Alexandra Niel walks through five apps she uses daily: Google Calendar for time-blocking, Trello for visual project boards, Todoist for task lists with recurring items, and Evernote for storing notes and recordings. She also warns against burnout from pushing too hard on productivity.
Do you struggle to stay on track with your productivity? I have. I think we all do. There's so much going on that we can't help ourselves. But today I'm going to share with you the 5 apps that I use to keep myself on track. And the very first one is my Google Calendar. I schedule the heck out of everything in my day: my downtime, my morning routine, my meals, my appointments, my block time when I have to work on something creative when I'm working on a new project or when I'm doing some research, I like to spend a big chunk of time doing that uninterrupted. And I can put in my calendar, I can mark 2 hours this day at this time, this is what I'm going to be working on. And I know that that's my time to be focused. So following your agenda is— some people might think that it's restrictive, but it's actually really liberating because it gives you an opportunity to just flow through the day. You don't have to stop and think, okay, what am I going to do next? And you have clarity all day long about what's coming so that you can prepare accordingly. And then you are ready when you're in the moment to start. You're ready to start and there's no interruption. And the beautiful thing is that I've linked it to my Calendly. So with Calendly, what I'm able to do is I can manage all of my appointments I can send reminders, I can create specific availability for specific types of events. So if I only want to take certain calls on a certain day at a certain time, I can make sure that I build that into my Calendly so that it helps me to manage my time much more effectively. The third thing that I use is Trello, and I love my Trello board. Most recently I've been using it mostly to manage my social media content, so I create and I can have different projects where there are different days, and then within those days I have all my social media content by day, what I'm going to— what the verbiage is that I'm going to add. So it helps me not to have to think about what am I going to create today, because I create that on a monthly basis, and then I have all of my information there. But the same thing can go for anything else. You can create different projects, whether you're renovating the kitchen, If you are planning a trip, whatever the case may be, Trello is really, really good to keep on task and manage whatever the project is that you are working on. You can add files, you can do checklists, you can automate things, and the best thing is you can share it with other people so that they also can contribute to it. So if you're in a family and you're all planning a trip together, Everybody can contribute to the same project, which makes it wonderful to be able to really manage everybody's time and to make sure that everybody has a say in what is planned for the trip. The fourth app is Todoist, and I love Todoist. I'm a checklist girl. I am a check the box. I'm a to-do girl. I know it doesn't work for everyone, but it does work for me, and if you're struggling with, you know, tons of pieces of paper, you've got things all over the place and you're trying to, you know, figure out how to keep track of everything, Todoist is the perfect thing because you can create a task or you can create a to-do. And if it's something that you do on certain days at the same time, you can duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it, or you can make it a recurring event, actually, is a better way to describe it instead of duplicating. You can just make sure that when you when you hit done, it automatically goes to whenever the next occurrence is. So it's super practical so that you don't actually have to duplicate and duplicate. You can just do it once and then the system kind of takes care of itself. And then within each to-do, if you want to, if it's a bigger thing and you want to, um, divide it in sub-actions and sub-to-dos, you can also do that. So it's really cool to keep yourself accountable and to really keep you moving through your checklist. And the last one that I use, last one but not least, is Evernote. I capture everything in Evernote. All my client calls, I capture my trainings. When I listen to a training and I take notes, I take notes in there. I take notes when I have conference calls with other people. It's a really great tool to keep me organized. I keep any article or useful information that I find on the internet that I'm like, ooh, I gotta remember this. Goes into Evernote. And I use the paid version, which is $7.99, so it's not a huge bank buster, but that allows me to have access to the information on multiple devices. The free version gives you access to up to 2 devices. This gives you access to multiple devices. It also gives you access offline, and it also gives me 10 gig of uploads per month. So whatever information, whether it's pictures, videos, whatever, I can just throw everything in there, and I have central location where I can access everything. And one thing to remember is, as we are so driven to be productive and, you know, we check the boxes and we, you know, there's that kind of hustle or, you know, get things done mentality, I would like to remind you not to burn out. And to help you to do that, I'd like to direct you to my 4 Tips for Avoiding Burnout video. So click on the image to go there.
