Sometimes you need a little help from your apps.
It’s that time of year when the holidays make life a little crazy. I get excited about all the activities I have planned and sometimes that makes it hard for me to focus on work. Don’t get me wrong, I love the work. I am fortunate to be able to produce meaningful work for my clients every day. It’s even cooler that I’m helping businesses achieve their goals. But I’m human and sometimes I get caught up in the excitement of the season so I rely on certain tools to make my life easier. Here are a few of my favorite apps and websites and why I love them:
Asana
Asana is a project management tool accessible through the web and a mobile app. Binary Star Systems uses it to manage client and company projects. I am a huge fan of how easy it is to use and we rely on it every day. My favorite thing about Asana is the ability to view my tasks by due date. Sometimes I feel like I have so much to get done but I go into Asana and view what really needs to get done and then I don’t feel overwhelmed.
Wave Receipts
Around the holidays the receipts pile up. They aren’t all for business but I hate to lose the ones that are. The Wave Receipts app lets me quickly take a photo of my business receipts and automatically sends it to my Wave Account. Then I get to throw the receipt out instead of letting it simmer in the bottom of my purse until who knows when. And I have a confession, I used to be the person who would keep a box of business receipts and process them at the end of the year. But guess what? I don’t do that anymore! I’d like to tell you this was a New Year’s Resolution that was followed through. Nope, I just got lucky that Wave Receipts exists.
TripIt
Have you ever gotten off a plane and couldn’t find the email for your car rental reservation? I have. In fact, the Gmail app on my phone did such a poor job searching for my reservation email I had to get a new reservation (I couldn’t even remember which company I had booked with!). The TripIt app automatically scans your email inbox for any reservations and automatically organizes them by city and date. So now when I land in a new city I just open up TripIt and voilà! all of my reservations are there. This is seriously convenient.
Swayy
I manage a lot of different social media accounts for clients. We all know part of being socially friendly is not always talking about your business. So, I like to share information that is relevant to my clients’ target market, things like relevant industry news and events. It takes time to find good content so I turn to Swayy. By analyzing my clients’ data inventory and user behavior, Swayy delivers personalized recommendations. For example, on the Facebook page for my personal blog Culture Seen I like to share news about the art world. Swayy analyzes the visitors to the Culture Seen Facebook account and recommends articles about artists, museums and galleries they think the Culture Seen audience will be interested in. Sometimes this is a life saver when I don’t have time to do my own research but I want to be active with my Facebook followers.
KeePassX
I know there are a lot of different password management programs to choose from out there. My advice to you is just pick one and make sure you use it. We manage tons of passwords for clients at Binary Star Systems and we are adamant about keeping that information secure. I can’t memorize all those passwords anyway so I rely on KeePassX every single day to safely store the passwords I need. I realize KeePassX looks like old technology but it’s secure and I’ve been using it since it looked less dated.
Pinterest Pin Button
The internet is an amazing place but it can also be the biggest time suck. I find marketing, design and technology articles all the time that look so interesting and I don’t want to lose them. I started using the Pinterest Pin Button browser extension so anytime I see an interesting article or site I don’t have time to investigate I pin it for later. I fall down the internet rabbit hole a little bit less now.
There you have it, a few of my favorite things. What are yours? Tell me by commenting below.