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Whether you are primarily concerned with “making it big” as an entrepreneur, with your own small business, or are simply highly driven when it comes to the idea of getting your own life organised, and keeping things on point, the modern world offers an incredible array of tools that can be potentially invaluable.
The thing is, out of all the different tools available – budget tracking software, paper file-based task management methodologies, timesheet tracking and billing programs, and so on – there isn’t exactly any one single tool that “does it all.”
The consequence of this? Well, you find yourself becoming easily overwhelmed, and feeling as though it’s a virtually impossible task to keep track of all your different tools, never mind use them effectively, and in synchronicity.
Here are a few ways in which consolidating your tools can improve your life, and some basic pointers on doing so.
The great productivity guru David Allen is to thank for the famous and much loved “Getting Things Done” task management system.
This system features an array of folders, contextual “labels” and a large task collection “inbox” for organising your assorted to-dos and long-term projects.
Perhaps the key benefit of the system is that it’s pretty all-encompassing, and allows you to deal with a significant portion of the job of organising your life, without having to create a Frankenstein’s monster of mixed elements from different systems.
The simpler, and more “compact” Bullet Journal Method has the same benefit.
Managing your daily planner, task, and project management systems, is essential if you want to avoid oversights, and be productive. Using a consolidated system that manages all of these elements at once, however, can massively reduce mental clutter, and give you an effective “bird’s eye” view of what needs to be done.
Consolidating your business communication tools can reduce the amount of time you spend sending out communications, and can avoid oversights
Every business relies quite heavily on communication tools of one sort or another. What’s more, as digital communication becomes a more nuanced and all-encompassing mode of expression, more and more tools typically get employed for that purpose.
Fortunately, however, there are some “all-in-one” business communication tools, that have been designed to streamline all forms of communication from a central platform, while also doing as much of what the modern business needs done as possible.
Whispir, for example, is a push notification service through which you can make calls, send SMS messages and voicemail, send emails, arrange events, and more — and automate all of the above, too.
Suffice to say, such a system can radically reduce the amount of time you have to spend sending out communications, and can avoid oversights, such as can occur as a result of neglected inboxes.
Automating and integrating your analytics-gathering programs can free you up a huge amount of time and mental energy
Every business depends, at least to some degree, on gathering, tracking, and analysing certain “analytics” – in other words, relevant statistics and data points that say something meaningful about the progress, and running of the business itself.
Analytics may include things such as the number of unique visitors landing on a given webpage in a given period of time, or something like customer survey results, and budget metrics.
Tracking and making sense of multiple different analytics at once can be tedious and difficult, to say the least. That’s why automating and integrating your analytics-gathering programs – such as, for example, courtesy of services such as If This Then That (IFTTT) can free up a huge amount of time and mental energy.