February 6, 2018 / in General Information / by Mic Johnson
Post written by Mic Johnson
I use several productivity tools almost every single day and I thought it might be helpful to share some of those tools with our readers.
Now maybe you use some of these tools already. Or maybe you’ve never heard of some of them. Or maybe you have others you use (please share those in the comments for me and everyone else) that make your life a little bit easier.
For the purposes of this post, I’m going to talk about some of the productivity tools I use on my laptop:
Roboform Everywhere – This is the username/password tool I’ve been using for the better part of the last eight years. There’s a handy little Chrome browser extension that makes it super easy to access all of the usernames and passwords for every website I use. I also use it to store client credentials. It’s encrypted and it’s easy to use and I use Roboform Everywhere countless times every day.
Checker Plus for Gmail – This Chrome browser extension gives me easy access to the multiple Gmail accounts I have…Blue Gurus, MJMeetings, and my personal Gmail account. It easily notifies me when I’ve got emails and I can quickly see, archive, delete and respond to emails with a couple of clicks.
Feedly – This tool aggregates all of the sites I want information from via RSS feed, whether it be news, sports, weather, you name it. I check it a few times a day to get the real-time headlines from sources that matter to me.
LinkedIn – The LinkedIn Chrome browser extension lets me know when I have notifications, but also gives me easy one-click access to get into LinkedIn. I usually pop into LinkedIn a few times a day to see what’s going on with people in my network, to share content, engage with others, etc. (ditto for Facebook and Twitter).
Honey – This money-saving Chrome browser extension searches for coupons when you’re buying things online and also will take a look at your Amazon Shopping Cart to see if you’re getting the best price on certain items. I wrote a post about this a couple of years ago and still use it today.
Loom – This is a new one in my toolbelt thanks to the article Jason wrote recently. Loom is an easy-to-use video service that lets you record your computer screen (and face) to create videos that are easily shareable on your website or social accounts.
Grammarly – This Chrome browser extension checks for typos, grammatical errors and more as you type emails, blog posts, etc. It catches errors for me on an almost daily basis and makes me more thoughtful about the accuracy of all of my communications. In fact, it caught several as I was typing this post you’re reading right now.
Boomerang for Gmail – This handy tool lets me type emails and schedule them to be sent at a later date and time. I use Boomerang all the time to cross off “to do emails”…for example, I send reminder emails to my peer groups about our monthly meetings. Maybe the meeting is a week from now…I’ll type up the email today and then use Boomerang to send the email later in the week.
WhatsApp – I wrote about WhatsApp in a December 2017 blog post. This tool lets you carry on encrypted conversations with groups of people you care about. I use it for one of my peer groups and a couple of Jayhawk groups I’m a part of. And there’s a laptop/desktop feature that lets you read and respond to messages easily (there’s also an app on the phone, but I use the laptop feature quite a bit myself.)
That’s it for now. Remember to share your productivity tools in the Comments section below. We all can use ideas to be more productive!
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We have worked with Blue Gurus for almost 10 years now. He and his team are incredible to work with.
Among other things they have helped us get a blog team together so that we are blogging regularly and it is a nice variety of viewpoints in the blog posts. All of us have stellar LinkedIn profiles thanks to Jason. There are many many other things they've helped us with over the years… too many to mention in one quote. They're so knowledgeable and so helpful and are a positive energetic addition to any project. I would highly recommend Jason and his team!!!!
Kandy Meehan
Owner of Home Rental Services
Hi Mic,
What an impressive toolkit! Can’t live without Grammarly, it’s perfect for anybody who’s not a native speaker of English.
For improving productivity, I use time tracking – it helps me know how much time I spend on my everyday tasks. The tool I use is TimeCamp (https://www.timecamp.com) – you’ll love it, even if you don’t have any previous experience in time tracking.
Hope you enjoy it!
Alex