique – helping you split your day into more productive time slots. It’s useful for making sure you don’t go over the hours quoted to your client, or for having clarity around how much time each particular project takes. But what it’s most useful for is keeping you accountable for your time. The timer clearly tells you when it’s time to work (usually in 90 min sprints of focused work). And when it’s time to take a break and stretch. Something many of us ‘workaholics’ and creatives tend to forget.

WeTransfer

If you work in the creative industries, chances are, you need to share large files with your clients, collaborators, and suppliers. And I haven’t been able to find a better, easier, and more nicely designed file transfer system (not that I’d looked very hard, once I’d discovered WeTransfer). You can send files of up to 2GB with a free account, and get notifications for when your files get downloaded. As you might have guessed, the premium version has better storage capacity, longer file holding and expiry limits, and more. Of course, if you’d rather support a larger corporation, you can always opt for the Google Workspace (Google Drive, custom domain emails, and more) – but I always liked an underdog.

Wise (referral link)

Naturally, once you’ve completed your client projects, you need to be able to get paid. If your clients are all local, it’s easy to transfer funds from their bank account to yours. But, if like me, you work with businesses from different countries, Wise (formerly TransferWise) is a great way to accept payments. Comparatively to PayPal, the transaction fees, and the currency conversion fees are much lower. And the payee can choose many different ways to pay, once they signup.

Grammarly (referral link)

I started actively creating content for my website (and Medium) over two years ago. Originally, it was a way to share what I know. But it also became a creative outlet and a way to improve my writing. Putting in my 10,000 hours, and so forth. And you shouldn’t underestimate the benefits of improving your writing either! A consistent writing habit can help you become a better communicator, meaning you can ‘sell in’ your ideas easier. Grammarly picks up on ways to improve your writing, with prompts on correctness, clarity, and more. And the best thing about it is that you can install plugins to help you write better emails, social media content, or anything else where you’d like to sound as smart as you feel.

Otter.ai (referral link)

I’d always considered myself as someone with a good memory (at least short-term memory). So remembering the key points of a short 1hr discovery meeting with a client was relatively easy and error-free. However, once I’d started running workshops, many of which would easily surpass 3 hours, and often with multiple participants, remembering things became more challenging. Otter.ai is a tool I opted for to record and then transcribe the meetings. I’d found it especially useful for strategic brand workshops, as I can assign several ‘speakers’ to each bit of dialogue that you can then sort through. When reviewing the transcriptions I tend to find one or two golden nuggets that I’d overlooked in the meetings.

Miro

Speaking of running workshops. The days of setting up live, face-to-face workshops, and brainstorms might be over. Or they might return. But what I can tell you for sure, is that remote, online workshops can at times be even more efficient and productive. Everyone can participate from the comfort of their living room, coffee shop, co-working space, or wherever. And I’d found Miro to be a perfect online environment to collaborate with clients and partners. It’s essentially a digital whiteboard where multiple people can engage with each other. Completing exercises. Brainstorming. Ideating. The possibilities are endless. Other similar products are out there, but being a designer, I was drawn to Miro’s pleasing User Interface and overall ‘feel’.

Skillshare (referral link)

While not technically a productivity app, is something that can improve your productivity, your output, and efficacy. They offer great, bite-sized classes to super-power you as a business owner. Whether that’s setting up your finances better, improving your marketing efforts, or learning how to code, design, animate, illustrate, or any other number of creative skills. Ultimately, the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders are those who know about a lot of different aspects of their business and they continue to improve complementary skills and expertise. Their monthly subscription pricing model means you can watch as many classes as you have time for. Here’s a challenge: how many new skills can you learn during your complimentary trial month?

NordVPN (referral link)

As we all become more remote, we need more tools to make us more productive, connected, and safe. If you’re not familiar with a VPN system, in the simplest terms, it allows your device to act as if you’re accessing the internet from a different location. Essentially, it masks where you are. And this has a range of benefits. When I temporarily relocated to Russia I still needed a way to access my professional network on LinkedIn. A platform that is banned in the country. With a VPN I can still access it securely. Another benefit is your online security – a VPN makes it harder for anyone to steal your personal data and files – especially if you tend to hop on those unprotected cafe wifi’s. NordVPN was my choice after my initial comparisons, as the price is good, and it has a ton of other supplementary products like the password manager, for example.

Anchor.fm

If you’re the kind of entrepreneur who’s looking to build a better personal brand with a higher reach, launching a podcast might be worth considering. When I decided to launch my own podcast in 2020, I’d had no idea of what was involved. Naturally, I’d asked around for a recommendation. I’d spoken to my fellow creators, and of course, Google. Unfortunately, the majority of the options to host and distribute your podcast were costly. And I wasn’t prepared to invest in something I was only ‘trying out’. Luckily, Spotify’s Anchor is free (at the time of writing). Easy to set up and distribute your podcast to the world.

Mailchimp (referral link)

Again, as a builder of a brand (personal or otherwise), you need to have easy access to people whom you serve. You can’t rely on your social media followings or your Facebook group members forever. As they say – you’re on rented land. And say what you will, but building an email list is still one of the most efficient ways to communicate with your customers and have direct access to them when you want to share your offers. I’m a bit biased when it comes to email marketing tools, as I’d been using (and loving) Mailchimp for years. As a designer, you can’t go past their beautiful and easy-to-use email builder and the user-friendliness of the overall tool.

Veed.io

An awesome video creation tool, whether you need to create social media content to grow your audience. Although initially I was less concerned about their video editing tools and was first sold on it because of their awesome automatic subtitle generator. There’s nothing worse than watching an Instagram Story, or an IGTV that has no subtitles. Many of us watch these on mute, meaning that your message is lost. Creating captions/subtitles manually by hand is a hassle. You need to automate the process (and increase your productivity). And this is what Veed.io does best. Nowadays, they have lots of other supplementary tools, like animated GIF conversion, and branded videos.

Special mentions

Here are a few other tools that are worth a mention. Some are nice-to-have, and others are good alternatives to the apps above.

SkyFonts lets you install fonts without the need to manually download and install them yourself, which also keeps the fonts synchronized with any updates. I find it especially handy for installing Google Fonts.

Slack is a great tool to keep your communication productive and efficient, and with a tagline like ‘be less busy’ you can tell why over 10 million people have jumped on.

InVideo is another great platform for creating video content, with ready-made templates and stock footage, it offers plenty of tools for a busy brand builder. Use Coupon ILYA25 to get 25% off your paid plan.

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