8 Productivity tools to keep Business Burnout at bay
I’m always looking for ways to be more efficient. Mainly because I’ve been a good friend of burnout too many times.
For small businesses like ours, and freelancers, we don’t have the hands of a big team to take care of the many moving parts. The accounting. The project management. The diary. The customer service. Sheesh! We’re doing most of it alone.
So, where I can streamline an area of my daily and weekly tasks, I absolutely will.
I’ve tried and tested a lot of tools over the years, and I’ve now got a golden set of tools I can’t live without. If you’re looking to quiet the chaos at your desk too, then this list is for you (omg look at me, poet, didn’t know it). Some are free, some are paid. But for the amount of time you’ll get back in your business, it’s worth getting your coins out.
Here’s 8 of my favourite digital business tools.
Squarespace
blissful Website building
The website platform I recommend to any busy business owner who wants to be able to quickly update a website without relying on a designer/developer. The learning curve is no where near as steep as it is with Wordpress, so you can easily put a site together yourself (coupled with the help of my website checklist).
Experiment with new formats for your services and offerings without too much faff. Add memberships, physical and digital products on a ‘try before you buy’ flex. Or keep your customer emails in the same place as your website for ease and a lot less automation steps by using Squarespace’s email marketing tool. I use it, because I just want simplicity and don’t need a lot of power from email marketing just yet (a marketing angel has just fallen out of the sky).
You can experiment without new extensions to your offerings too much faff - add memberships, commerce and use Scheduling (formerly Acuity) for bookings.
**This only applies to new website trials started by me. If you don’t need design, that’s cool. (Perfect for anyone looking to move from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1)
FreeAgent
Because self assessment ain’t it
Numbers are not my thing. I mean, confusing myself on spreadsheets is where I came from so I wasn’t expecting miracles when I started using it. FreeAgent is my saviour and I do everything from invoicing and project and time tracking to bookkeeping and the dreaded self assessment.
You can schedule invoices, and you can integrate PayPal and Stripe to offer clients different payment methods. I love the insights for giving an instant health check on how your business is doing financially, at any point in your tax year. The mobile app is wonderful for letting you do all the above from your phone *chefs kiss*. Can’t tell you how many Saturday mornings I’ve reconciled my books at footie practice. #soccermoms.
Before I knew better I baulked at the price. But in actual fact it’s been worth every single one of those 2299 pennies.
Or use my referral code at signup: 461wdewq*
Clickup
Project and Task Management gone wild
Clickup is so versatile! It’s become my CRM, project manager, sales pipeline, notebook, task manager and my content calendar. I’ve tried loads of other task management tools like Asana and Monday.com but this is, for me, by far the most powerful. It’s fantastic for project management. You can set up spaces for each project and hold every single project task, communication and note in there. You’re even able to email clients directly from tasks.
So much automation can be done with the Zapier-esque Clickbot. Events can triggers an action. So, let’s say a client completes a form, and you want them to receive a welcome message…hello Clickbot! I love the options to set up your tasks in a view-style that suits you. Some like a linear style like a traditional to-do list. I use the Trello style boards mostly because I’m visual.
Big saviour for me is the Document view. Uh, listen…if you’ve ever used Evernote, then you’ll know the satisfaction of nesting docs inside of notebooks. Clickup documents can be made public so you can almost have yourself a Notion setup. Genius!
I’ve even now got an automated help desk setup for my website maintenance clients! Well worth the money for me.
Iwocapay
Help clients spread the cost
Now, I’m not an advocate of business debt at all. If you can’t afford it, don’t hurt yourself to buy it. But, I also know that cash flow can be an enemy of progress. Literally.
There are situations when the money is guaranteed to come but you don’t have it all to invest right now. That’s why I offer a ‘spread the cost’ option. I wouldn’t have been able to work with some of the experts who helped me rebrand without being able to split the investment over a longer period. If you want to know how it works, watch the short and sweet video walkthrough of the Iwocapay dashboard that I did for a biz bestie.
Oh, and there’s a £100 voucher in it for you if you love it enough to sign up with my referral link.
Google Workspace
From Professional Email to Drive Storage
My long time friend. I’ve been with Google Workspace from the old GSuite days. Email delivery was problematic before I made the switch. And I haven’t had an issue ever since I signed up all those years ago. I love Google’s, or Gmail’s email tools - confidentiality mode, that noise-cancelling promotions tab and the sensational new layouts tool that turns your emails into emailers (whaaat?!).
Not forgetting the big ol’ bag of productivity tools it comes with - Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet (because why pay for Zoom), and Drive. Google Drive is what I use for file storage, file sharing and it’s even synced to my Mac so my files live there to free up space on my hard drive and to act as a backup for everything.
If you’ve been on a call with me, you’ll also know I don’t use Zoom. I use Google Meet since it comes with my paid subscription. And, as you can see, I’m paying for so many tools I really don’t want to shell out for Zoom too.
Slack
Communication for teams
Oh I love Slack! It’s where I organise my team chats, manage project communication and I also sync my Google Calendar and Clickup to it for ultimate organisation. Slack is a little bit like Whatsapp in the way that chats happen between contacts. And channels are like group chats, just without the chaos.
It’s the place I check-in with my biz besties. Because everyone needs a network to send memes to. And if you’ve ever read Slack’s iPhone update copy, you’ll probably be head over heels for them too. You wanna know what the designer in me geeked out at? Being able to customise the dashboard colours so it’s on brand. Fire.
Basically, there is nothing worse than sifting through countless email threads, and Slack takes that headache right away. They recently made it possible to communicate with voice notes, send video messages and catch up with the channel in a group video or audio call. All of this for free! Honestly. It’s a steal.
Otter
An auto-transcription tool for meetings and video
Dictaphones are out, ai transcripts are in. Otter comes to my meetings, records the audio and creates a transcript in real time, ready for me to highlight key points, make notes and assign tasks to the team.
To create captions for your videos, you can run it through Otter and download the audio as well as the .srt file you’d then import into LinkedIn (or wherever) to add your timely captions.
Yay.com
Virtual landline
I have a virtual landline to make and receive client calls from. It’s the best way for me to offer clients a way to call me that doesn’t gatecrash my focus periods, or interrupt mom-mode in the evenings after school pickups. Work-life balance is impossible IMO but I do what I can to not have one gatecrash the other.
Yay.com lets me switch the phone line on during the hours I set, and I have recorded a personal greeting to manage expectations. I’ve also added a recording to let callers know what to do if they can’t reach me. Calls can be made and received from a desktop and a mobile phone using the browser or the app.
And voicemails are emailed to you straightaway, so you can pick it up or add the voicemail file to a task if you need to. I’m a light user so I just pay £5.99 per month (inc VAT). It’s saved me a lot of money from the days of having a ‘work’ mobile phone. Oh, and if you have a remote team, you can add users to the same phone number, and set up call routing for users to ‘press 1’ if they need to reach a specific person, for example. This, I love.
*Full disclosure: Any asterisked links are affiliate links. But, you can see I genuinely love and recommend them and it’s not a sleazy shmoney tactic. You also get a little something from signing up using them, although these tools are already worth their weight in gold.
