5 everyday productivity tools
When kicking off Many Mind Consulting in 2019, I spent some time researching the latest productivity tools on the market to see what would work best for my needs - this article reviews some of the tools I tried and that I’m still using on a daily basis in an attempt to make my days more productive. While some of these tools may exist on other platforms, my experience has been with macOS and iOS, so my experiences mostly reflect that combination. As I started putting this info together the list of tools grew every time I drafted - however I thought best to keep it simple by narrowing to the ones I use everyday and that would improve my productivity and keep it at a 5 minute read!
Email: Shift
Available on Mac, Windows, or Linux - Shift is the desktop app for streamlining your accounts, apps, and workflows. As I typically work with a number of different firms, each with different email addresses, Shift simplifies access to all of these accounts, each in their own space - without getting lost in browser tabs. Once it was setup the benefits were easy to notice, with a different native G-Suite or Outlook icon for each account and the ability to add multiple “apps” for other web based tools that I regularly would use. Shift allows configuration of notifications for each account and has some built-in extensions for third party tools like LastPass and HubSpot allowing you to seamlessly integrate those services into your workspace. The biggest win (after a little of becoming used to), was the ease of finding everything I needed, where I expected it to be.
Scheduling: x.ai
x.ai connects with all your calendars and coordinates the best time to meet with your guests. Trying to sync multiple calendars has historically been something I have not seen an elegant solution for. While the basis of x.ai is using AI via a virtual assistant to schedule meetings, I’ve found that pointing folks I’m trying to schedule a slot with to a webpage for them to choose an open time works well for most cases. You can see what this looks like or even book a meeting with me here. x.ai can sync across open slots for all my calendars and has a multitude of different parameters (times/days of work, number of meetings per day, breather time between meetings etc.). You can even have different meeting types which allow you to configure which calendar you’d like the meeting scheduled from. I can easily estimate this has saved me hundreds of emails that would have been spent setting up times to meet. Reduces the busy work and gets the meeting scheduled sooner.
Contact management: Contacts+
Contacts+: The Best Way to Maintain Your Contacts. I had been using the predecessor to Contacts+, Full Contact a few years back. I had stopped using it, mostly because I didn’t really find myself using the app anymore, but now that I was back in the world of co-ordinating between multiple different accounts, platforms and devices I found it had rebranded (and significantly simplified) as Contacts+. In short I now have one address book across multiple accounts and devices. It provides some neat features around merging and updating contacts based on social media updates or signature blocks and also allows ‘scanning’ of business cards directly from the iOS version of the app. The days of searching in 3 different places for an email address or a number of someone I’m trying to get in contact with are gone!
Phone: Google Voice for business
Stay connected, organized, and on task with an easy-to-use phone solution that fits organizations of any size is the tag line from the Google Voice for business landing page. Call me old school but I like having a telephone on my desk! I like to know there’s a way to call people and not have to worry about bluetooth not working, headphone or cell phone batteries being depleted or a random process slowing down my computer. My desk phone has saved me in these scenarios more times than I’d like to admit. The advancements in teleconferencing and videoconferencing, especially in these times, have been amazing - however sometimes it’s good to have a reliable and simple backup. I previously had a VOIP ‘landline’ service that I had been using for any business calls. I moved over to the Google Voice for business service, ported my number and picked up a Polycom VVX 450 phone and haven’t looked back. Now I have one business number, on my desktop and phone - with alerts/voicemails going straight to my email. The iOS or web app also allows you to send text messages to/from the number - which is a neat feature. The one additional feature that would make this awesome would be the ability to sync Google contacts to the phone’s local address book (now I have my contacts organized) - unfortunately that’s not there yet as far as I can see.
Note Taking: Google Keep
Google Keep: Save your thoughts, wherever you are. Since most meetings are virtual these days I’ve found myself not actually using a notebook and pen anymore. There’s still something quite disengaging about taking notes on a computer or phone during an in-person meeting (a colleague of mine used to always remind me to bring a “prop” to every meeting!). So while I think that the world of notebooks and pens will never go-away, in this new mostly-virtual world I needed a way to keep my notes simple and organized. In days gone past I would have always had a local notepad type app open and I’ve tried many paid tools over the years to aid with organizing my thoughts/notes. More recently I’ve been very happy with the pure simplicity of Google Keep. On either iPhone or browser; or via Shift! - which conveniently allows Google Keep to be a side-bar within each account - so email and notes are side by side. Google has made it very easy to keep notes, search, and organize. Sometimes I get frustrated that it doesn’t have bullet points or formatting features - but mostly I just come back to the fact that I’m using it as a scratch pad - if more features are needed I can always just move to a more appropriate tool. The collaboration features also make it useful to be a team scratch pad during meetings or share ideas and revise with the team. I don't see this as replacing any other collaboration tools that are out there - but if simple and quick are what you need (isn't that the point of being more productive) - then Google Keep checks all the boxes.
Hopefully these thoughts are useful to anyone looking to improve productivity or searching for tools to make life easier, as I come across other things that work for me - I’ll post them here on the Many Mind blog.