The Top 5 Tech Tools I Can’t Live Without
When you look at a beautifully polished brand, do you get pangs of jealousy? Where do they get the time to create such amazing content? Or how do they look like they’re spinning all the plates, whereas your office looks like the aftermath of a Greek wedding?
The secret is in the toolkit. And what’s more, you don’t have to be a tech whizz to start using them.
User Friendly Design
Are you team Canva or team Adobe Express? Personally, I’ve got a foot in both camps.
Both of these apps allow you to create a brand identity that will help you knock together Instagram grid-worthy images or a set of presentation slides in minutes. You don’t need to be a designer; you just need a few ready-to-go layouts that keep your brand looking entirely consistent.
Social Media Scheduling Tools
There’s no need to be constantly ‘on’ in your social media channels, with a variety of apps to help you schedule your posts and provide vital performance stats.
Meta Business Suite for Instgram, Facebook and WhastApp will do nearly everything a small business needs and its capabilities are growing all the time. But if you want to do more and schedule to other platforms, there are some great tools out there: SmarterQueue, Metricool, or Planoly. They let you batch your work so your business stays visible while you’re completely offline.
AI Assistant
Love it or loathe it, AI is here! But it doesn’t have to be about social media trends creating images of you or your team as dolls or action figures. Far from it…
Side note: it’s all about the questions you ask and clarifying where it got it’s data from.
Here are just some of the tasks I use an AI assistant for:
- Deep research and competitor analysis
- Creating detailed client personas in different areas of my business
- Pulling cluttered data together from several different sources
- Brainstorming a month’s worth of content ideas when I’m staring at a blank screen
- Polishing a rough paragraph of text into a punchy newsletter hook.
Notes App
I’ve used all sorts of task management apps and software; some I still use daily. But there’s no getting away from a good old brain dump of info or ideas! The native Notes app on my iPhone is a huge source of ideas, research, follow-up tasks, and quick voice memos caught on the go. Because it syncs flawlessly between my phone and my desktop, it acts as my external brain. I couldn’t live without it.
Password Manager
In today’s world where it feels like our entire lives are online or run by apps and software, we have to be aware of how we protect access to our systems. Gone are the days of P@$$w0rd being used across mutliple logins! We need one password per login and it absolutely must not contain anything personal about ourselves.
Major players and our phones have their own native apps, but there’s also some great services out there like LastPass and 1Password. They work on the principle of using one unique master password that protects all of your passwords. All will help you to generate passwords that are completely random and secure, saving you from clicking ‘Forgot Password’ three times a week.
What does your digital toolkit look like right now?
Are you successfully spinning all the plates, or are you looking at the aftermath of a Greek wedding every time you open your laptop?
If you’re ready to trade the tech headaches and chaotic folders for clean, quiet systems that run beautifully in the background, let’s have a chat. Drop me a line on my contact page and let me know which tool is causing your biggest administrative nightmare this week.
