MBA1331 My Top 5 Free Productivity Tools

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Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, giving you more than you bargained for every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. In today's lesson, you will learn my top five free Productivity tools. Sometime back I did a lesson on my favorite productivity tools and I heard from our audience members asking, hey, these are great and all, but I'm on a budget. Do you have any tools that you recommend that are free? Well, that's what today's episode's all about. Tools that will help you organize yourself, your business, your schedule and the tasks at hand. I'm going to tell you why each tool makes my list, why I recommend some of these tools even if you're willing to pay in many of these cases, the free option is better. It's actually the best option. I'll also mention how some of these tools will grow with you once your needs are met and you're ready to pay what paying later on will get you. Let's get productive. Let's get going. Let's get down to business. All right, my top five free productivity tools. Here they come. Number one. And this is a big one and it's a simple one, but it's powerful. And that's Google Calendar. Google Calendar is part of G Suite and Google Calendar is free with Gmail. It's a personal Gmail account, not a business one. You're going to get Google Calendar as a part of it. It doesn't cost anything to have a Gmail account. And when you're starting out and you don't have a business address yet, like your name@your business.com. you could use your Google account in the time being your name@gmail.com and in Gmail there is Google Calendar. And Google Calendar is in my opinion the best free calendar out there. Number one, it's syncs with every other app. Google is such a big powerhouse that you have to sync with their apps. They have a great mobile, iOS and Android. So you can see your calendar on your phone easily. You can add events, change events, and their web app on the computer is very easy. What I like about Google Calendar is that it does everything you need and nothing you don't. There's so many other things you can do with calendars, but you don't need that at the start. You just need something that's going to organize your days, your weeks, your months so you can understand and plan out everything you're doing in advance. I live by my calendar. If something's not in my calendar, it's just not going to get including personal stuff, including what we do on the weekend, including all that kind of stuff. If it's not scheduled, there's no time scheduled, then it's simply not going to happen. If it's not important enough for you to put on the calendar, that is not important enough to do. And people might say, oh, that's kind of restricting. There's no freedom there. And I think it's the opposite of that. It is freedom. I have the freedom to control my time. If I don't have something on my calendar, that means my time has no value. I value my time and it's the biggest asset we all have. So I give my time to only the things I value and I do that. I commit to that via a calendar. What's great about Google Calendars also is that it gives you reminders. When you have an event, you get an email, you get notifications. So you're never late for an appointment. So you don't forget about a call you need to make. You can block book your calendar and say these are all day events. So from this day to this day, all day event, I'm not available. Now I mentioned people booking on your calendar. Now if you subscribe to a paid service like Schedule once or Calendly or Book like a Boss, these are schedule apps where you make your calendar available to other people to book your time. These services sync with Google Calendars. This is fantastic because later on if you want to go down that route and pay for that service, you don't need to change calendars. Your calendar scheduling app will sync with Google Calendar. Okay, so number one, get your time in order. Get your schedule in order with Google Calendar. Number two, Trello. Trello is a free project management tool. Totally free, and it's really generous. Free meaning that you can create so many projects, so many boards before you hit, you know, the free tier. I think it's like 10 boards and you can archive these boards and bring them back and all that kind of stuff. Now what Trello is, it's like a way for you to organize tasks, bigger projects. You can even use it for a to do list. But I like to use it to organize projects that have several stages. For example, let's say you're writing a blog post. So writing a blog post is not just write a blog post. You have to brainstorm ideas. You have to create some headlines. You need to source some media, images, videos or whatever you're going to do to supplement the copy, supplement the actual blog post writing. You have to draft that blog post, it has to be edited, you have to put it into your website, you need to publish it, all that kind of stuff, right? You need to market it later on. So all these things are steps. And Trello is a way for you to be able to organize the project and move cards and move steps as you're going along. It allows you to stay organized and not get overwhelmed. They use what it's called, a cabana card method is very popular. It's kind of like virtual sticky notes. And it's absolutely free, super simple to use. Big companies even use Trello to organize bug fixes, like in a tech company or project management. But if you're looking for a tool to be productive in tackling projects, tasks like blog posts, like creating content, like a marketing campaign, like creating your product or service or your actual business, whatever those projects are, you can create a Trello board for it and get organized again. It's free, no strings attached. If you want to upgrade later on to more boards, you can, but you have plenty to get started with. And really I've been using the free Trello for years and never needed to upgrade. Number two, totally free app, Google Sheets. Google Sheets is an amazing, amazing, amazing tool. What's Google Sheets? Well, Google Sheets is basically Excel, but in cloud format and tied to your Google account. Again, it's free with a Gmail account. And I use Google Sheets for so many things to get organized, to get productive. I use it for my to do lists, I use it for idea dumps for Organizing ideas in a project or a new task. We use Google Sheets for our production schedule for this show, so we have a column for the episode number, the title, the air date, all the show notes, the links, the sponsors, all that kind of stuff. We have a spreadsheet, a Google Sheet to organize all that so we can all be on track. And what's great about Google Sheets, you could share with other people so you can collaborate with other members of your team or people that you hire to help you with a task. I highly recommend you use Google Sheets if you do any kind of production schedule, whether you're creating blog posts on a regular basis, videos, podcast, episodes, whatever it is. It's also great for basic accounting if you want to create a profit and loss sheet, or create a sheet to keep track of your expenses or payroll or even revenue if you have to do it manually. Now, the reason why I love Google Sheets so much and love it even more than Excel, you know, spreadsheets are something that I got into pretty young in my career because I was in education and you had to use spreadsheets to do grades and all that kind of stuff. But Google Sheets lives in the cloud, and it has its own app on your phone again, So I can pull up my Google Sheet at any time. I use Google Sheets for ideas or tasks or to dos or action items I want to take. So if I'm out and about, if I'm at a conference, I might be at a meetup, I might get a good idea or get somebody's name or number, and I want to jot it down and be able to follow up later on to, you know, make that connection, to look up that tool or that piece of advice that somebody mentioned or that book, or we're traveling, I can see, hey, what's up on my production schedule? What do I have to do next week when I come back? It's just handy to have something available to me at any time. And what's awesome about Google Sheets, too, is that you can make certain sheets that you choose available offline. So even if you're on an airplane and there's no wifi, you can see your sheets even when you're offline. All right, free productivity tool number four, Last Pass. What is LastPass? Well, LastPass is a way for you to save all your logins and passwords for all the different tools that you have. If you are like us, who have all these logins, all these passwords, all these software subscriptions you have, it's a great way for you to save all that information with one master account. Now, LastPass is highly secure and there's an app for it as well as a web version. It detects when you are signed into a different device. So if for any reason somebody tried to hack your account, you would know immediately. So you can change people's access or change passwords or, you know, flag it. But what really makes LastPass powerful is, let's say, for example, you want to give access to your content editor, to your website. Instead of giving them your name and password to your website, you can give them LastPass access. So what they do is they create a free LastPass account and they share with you the email they create that account with, and you just basically give access to that email to that account in LastPass. And LastPass will populate the username and the password on their end when they sign into your account, your website, in this example, and they won't reveal the password. That way they can have access to your account without sharing password information. And this is great, especially for getting started. And you need to give freelancers or contractors access to your accounts or your services or your website or whatever it is to do some work. And you don't necessarily want to share your actual username and password. So it's like a login and password organizer as well as a great way to securely share it with other people. All right, Free productivity tool number five. This is an oldie but a goodie. And it's Evernote. Evernote is a note taking app and they have a free version of their actual app that you can be able to access Evernote on two different devices at the same time. So whether it's your desktop and your mobile device, for example, and Evernote allows you to take notes and organize these notes and do checklists and insert photos into these notes and screenshots and things like that. And Evernote is handy if you want to take notes at a conference, at a meeting, at a meetup, whatever it is. It's a great way to take notes. It's very powerful on the iPad, if you prefer the iPad or a tablet. And it's absolutely free. Again, it's cloud based, so you can see your notes anywhere and you can even share your notes with other people as well. You can doodle, you can take notes, you can insert comments and images like I mentioned. And it's like a notebook that lasts forever.

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Ba da ba ba ba. So the fifth free productivity tool I shared with you is Evernote. I have an alternative for you if you want to stay with within Google's G suite and do the trifecta calendar sheets and docs. And this is what I moved over from Evernote. I still love Evernote but I've found myself using Docs more often and docs is basically Microsoft Word but again in the cloud. Great for taking notes, great for jotting down ideas and organizing documents. Again, it's free with Gmail and there's an app for it so you can access anywhere. And again you can access docs offline. Well there you have it guys. Those are my five plus and a little extra one. If you want an alternative to note taking app. They're absolutely free. Nothing for you to pay to get started. So go ahead and get more productive with these tools. Taking action is the most important thing you could do. So take on one of these tools this week and start adopting more productive habits and leveraging its power. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. If you love the show, hit subscribe right now so you get automatic updates as soon as a new episode is available. It is downloaded to your device so it's ready for you when you're ready to listen. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. These tools are absolutely great, but your habits are more important. Being mindful of your Google Doc and taking notes when you're at the actual conference, keeping up with your to do list, utilizing your calendar and making sure you are valuing your time and putting something in your calendar for your working hours for every working hour. These are just tools. If you don't use them, they have no value. All right, thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free Ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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