Best Productivity Tools For Businesses

In our digital world, there are so many tools out there. But you may be feeling overwhelmed with the number of choices and wondering, “Which are the best productivity tools for me and my business?” In this post, I’m going to show you the best productivity tools for business.

[PROJECT MANAGEMENT] Monday.com

I have tried many project management tools over the years, however, none have come close to Monday.com.

Monday is a clean interface, simple to use and is perfect for obtaining line of sight on all your projects. It has multiple purposes or can be used in a variety of different ways:

• Project management
• Personal to-do task manager
• Recruitment manager
• Sales CRM
• Marketing tasks
• Finance Meetings notes
• Meetings notes and next actions

PRO TIP: Monday has many 3rd party app integrations and can be set up with other productivity apps like Evernote, Slack and your Outlook/Gmail calendar. If you use any of these apps, it saves you time having to ‘double-dump’ or enter information twice. Simply email something to your Monday board and it’s there. Or sync your Evernote notes with Monday and it appears in the relevant Monday board. Magic.

[NOTE-TAKING] Evernote

Widely considered as one of the best note-taking apps. Evernote has stood the test of time, despite criticism of the past couple of years for its slow advances in the productivity space. However, recent advances have shown it still remains as one of the best productivity tools out there.

My whole life is in Evernote. I’m not joking. Everything personal and professional is in Evernote.

With a clean and simple interface, you can create notebooks for every purpose and create notes in each notebook. Some of my notebooks include:

• Business Inbox
• Personal Inbox
• Personal Development
• [X] Company Turnaround
• Someday Maybe (my Bucket List)
• Personal Documents etc

In every meeting, I open my Evernote and take notes. Have you ever seen one of your team members in a meeting taking notes on a scruffy notepad? Does it fill you with confidence that they will actually look at those notes after the meeting? Do you sometimes wonder if they will lose that notebook? I have personally seen some team members take out a piece of scrap paper from their pockets and take notes on it. When I looked closer, the paper was letterheaded with a hotel’s name on it! That’s not organised or productive. That’s dangerous. 

With Evernote being a cloud-based app, you can rest assured that your notes are always safe and can be accessed from a web browser or an app on any device. Oh, and it looks great in Dark Mode.

PRO TIP: You can email things into Evernote. The software assigns you your own unique Evernote email address. You can tell Evernote which notebook you want that email to go into. Pretty cool, eh?

[TASK MANAGER] Todoist

Todoist is simply wonderful. Again, there are so many to-do apps out there but there’s just something about Todoist.

Again, clean and simple interface. Easy to use. You can organise your tasks into different ‘projects’, assign dates and times. The software also sends you nice motivational messages and congratulates you when you’ve achieved a certain amount of tasks. Another great motivator is that you can set goals for yourself. Not too shabby.

PRO TIP: Sync your Todoist with other 3rd party apps for maximum productivity. By syncing it with things like Slack will ensure you can easily collect tasks without having to double dump.

[COMMUNICATION] Slack

You must have heard of Slack. It’s the best comms app out there! With so much functionality and automation, it’s hard to wonder how we ever got on without it.

You can create ‘Slack channels’ which are kind of like Whatsapp groups. Therefore your comms are clean and organised. I have various Slack channels for different teams – Finance, Sales, Leadership etc. That way you can also make sure that sensitive information goes to the right people. Also, this means that people aren’t getting bombarded and overloaded with too many messages.

If you go onto Slack, you’ll also find that your email traffic dies down. For some reason, I have also found that people don’t tend to abuse Slack either. Overall, since switching to Slack, my overall message traffic has come down. 

PRO TIP: Set reminders in Slack to tell you or your teams to do something. For example, send and end of day report, an end of week email, attend a team meeting etc.

There you have it. My best productivity tools to help you and your business get after it! All of the above has so many free tutorials on YouTube that you can check out. To be honest, part of the fun is to hop on each platform and start playing around with it. 

Have fun!