You’ll want to maximize your productivity tools if you want to make the most out of your small business day. You can use productivity tools for all sorts of things, but maybe you’re looking for professional development for yourself, or an app that will help you stay organized at work. Whatever you’re looking for, there is a productivity tool sure to fit the bill.
In this review, you will find a list of amazing productive tools that will help you manage your affairs more accurately and effectively.
Evernote
Best note-taking tool for employees who constantly need to jot things down.
Evernote is a centralized place to store all your notes, documents, images, and brain dump into. It’s accessible on all your devices, so you can see your notes and make new ones from anywhere. The Evernote Google extension even lets you clip information from web pages right to your Evernote notebook.
You can take notes either by typing them or through voice-to-audio. Evernote will automatically save and sync your notes to your account. This increases productivity by eliminating the need to cover your monitor with sticky notes—you can simply use the search function in Evernote and find exactly what you’re looking for within seconds.
Because you can access Evernote from anywhere, you can jot things down as they come to your head so you won’t forget them by the time you get back into the office. This is especially helpful if you’re constantly jumping between devices.
Integration ideas:
- Integrate with RingCentral and simply attach your Evernote notes in your RingCentral conversations for quick reference.
- Integrate with Gmail or Outlook to save documents directly from your emails to your centralized Evernote notebook.
- Integrate with Google Drive to drop your Google Drive files right into Evernote to add context to your documents.
Infinity
One of the most important things when it comes to productivity is for the team to be on the same page and in sync at all times. And that’s exactly what Infinity can help you with.
Infinity is an all-in-one work management software that can help you keep all of your projects, tasks, documents, contacts, leads, and everything else work-related in a single place, and ensure that you and your team stay on top of your tasks and be productive on a daily basis.
Top Features:
- Task Management
- Team Collaboration
- Multiple Views, Including Gantt & Form
- Document Management
- Time Tracking with Clockify
- Public Boards
RingCentral
Best all-in-one team messaging, video conferencing, and cloud phone tool for teams who need to streamline their communications.
RingCentral is a cloud-based all-in-one communication platform that gives you messaging, video conferencing, and a phone system—in one app:
It lets you connect securely with your team, prospects, and customers over the internet using your smartphone, tablet, or computer with enterprise-level voice quality.
Not only does this eliminate the need for a whole bunch of expensive office equipment, but it gives your customers the impression that you’re in a big office while in fact, you have the freedom to work from anywhere.
At RingCentral, we get that sometimes less is more when it comes to apps. Studies show that 69% of employees switch back and forth between up to 10 apps in a single hour, with some switching between up to 15 apps. If this sounds familiar, then you know all that context switching can overwhelm employees and kill productivity as a result.
RingCentral’s app was designed to unify your team’s messaging, video conferencing, and cloud phone into a single platform, so employees don’t need to constantly toggle between different communications apps and instead focus their energy on the tasks that will ultimately grow your business (like closing deals).
Oh, and not only do you have all your communication channels in one place, you can also create and assign tasks in the app. Set a due date, attach any files for context, even color-code the task if you need to:
Integration ideas:
- Integrate with Salesforce to make and receive phone calls, log calls, schedule video meetings, and take notes directly from your Salesforce account.
- Integrate with Google Chrome to schedule a RingCentral meeting within the RingCentral for Google Chrome extension and invite with Google Calendar.
- Integrate with Slack to post RingCentral meeting details right into a chat.
Sanebox
Best email organization tool for teams that have a whole lot of email and not enough time to sort through them or those that want to prioritize their emails automatically.
Sanebox is the personal assistant everyone wishes they had to clean up their email inbox for them. It uses smart filtering to automatically sort your emails into different folders based on importance, so you can effectively focus your time on the high-importance emails first.
It does this by analyzing your email history to figure out which emails you care about and which ones you don’t so much. It’ll then move the not-so-important emails to a @SaneLater folder which hides all your meh emails out of sight until you have time to look at them. (Or until you ruthlessly hit “Send to Trash.” Y’know, whichever.)
It also saves any email attachments in the cloud for you and gives you the ability to snooze emails until you’re ready to look at them, to help you avoid distractions.
Google Drive
Best collaborative file sharing and storage tool for teams that find themselves misaligned or lacking a source of truth.
Google Drive is the best free file sharing, document collaboration, and file storage tool out there. You get 15 GB of storage on the free plan, which is pretty awesome (beats Dropbox, another popular option that only gives you 2 GB on its free plan).
If you’re going to use Google Drive, you may as well take full advantage of the suite of Google Workspace productivity tools that come with it, including Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Switch out your old-school Microsoft Office programs for these and enjoy real-time collaboration like never before, like commenting and team chat right on any document. All changes are recorded in the document history, including who made them and when, providing your team with a single source of truth rather than siloed documents on individual team member’s devices.
No more having to email documents back and forth and call it “collaboration.” No more confusion about which document is the most up to date. And a whole lot more productivity.
Google Drive also has a handy Backup and Sync feature that can automatically back up any files you save on your computer to Google Drive and let you access them without having to open the web app. Just another way Google Drive lets you find everything in one place.
Integration ideas:
- Integrate with RingCentral to reduce the need to switch between multiple apps while working in the RingCentral app.
- Integrate with Evernote to consolidate different types of content from Google Drive into a single, living note.
- Integrate with Trello to add a file in Google Drive to a new card in Trello.
Trello
Best project management tool for teams with a lot of items in their backlog or a lot of pieces moving at one time to track where each task is at a glance.
Perfect for visual organizers, a Trello board is made up of multiple swimlanes to represent the different steps in your workflow (e.g., “To do,” “In progress,” and “Done”). You can simply drag and drop tasks or “cards” to the appropriate swim lane as they move from one stage to the next, giving you a birds-eye view of where all your tasks are at.
Cards can be assigned to people and be given due dates. They can be filled in with more details and even contain subtasks to break large tasks down into smaller ones.
Trello can help your team be more productive by serving as a centralized place to drop tasks into. Because everyone’s tasks are in one place, it provides great visibility to your team so they all know what everyone else is working on and stay on the same page.
Your small business has big goals, and while those goals are easy to remember, the minuscule steps that go into making them a reality aren’t so much. Trello can help with that.
Integration ideas:
- Integrate with RingCentral to get your Trello notifications and tag coworkers directly from within the RingCentral app.
- Integrate with Google Drive to drag and drop files and folders to Trello cards.
- Integrate with Slack to create Trello cards right from Slack messages.
Asana
Getting work done on a remote basis is a piece of cake with Asana. This productivity tool rocks tons of goodies that will help organize and manage projects and tasks no matter where in the world you are. Create a plan, stay on track and never miss a deadline again.
Since we are focusing on free tools, Asana’s Basic kit will do the trick. Keep in mind, this option is for freelancers and individuals exclusively. Some of the features include collaborating with up to fifteen team members, calendar view, unlimited projects, unlimited file storage with a limit of 100MB per file and more. Even though you do not have to pay a fee, Asana still delivers tons of great features to profit from. Lastly, you can seamlessly upgrade to any of the pro plans at any time you want.
Conclusion
Everything that will make your business run more efficiently can be delivered with free productivity tools. But, why invest money when you can save good money with free good. I’m not sure how many of you are aware of this but there are tonnes of FREE productivity tools to improve your efficiency at work. They are also very popular for students throughout the world because they are available on Android phones which is amazing.