Time-Saving Apps to Increase Your Productivity

As the owner of a busy Virtual Assistant business, I am always looking for ways to save time, improve systems, processes and increase productivity both within my own business and those of our clients.
 
In previous blogs we've shared some of our 'bread and butter' apps and systems for small business owners, such as Dropbox and Trello. This blog however, focuses on a couple of (possibly) lesser known ‘must have' productivity apps which you can utilise as and when you need something organising, or referencing quickly, easily and efficiently.

Doodle
This is a free, easy scheduling app which simplifies the process of arranging F2F meetings, Zoom calls, workshops and events. Within minutes you can simply set-up an online meeting poll, populating event information, adding proposed dates and times before inviting delegates to mark their availability onto the poll.

Doodle removes the need for countless email chains and the arduous manual process of trying to keep on top of delegate responses, it clearly highlights the date and time chosen by the majority, allowing you to confirm the meeting date with ease.

Doodle does not require registration by either the initiator or those being invited to view and mark their availability onto a poll. You can connect Doodle to your calendar, Zoom, Google Meet or Webex and add video conference links to every event automatically.

As a PA I’ve used Doodle a lot over the years and recently a client of ours was using it, which just reminded me how good this organisational, time-saving tool is. I would highly recommend that you check it out and have a go at setting up a poll… Summer works party, sounds fab, let’s see who is free to come and when!

Pocket
Previously known as Read It Later, Pocket is a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks. It’s a quick and easy way to save interesting online content to read or reference later, including blogs, articles and videos so you’ll no longer have to keep emailing yourself links or adding countless web pages to your favourites list in your browser!

With Pocket, all your content gets saved in one place, so you can view it anytime, on any device, with or without an internet connection.

When you add a web page or article to Pocket, you can create and add tags to categorise your ‘Saves’ for example, I have; Blog Ideas, Health, Books to Read, Useful VA Content, you can add as many tags as you like.

Pocket is more than just a brilliant time-saving app, it’s transformed the way we save, access and later share online material. 

It’s a great resource to compliment your Social Media Marketing activity.

You can use their ‘Collections’ or ‘Discover’ sections to search for specific content or you can read their top saved stories and trending articles. I particularly like the way in which you can reference a particular subject, and/or share an article of interest that you’ve previously saved, rather than hunting for relevant content as and when you need it.
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Go and give Pocket a try, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.