23 October 2017 | Jack Francis
Staying organised at work can be damn difficult at times. I can imagine it was even more difficult before your phones contained just about any information you could ever want to access, alongside a myriad of tools to help organise your day and keep all your contacts in the one place. The downside to that is there is more ways than I can count to distract yourself. Twitter, Instagram Reddit, Youtube, Facebook… The list goes on and on. With great power, comes great responsibility. I’ve compiled a list of 5 apps that are essential to me when it comes to running by business;
Hubspot – Right now, my life revolves around completing sales. I wake up, and worry about where the next sale will come from. I then spend the majority of my day trying to set up meetings for sales, or pestering the potential clients we have. For this reason, Hubspot is a complete lifesaver for me. It has all of our company’s current jobs, and our prospective jobs on my phone. Any time I need to get an overarching view of where we are as a company and how the next few months are looking, I can just open the app and it’s right there.
Slack – Slack is almost like a forum for your company. We used to use Whatsapp, but it was really frustrating having to trawl through the thousands of messages sent over the weekends about films, hangovers and our Creative Director’s questionable music. We continue to do this on Whatsapp, however we have moved all things business to Slack. Slack allows you to create topics, and everyone to comment on these topics. It just keeps things nice and neat. We have a for topic each ongoing project, and a ‘general’ topic to ensure we can still rag on Darren for his music.
Linkedin- If you can wade through the “absolutely delighted to…..” posts that seem to increase in frequency when graduation season starts, Linkedin can be pretty cool. It’s a great way to reach out to people you kind of know and there have been quite a few circumstances when work has been pointed our way through it. It also shows you when someone is looking at your profile which is a nice stroke for the ego. It’s also a great way to promote your business and keep your clients up to date. Because let’s face it, no one on Facebook is really going to care that you’ve just completed another job.
Evernote – If there was ever an award given out for the world’s most forgetful person, I would win, then miss the ceremony because it had slipped my mind. This is where Evernote is just fantastic for me. It is an easy to use, simple to navigate notes app on your phone. Today I had a list of things to do as long as my arm (this blog wasn’t one but I don’t want to do the boring stuff so here we are), and I have it all neatly organised in Evernote. It allows for you to create Notebooks for each project, each with lists inside them. So for ‘Project A’, you could have 5 sections to it, each with their own list of things to complete. Now I just need to remember to use it.
The Outlook App – The opinion on the Microsoft Outlook desktop application is pretty divided in Pogo Studio. Some of the team like it, others think it looks like free software you would get with Windows 98. However, the mobile app is brilliant. It’s super easy to switch between email addresses and the diary feature is great, you can share it with your employees and it doesn’t look dreadful like its desktop cousin.
I would say these are the 5 most important apps I have on my phone when it comes to being productive and staying on top of things. It seems only a few years ago that my most used apps were Flappy Bird and Doodle Jump. I don’t know if I’m getting older or more boring but I don’t particularly care. As long as I can kind of stay in control of what’s going on, I’m happy.