You can’t actually save time and use it later like you can with money, but you can be more effective with your perishable commodity. There are a ton of apps and techniques to conserve time. I am giving you the insights on the ones I use and the ones my clients report using to create efficiencies in our work production. I didn’t review thousands of them and didn’t spend my time researching the best ones for you but these will, without a doubt, be lifesavers for you.
Please note you can have all the apps and techniques in the world, but unless you learn how to use them and then incorporate them into your daily routine, they will remain ineffective tools for you.
Zapier – App Communicator
It is this amazing tool that helps your apps communicate with each other. You can use it for FREE or pay a little more for more bells and whistles. Here are a few of my favorite automatic work flows they call “zaps”.
- Add my *vCita lead appointments directly to my Google Calendar
- Add my Office 365 appointments to my Google Calendar
- Tweet my latest blog post in WordPress
- Tweet my latest blog post to my Facebook Page
- Add a new *Stripe customer to Quickbooks
- Add new *AWeber subscribers to Excel
- The list of possibilities goes on and on!
*vCita is a business management tool for small businesses
*AWeber is an email marketing management tool
*Stripe is an online payment system like PayPal
You can learn more about these additional starred tools by clicking the icon below:
They are like free assistants. Cortana for Microsoft users and Siri for Apple users. They make calls for you, find data on the web, find notes in your computers, create calendar events, send emails and more. The capabilities of an automated assistant like these two will increase in the upcoming years giving everyone more opportunities to delegate tasks and save time.
Google Calendar – Online Calendar
This isn’t a new resource but is vital to using time wisely. As a coach, I am constantly advising clients to schedule their time for all of their tasks. This includes e-mail checking, blogging, social media posting, breaks, self-care, lunch, attending meetings, business planning, etc. The most successful people in business schedule everything and your calendar should be booked every day.
Buffer – Social Media Scheduler
There are a number of them to include Buffer, Hootsuite, MeetEdgar, EveryPost, SocialOomph, SproutSocial and more. Each has their own twist on scheduling. It is the process of scheduling out your posts that will save you huge amounts of time that would otherwise disappear waiting for sites to pull up and engaging with them regularly. Avoiding the trips into social media will give you more time back than you realize.
Office 365 – Email Manager
This is a set of office applications to increase your productivity. Its intelligent email can sort your mail by priority and in almost any way you can imagine. It also allows you to reply without opening the email. O365’s SharePoint saves and organizes notes with ease and it has a great search feature as well. The O365 planner helps with project management workflow allowing you to easily share files and assign tasks. The more you understand it, the more it works for you.
The old saying, ‘time is money’ has some truth to it. If you spend more effort saving minutes you will be less stressed finding more of them. I encourage you to spend more of your energy on figuring out how to shave time off from every task, even the tiny tasks.
Virginia Phillips is an author, speaker, coach and the owner of The Academy of Entrepreneurial Excellence. She is a communication and leadership expert and recipient of the VIP Woman of the Year 2016 for excellence and locally nominated for the “Best of 2016”. Read her interview on LadyBossBlogger to learn more about her.