Productivity is everything to a small business owner, and the trick to being your most productive self is being organized. Luckily, these days getting organized can be as simple as a trip to the app store.
We now have access to online tools that give small business owners an edge that can put them on the playing field with larger companies. The trick is weeding through all of the “latest and greatest” and choosing ones that will help you meet your business goals.
Documented processes don’t just save you time, money and create a consistent method for your team to follow. They make everything you do more reliable and efficient, even increasing project success rate by up to 70 percent.
Unfortunately, getting started is the hardest part. Whether you don’t feel like you have time to set up your management system or just don’t know what to use for your needs, it’s difficult to get over the initial learning curve. Here are a few tried and true online tools our team uses to improve workflows and get organized:
Spreadsheets & Templates: Airtable
Airtable is an essential part of managing our projects and processes. The easiest way to describe this tool is Excel on steroids. It gives you the ability to create your own databases and adapt them to your specific needs and wants. You can use it to manage projects, organize customer relationships, catalog your inventory, or make reusable checklists.
Airtable allows you to log entries in spreadsheets which can be turned into diverse, expandable, versatile sets of data. The columns can be edited to contain anything from regular text to checkboxes and multiple choice fields.
Pieces of data can be linked to each other to contain a web of information for everything relating to your company, making it perfect for tracking large-scale, detailed data sets. You have the ability to generate different views from traditional spreadsheets to calendars and Kanban boards.
And as every great tool should, it comes complete with a top-notch mobile experience, real-time collaboration, and cloud-based sync, so you can access your content from anywhere.
File Storage, Project Management & Dashboards: Notion
Notion is an all-in-one workspace where you can write, plan, collaborate and get organized. This workspace allows you to write in a beautiful clean space, build your own personal wiki (with endless layers of content), plan using a kanban view, a calendar or a simple list view and last, but not least, to capture your workflows and record everything creating spreadsheets and databases.
Notion offers team functionality for real-time collaboration and provides the ability for teams to share, comment and assign tasks and reminders. So as much as individuals and professionals can use Notion, so can teams.
Notion works with blocks and they can be whatever you want: text, image, checklist, bullet points, code, you name it. You can easily write a sentence and then transform it into a stand-alone page or an entire database, there are many possibilities.
It provides you with a lot of pre-made templates for different areas of your life, from meeting notes to personal goals. Also, the ability to share pages using a unique link makes the app usable even for those who don't have an account.
If you have more questions visit their homepage view the embedded demo page.
Project Management: Asana
Asana is a cloud-based project and task management solution that enables companies and ad agencies to manage and organize tasks and projects, communicate and collaborate. It is helpful for teams and companies that handle multiple projects at one time, and it can serve companies of any size. It aims to make tracking work activities simpler, reducing the need for email and unnecessary meetings.
Features include task management, reporting, automatic notifications, a customer portal, collaboration tools, dashboards, a mobile application, document management and task assigning. Asana also includes an Inbox feature that captures all updates generated automatically by the software.
Asana allows teams in organizations to determine how they need to work together. Whether they want to work in a way that is driven by conversations or by tasks, they have the opportunity to work in a way that is comfortable for the team. It will benefit teams that previously relied on a diverse set of tools like spreadsheets, file sharing, and even email and chat apps.
Asana offers a free and paid version and is available through a web browser and a mobile app, with support for both Apple’s iOS and Android.
Project Management: Trello
Trello lets you lay out your projects in a Kanban-style board. This means that your tasks or projects are stored in cards which are then arranged into columns. You use it to organize “cards” into lists—those cards can be tasks, notes, projects, shared files, or anything else that helps your team work together. Similar to Asana, Trello is a great tool to replace your team’s use of email and chat for task-based communication.
You can learn all you need to get a job done from a task card, and all discussions about it can take place right there. By keeping all of the information you need in a single location, it’s easy to keep everything on track, quickly see what’s being done, and look back to previous conversations.
You can use Trello for any type of project you want, whether by yourself or with a huge team. It works with any type of organizational system. It doesn’t force you into specific patterns of planning or communication. It’s a low-friction way to get everything organized. And it’s really easy to learn and use.
When you open a Trello account, you get to create a Team. You can have many Team Spaces. Within the Teams you create or join, the Board is the main working unit. The next thing in the Trello workflow is Lists. Lists would hold your to-dos, in-progress tasks, and things you’ve finished. The smallest unit of work in Trello is the card. Cards are super flexible and allow you to include descriptions, attachments, subtasks or checklists, due dates and times, assignees, and labels. A card typically represents a single task in your workflow.
Team Communication: Facebook Workplace
Facebook Workplace is a business-focused version of Facebook that creates a collaborative space with a look, feel, and function similar to the consumer version of Facebook. Accounts are separate, so users of one Facebook platform don't need to worry about their personal and business lives bleeding into each other. Profiles, news feeds, friends, groups, and other features of consumer-facing Facebook are there, but they're all restricted to people who share your business's email domain name.
Workplace is available at two levels: Premium and Standard. Premium provides access to integrations and other enterprise-level features including single sign-on, APIs, and IT monitoring tools; the free Standard level lacks many of the customized features.
Workplace has the potential to truly change the collaboration game. Facebook has even baked Facebook Live into Workplace, making broadcasting to employees and team members super quick.
Team Communication: Slack
Slack brings all your communication together. Teamwork in Slack happens in channels helping everyone save time and collaborate together. With its numerous robust features and integrations, Slack can easily turn into the central hub for all your team activities. It can even become a central part of your project management process.
Channels are a single place for messaging, tools and files. These are the building blocks of Slack. They can be divvied up by team, project, client, or whatever else is relevant to your organization. Team members can join and leave channels as needed. You can share channels with companies and businesses you regularly work with – like clients, vendors, and partners.
Face-to-face and -screen allows you to talk it out over voice or video calls directly from Slack. And if you need to show your work, you also have to option to share your screen. You have the ability to share integrated files. Drag-and-drop PDFs, images, videos and other files directly into Slack. Get feedback on your work and create an archive of your progress.
Streamline your work with integrated tools. In Slack, tools and services work in the same place as your team. Information leaves soiled inboxes and flows into shared team channels. The Slack App Directory has over 1,500 apps you can integrate into Slack. Spend less time juggling tabs and more time focusing on meaningful work.
Running your business like a well-oiled machine can save you time, money and prevent you and your team from feeling frustrated. What are your favorite organization tools? Will you try any on this list?
XO
Hello!
I’m Kat
My job is to help busy entrepreneurs share their personality, creativity and big ideas with the world.