Our Top 10 Favorite Productivity Tools for 2021
Owning and operating your own business generally means that you end up wearing lots of hats, especially when you haven’t yet formed a team. You’re not only the director of pushing out and creating all the content, but the one who markets it, organizes getting paid, communicates with clients, and so much more.
Needless to say, all of this can be beyond overwhelming, unless you have the tools and systems in place to help you save energy, time, and money. If you know anything about us at all, it’s probably that we’re all about tools and systems. It’s like therapy for us knowing that we have a system for every part of our business.
Today, we want to share our top 10 favorite productivity tools for 2021 and how they impact our business, in hopes that they can help you in your business, too! And, yes, we actually use and love the tools on this list!
Trello
You know when you love someone or something so wholeheartedly that you can't even find the right words to describe your infatuation? That's how we feel about Trello. In just hours, we were able to streamline our systems and batch our processes. Hello, productivity! In 8 months, we became a 6-figure business and just 4 months later we were on track for $200k. Trello is totally free — and the program to teach you exactly how to use it and copy ALL our systems is only $29.
Zoom
We’ve spent too many hours to count with each other on Zoom having important discussions about our business, brainstorming ideas, and even just coworking together. We’re able to screenshare what we’re working on, and one of the best parts is that we think it’s just nice to be able to hop on a call with a biz bestie.
Not to mention that we host all of our team meetings on Zoom, coaching calls for Strategy Academy, lives in our Facebook groups, and record podcast episodes all on the platform. It’s a total all-in-one for so many parts of our business!
Google Drive
We’d be lost without Google Drive and, honestly, all of their G Suite products. With Google Drive, we’re able to keep track of all important documents and spreadsheets created within Docs and Sheets, as well as easily share those with other members of our team. Heck, this blog post that you’re reading on our website now was originally just written inside of a Google Doc that lives in our Drive folder for blog posts.
Pro Tip: Create only one shared folder then make folders inside it for organization. This way, you don’t have to create a share link for every single thing you work on — just add it to the main folder and anyone who is added to the shared folder can see it!
Dropbox
Dropbox makes it so easy to keep all our files organized and is super handy because of its multi-device functionality. We’ve got Dropbox downloaded on our computers so we can save directly, and also installed on our phones so we can access documents or images on the go. We can keep track of all our blog post graphics, stock photos, slides for webinars, Creative Template Shop products and graphics, and all the course content we produce.
Flodesk
Flodesk is our current and favorite email service provider. We’re able to create stunning emails and forms, build all of the automations we need, segment our subscribers, and more. It isn’t as robust a system as other, bigger services, but we couldn’t be happier with our decision to switch. We realized that we didn’t need all of the fancy automations and extra tools that came with it. With Flodesk, we’re able to keep everything simple and streamlined just how we like it.
Later
We’re all about batching content to save time and make our lives even easier, especially when it comes to social media. Later makes it super handy to not only be able to schedule posts in advance , but be able to type your caption on a laptop instead of the tiny, fumbly keyboard on your phone.
Ready to get started on Later? Use this link to sign up for your free account and get 10 extra free posts a month!
Dubsado
We could write a whole post on just Dubsado alone, but one of the main features that we love about it are the workflows. Instead of having to manually walk through your client onboarding process, remember to send out feedback forms, or more, that can all be automated using their workflows features. This saves an incredible amount of time, allowing you to focus on the actual project at hand versus the more mundane or time-sucking tasks!
You can try out Dubsado now and get 50% off your first month or first year using this link.
Gmail
It may seem silly to have to mention Gmail, but when we see anyone with any other email provider, we can’t help wondering why they haven’t made the switch yet. The layout is user-friendly, and we have an awesome system of organization where everything has a folder, and our main inbox is split up into unread emails, starred (important), and everything else that either doesn’t have a folder or needs a response.
Tailwind
Oh Hello Pinterest. Over the years, we’ve not only seen major results in not only Boss Project, but also in our separate businesses. Tailwind makes it super easy to schedule Pins to our boards, and we push out tons of Pins weekly. We’re able to strategically pin content from our 700+ Strategy Hour podcast episodes and 500+ blog posts. The SmartLoop feature put key Pins on rotate to automatically repost and keep them “fresh” on Pinterest.
If you’re interested in trying Tailwind, use this link to start on the free forever plan and receive a 25 ghostwriter credits to help you craft the perfect captions!
Digital Planner
We love keeping things on our devices, so using our Digital Planner in The Creative Template Shop makes it easy to plan different aspects of our businesses and personal lives right on our iPad. You can even print it off if you prefer the pen and paper route. It’s a simple, 12-page PDF that has pages for:
Daily, weekly, and monthly general planning
Project notes
A project tracker
Monthly and yearly goals
Blog post planning
Social media planning
Meal planning, and
A grocery list
Here’s the kicker: It’s $47 for a one-off purchase, or with the same cost per month, you could have instant download access to this item and all other templates in The Shop by becoming a member. We think the choice is obvious, but we’ll leave that up to you.
Having these tools in our back pockets saves us time, keeps up our productivity, bridges the gap of working apart, and more. Your business is never too small or too chaotic to put systems in place that can make your life easier, so we really hope this list helped to give you some options or ideas for tools that you may be missing out on!
