There are so many productivity tools, apps, sites and services available to businesses nowadays that it can be hard to know which will help you or your team work more efficiently. We often rely on word of mouth for recommendations.
So we thought we’d share a selection of our favourites.
The list doesn’t include the usual suspects, like Xero, Receiptbank, Office.com, Zoom, Slack etc. which are pretty well known and loved already!
Canva
https://www.canva.com/
Canva is to design what Squarespace is to website creation. It’s a free tool (with paid options) that allows you to quickly whip up great looking designs using their templates. The site offers designs for invites, posters, social media, presentations, documents and other visual content. The free templates give you options to drag and drop in your own images and logos, and change colours to fit your branding. Whilst it’s no substitute for a bespoke piece of work, it has some really great designs that you can tweak for quick pieces of work.
Draw.io
https://www.draw.io/
We use the freely available draw.io to mock up flow diagrams, which can be particularly helpful when working with technical teams to help visualise a process without having to spend ages writing it out. The tool allows you to connect and store the flows directly in office.com but also has export options such as png or pdf. Creating a process diagram is actually really easy and the way that connecting lines snap from box to box is weirdly addictive. Another option I’ve heard of but yet to try out is Whimsical; https://whimsical.co which I hear is really intuitive.
ChatGPT
https://chat.openai.com
No tool on this list has generated as much buzz as ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology. It can answer questions and assist you with tasks, such as composing emails and code. It isn’t the only free-to-use large language model based chatbot, but is certainly the most popular to date.
To access ChatGPT visit chat.openai.com and create an OpenAI account. Free use is limited and you can buy ChatGPT Plus (priced at $20 per month as of September 2023). The paid subscription gives you a number of benefits including faster response times, no disruption during peak hours and early access to new features. There is plenty of information out there to help you write effective ChatGPT prompts, which will help you get the best answers. ChatGPT can help you with repetitive tasks, write emails, build code and produce content. As large language models develop we can expect them to play an increasingly big role in our work lives. We currently use ChatGPT to help with written content and we’d like to use it more to help with
1Password
I have a confession to make. A few years ago I used the same password for almost everything (I know, I’m going to hell). After a security scare I decided it was time to secure up my passwords. 1Password means I have a unique and strong password for every single login, but that they are all safely stored. The vaults option in 1Password is great for small businesses, as we can have our own personal vaults, and then have a separate vault for shared information.
Calm
Mindfulness and taking time to relax is such an important part of cultivating a healthy work life balance.
It’s actually not easy to stop working when you have a mostly work from home setup; there is temptation to be always checking emails or “just doing a bit more” This can be damaging to our mental wellbeing and so we encourage everyone takes some time to stop and unwind. There is a paid subscription to Calm, but equally for someone looking to test the idea of mindfulness exercises there are a significant number of sessions that are available for free.
Coolors.co
I’m pretty sure this service has so many more capabilities than what we use it for. We’ve used Coolors to quickly create colour palettes.
If, for example, you’re designing a slide deck for a presentation and want to include a brand colour but need a complementary palette you can use Coolors to find these. Insert the HEX code of your colour, ‘lock’ it in and then keep hitting that space bar until you find a palette that you like!
Mailinator
This is a bit of a niche one but can be really handy for testing with multiple email addresses or helping create user accounts with anonymous email addresses.
Mailinator allows you to instantly create a virtual email inbox and temporary email address. This is useful if you are signing up user accounts and/or email addresses that only need to be used once.
Sli.do
When we hosted The Unconference we did a lot of research about which audience voting tools were on the market, and which would work for us. Sli.do is our absolute favourite.
The basic tool package is free and setting up a new poll is so easy. It’s a great tool to use in meetings, workshops or larger events (although you should be mindful of the user limits and make sure you upgrade to a paid version for large audiences). The tool is also useful to encourage audience participation, as people love the opportunity to submit anonymous questions!
Miro
https://www.miro.com
In need of a good ‘ideation’ session but can’t get everyone in the same room. Then Miro is the tool that can help. Miro is like a virtual whiteboard. It is great for getting your team together to generate ideas, run workshops, visualise workflows and generally collaborate as though everyone was in the same room.
We recently used Miro for some cross-industry collaboration exercises, which involved more than 20 people all submitting and voting on their ideas. Miro is also a really useful tool to encourage participation from everyone in a workshop and also to anonymise input. It’s really easy to use and their is a free-version available for new users.
Notion
https://www.notion.so
Notion started life as a note-taking tool, but has grown to a fully connected workspace that allows you to share documents, content, tasks, files and templates. Notion is a fantastic tool for collaboration on documents and for a centralised place to allow colleagues to access files and information.
We have used Notion to create long-form documents that need to be curated and edited by multiple colleagues. It has also proved really useful to create and store cross-company information like employee and client directories. Information can be locked to specific users or shared with everyone in your workspace. Again, there is a free version to help you get started.
We’re always on the lookout for new tools, apps, sites and services that can help small businesses like ours, if you want to add your own recommendations please feel free to do so in the comments box below!