A h‘app’y solution to greater efficiency

The productivity apps small businesses should download now.

If you want your business to excel then it’s important to explore and develop new ways to improve your day-to-day productivity. The good thing is there are plenty of useful apps that will help you save time, work more efficiently and ultimately free you up so you can concentrate on making more money.

I asked Michael Peres, a serial-entrepreneur, journalist, radio host and software engineer, to share his favourite productivity apps. Operating multiple businesses has meant Peres has had to master the art of being highly efficient with his time.

“Sometimes taking just a few minutes to expose yourself to new tools can save you countless hours in the long run,” said Mikey Peres from Seattle, Washington. “I believe we should all spend time learning new tools, it’s a great investment.”

Here are Michael’s top 13 productivity apps aimed at helping small businesses.

Last Pass

Peres has been using LastPass over a year and he swears by it. Our laptops are fragile and it’s not uncommon for them to get damaged, or worse, stolen. If you have all your passwords stored locally, you’re in for a digital nightmare. This can be especially complicated if you have two-factor authentication and multiple accounts.

“Taking just a few minutes to expose yourself to new tools can save you countless hours in the long run.”

The solution…LastPass! “Last Pass stores all your passwords in the cloud and their service is secure as they come! Your content is protected with a technology called end-to-end encryption, which means that even if LastPass were to have their databases compromised by bad actors, your passwords are still hidden,” Peres says. For this reason, it’s important you remember that one master password, and that’s really all you need to do to keep your password worries at bay.

Last Pass can be used as a chrome extension or on a mobile app.

Alternatives: 1Passwd, Dashlane

My Noise and Calm

“You might think I’m strange, but I play repeating and calming background noises to cancel out all those external noises in my brain and get hype focused. This is one of my most effective tools for getting focused and hyper productive” Peres says.

In fact, upon doing some research, Peres was spot on. This phenomenon is referred to as “white noise” or “stochastic resonance”, and in a recent study at Edith Cowan University it was found that white-noise significantly improved the concentration and memory of their subjects.

“I’m a concentration ninja when I snap on my noise cancelling headphones playing a 3 hour YouTube video of a box fan at work on a raining night. There’s just nothing like it,” he adds.

Whether it’s the crackling wood of a fireplace, or a box fan with distant thunder, having white-noise in the background may be a great solution for keeping the small distraction away and maximizing productivity. For Peres, the use of these videos doesn’t stop here

“In fact, I use these videos before I sleep as well, it makes the process of transition to sleep really calming and enjoyable,” Peres adds.

Apps like My Noise and Calm are a great place to learn more about white-noises and find the clips that work best for you.

Tomighty

“If you’re like me, tiny distractions can lead to significant productivity loss. Something as simple as quickly checking your phone can easily result in the loss of 30 valuable minutes. There are times where I like to do many things at the same time, and there are times where I need just a few minutes to cancel everything out and just tackle a specific task. In either case, the Pomodoro technique is a godsend,” says Peres.

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short break.

A great app to tracking your time is Tomighty.

“You don’t always have to do lengthy 25-minute intervals, sometimes, and especially when my attention is scattered with many exciting things on my mind, I’ll spend 10-minute intervals isolating between coding and workout out, it’s funky but it keeps me super productive,” Peres says.

Alternatives: Serenity

Click Up, Notion, Trello and Monday

As an entrepreneur, it’s important you create a smooth and efficient system for internal communication. Of course, this is essential for offering a great service, but you also want to focus your energy on building your company, not micro-managing it.

Team productivity tools like ClickUp, Notion, Trello and Monday are essential for running a productive and successful business.

“I honestly don’t know how I would operate without these tools. Each one of these apps are amazing in their own way, and it’s crucial you read up on each online, or even what YouTube reviews for each, spend hours trying them out, and making a selection,” Peres says.

Freshdesk

“Working through emails is so 1990, and if you want to give your clients a pleasant and efficient experience, I recommend you divorce from the relic of traditional emails and start using a system that allows you to communicate with clients in a more effective manner, and Freshdesk is the way to go,” Peres explains.

Freshdesk is a ticket system that builds on top of emails, allowing you to keep your internal operations organised and running smoothly.

“FreshDesk is another app I just can’t see myself surviving without, I use it to document official conversations and can attach private notes to tickets, assign them to workers, it’s just amazing,” Peres adds.

RescueTime

Before solving a problem it’s important to identify it first. So many bad habits of behaviours stem from actions that we aren’t even conscious of. One being how much time we waste in the wrong places and RescueTime helps us get to the bottom of that.

This article first appeared in issue 32 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine