My children are “spirited” – and what I mean by that is that they’re noisy, imaginative, questioning (oh so many questions!) and essentially I cannot think straight when they’re around so I need to be super-organised about what I’m doing.
Because I’m a single mom – I don’t get that time when someone else can take over for an hour – and by the time my kids go to bed I’m dead on my feet. This means I need to make every second of my working day count.
To help me do this I’m going to share with you my top tools I use to keep a hold of all the mental load, save me a heap load of time, make me more productive and ultimately keep this ship on course!
1. Click-Up
I would be lost without my old buddy Click-Up!
It’s a user-friendly organisational app which allows me to organise and plan my business by areas (e.g., content creation, website updates, launch planning, etc., etc.), put deadlines on these, add notes to the tasks and generally organise the crap out of stuff.
I can see what’s coming up, what needs to be done and horror of horrors – it turns red when a task is overdue!
Because it works on my phone and syncs everywhere, it means that when I’m out and about I can quickly add a note which I will no doubt have forgotten about if I intend to go home and work on it – so it means it can carry the mental load for me and I can deal with it later.
There is a free version which is great – but I use the upgraded version as it gives me a geeky project management style Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a fancy-shmancy way of saying “wall calendar” to all intents and purposes. What I find it useful for is project slippage – because tasks are dependent upon the successful completion of the previous – this tool means that I can shift the entire clump along without needing to go back and re-work everything.
2. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a email auto-responder which allows me to set up welcome emails, newsletters and sales funnels. You can create landing pages, optin forms and even sell through it!
I’ve tried some others at the lower end of the market (e.g., Mailchimp and Mailerlite), I’ve also tried GetResponse (pretty impressed!) and FloDesk, but I am always drawn back to ConvertKit because it’s so intuitive to use and frankly I don’t have the time or inclination to battle through a zillion help-files and Google every single step I need to take to do something and ConvertKit simply WORKS!
It has clean lines, easy automation and segmentation set-up and what I really loves it that you can upload any freebie optin there so that it is hosted and downloaded by ConvertKit rather than you having to store that file elsewhere. It’s just easier to keep it all in one place.
Unfortunately ConvertKit doesn’t have a free option – but it’s one of those business expenses that when you’re first starting out and trying to save every $ the cost might make you wince – but it’s worth every penny in terms of simplicity and ease of use.
*April 2021 – CK DOES now have a free option up to 1000 subscribers. You won’t get a ton of automations and sequences with this – it’s just basic newsletters + landing pages. BUT… if you’re trying out some new ideas and are still figuring out your path and want to keep costs low whilst you’re building your list – this is a no-brainer for me and super-easy to upgrade when the time comes.
3. G-Suite (Google Workplace
I used to love having all my apps stand-alone on my PC and I love the simplicity and clean lines of Office Outlook… but I have a terrible, terrible habit.
I KILL MOTHERBOARDS!
Which means, every time I killed another laptop – despite having backups which were annoying and arduous to restore – and using cloud services, I lost SO much work and so many emails, I just had to make the jump and go with Google.
I have NO idea why I didn’t do it years ago because it’s very cheap and you get the document processing tools you need along with a robust email system and cloud-storage space.
TOP TIP: If you have a few email addresses associated with your domain – e.g., alex@ + info@ + support@ – you don’t need a separate account for each of these values. You can add them as an alias email address to the account, so you’ll actually receive ALL associated emails within that same workspace account.
BONUS TIP for when you’re lying in bed too tired to even type on your phone but you have a spark of brilliance!:
“hey Siri, please make a note for me “blah blah blah”! 😁👍
