On the fourth day of Christmas, Spin Sucks gave to you: four productivity tools, three AI experts, two PR trends, and one mindset shift in a pear tree.
We are already a third of the way through the 12 Days of Christmas series. Crazy!
That means we technically have only 12 more business days in the year.
(Some of you may have a couple more if you’re working in between the holidays. But not many are left, regardless!)
To make the remaining 12 (or so) days most productive for you, here are four tools we recommend.
Productivity Tools: Superhuman
Don’t tell CoSchedule, but I have a new love in my life.
I mean, I totally still love them—we are married, after all.
But I am also seeing Superhuman. I don’t think they’ll mind, but let’s keep it between us, just in case.
A couple of months ago, I was emailing with Andy Crestodina and he said, “BTW, check out Superhuman. I’m using it for my email.”
Because I do everything Andy says, I checked it out, but was sad to realize I had to get on a list and wait.
And wait some more.
By the time I heard from them, I was so anxious with anticipation, I nearly bowled them over with exclamation points (as if I’m Laura Petrolino or something).
(This also may be a marketing tactic on their part, which is brilliant.)
Superhuman is the easiest way to send, receive, archive, and create tasks for yourself in the history of all mankind.
When I talked to the team over there, they asked me what my email priority is and I said, “INBOX ZERO!”
I thought they’d laugh at me and tell me good luck.
But nooooo! They showed me how to achieve it. And do you know I have had Inbox Zero every day since then?
It’s amazing.
The idea is that it’s all shortcut-based.
It takes a day or so to learn the shortcuts, but once you have them down, you’ll never go back.
In fact, I was in my regular Google mail the other day trying to do shortcuts and getting frustrated that things weren’t going where they needed to.
I guess that’s sort of like our kids trying to swipe their fingers across our computer screens. Doesn’t work.
It’s $30/month, but it’s worth significantly more.
Check it out. You will love it. Your life will change. You will no longer be a slave to your email.
Productivity Tools: High Performance Planner
I haven’t been shy in admitting 2019 has been an incredibly rough year for me personally.
I’ve spent a good portion of the year feeling sorry for myself and spending more time thinking I should just go work at Starbucks than is healthy.
In September, after school started, I decided I needed to put my big girl pants on and do something about my miserable year.
I bought myself the High Performance Planner, I got myself a coach, and I started to work on my mindset and my gratefulness.
This is all a little woo-woo for me. I’m VERY cynical (and sarcastic) so being all cheerleady, rainbows and unicorns, positive and optimistic is something I typically leave to Laura.
But I knew something had to change so I decided to try it.
The very first thing I do every morning is sit down and write out my plan for the day. It includes all of my meetings, my work priorities, where I need to be on my A game, and how to best lead my team or clients.
Then, at the end of the day, I take a few minutes to write down what went well, where I could shift things for the following day, and three things I’m grateful for.
And you know what? It works. As much as I hate to admit it. It totally works.
It works so well, in fact, that everything seemingly goes wrong if I skip a day.
I now look at it like I do riding my bike and brushing my teeth—I can’t go a day without it.
If that particular planner isn’t your jam, check out other mindset or journaling options. You won’t regret it.
Productivity Tools: Voxer
I’m about to blow your minds if you don’t already know Voxer.
A couple of years ago, my friend Kevin Kermes built a small mastermind group and introduced Voxer as a way to communicate in between meetings.
I was a grump about it! I didn’t want to add one more thing. But I tried it because I said I would. And I was wrong!
I love it.
It’s a walkie talkie app, though you don’t have to use 10-4 and over-n-out when you use it.
(Unless you’re Martin Waxman, who insists on using the vernacular AND saying goodbye at the end, which is akin to singing every text message with a good-bye. He makes me laugh!)
It’s so much easier than any other messaging platform. All you have to do is hit the button, talk, and hit send.
Plus you get the advantage of hearing context and not just reading something.
I’m a big, big fan…and it serves me right for being so grumpy about it.
Productivity Tools: LastPass
And the last productivity tool we are going to discuss is LastPass (or another password keeper).
If you’re not using a password keeper, this is (nearly) 2020 people!
You should not be using the same password for everything. You should not keep passwords in a spreadsheet. And you should not have passwords you can remember.
LastPass fixes all of that.
It creates strong passwords and saves them all for you. All you have to do is go to the site you want to log into and it’ll populate the username and password for you.
You can set it to change passwords every 30 days (or more), if you want and you never have to remember a single password again.
And it has an extension for every browser known to man so you can just click a button in your bookmarks toolbar and be on your way.
If you have a team, you can set it up so there are folders based on what you want each person to see. You can also set it so no one but the administrator can see the password.
The only challenge to LastPass is if an employee has a super simple password to log into their account, which can be hacked.
But that’s not really the issue of the software. It has to be something you include in your employee handbook—passwords must be impossible to remember.
I know there are some other keepers out there, but LastPass is the one we settled on here.
Your Favorite Productivity Tools
So there you have it!
You now can be your most productive self in 2020.
And now it’s your turn.
I’d love to know about your productivity tool favorites.
And remember, mum’s the word about CoSchedule and Superhuman.
