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If making countless decisions throughout your workday is causing you fatigue, you’re not alone; decision fatigue is real thing that affects many people in their daily lives, both at work and at home. In fact, the New York Times published a study that showed that “prisoners who appeared early in the day received parole about 70% of the time, while those that came late in the evening had less than 10% chance at landing parole.” This is mainly due to the fact that judges are human, and thus suffer from decision fatigue like so many of the rest of us.
According to FastCompany, each decision you make tasks your brain, making it harder and harder to make choices throughout the work day and eventually prompting your brain to take “shortcuts”- not something you want to do when making high-stakes decisions. So why not pass some of that stress and responsibility on to a program that guarantees not to suffer from workday fatigue, thus allowing your brain to function at it’s highest capacity for the tougher choices you have to make. Read below to learn about 6 popular tools that can cut down on stress and make your work day run faster and more smoothly.
Social Media
HootSuite is a social media management dashboard similar to Buffer and SproutSocial. They offer the ability to schedule posts so that you’re not chained to your computer trying to monitor your social media sites, and (like the other two) they also offer analytic data so you can track your progress. One difference with HootSuite is that they offer a Free limited plan, so you can really try out the program and see if it’s right for your business. Buffer and SproutSocial offer free trials, but they’re not as extensive as the one offered by HootSuite. Their Enterprise plan is also customizable, so if you’re a big business with a big budget you have the option to create a plan that’s perfect for your individual goals, as opposed to trying to fit your business into a pre-configured marketing mold.
Communication
HubSpot combines marketing, sales and CRM to create a “people-centered” approach to business marketing. Their goal is not to bother people with annoying sales pitches, but instead to help businesses by providing a program that combines the aforementioned tools in a way that connects with people and builds relationships, instead automated marketing that looks and sounds like it’s from a robot. Each of their plans offers different types of services and can easily be customized to meet your business’s needs. They also provide a variety of add-ons for their plans that allows users to incorporate website development, marketing and sales reports, and advertising. This is a good tool to use if you have somewhat of a large marketing budget and are looking for an “all-in-one” tool to automate your workload. Check out the chart below or visit their website for specific pricing information.
Checker Plus for Gmail is a Chrome Extension that allows you to quickly manage multiple email accounts without ever having to open your inbox. After installing Checker Plus, you will receive notifications on your screen whenever you receive a new email with important information like the sender’s contact info and the email subject heading. You can then choose to read, delete, or mark these emails without ever having to leave your browsing screen, thus taking multi-tasking to a whole new level. Perfect for the busy business owner with multiple email accounts (but could be helpful even if you only have one!) who doesn’t have time to constantly be clicking back and forth between browser windows every time they receive an email.
Content
Snip.ly works by driving traffic to your site by promoting someone else’s; kind of like a “help someone else, help yourself” mentality. Snip.ly helps you do more than just share links; you can attach a CTA to every link you share, as well as track your clicks, conversions, and on-page data. Snip.ly has an “A/B testing tool” that lets users try out different CTAs to find out which ones work best for their business, and they include retargeting pixels with every shared link in order to create custom audiences for remarketing campaigns. Snip.ly is a good tool to use if you find yourself sharing a lot of links but not getting a lot of conversions in return. Take the time to analyze what you’re doing right and what can be improved, and let Snip.ly do the tedious work so you have more time to focus on the hard stuff.
Organization
DropBox is one of my favorite ways to keep all my files from different aspects of my life organized, with the added bonus of being able to share them with friends, family, and coworkers. They’ve recently come out with DropBox for business (see pricing models and details below), which is designed specifically with small business’s needs in mind. They make it easy to save and share files and collaborate with team members. DropBox has two access options; you can go to their online website and work directly from there, or you can download DropBox directly to your computer and it will appear as a documents folder. I’m partial to the online version because then I have access to my files wherever I am: at home, at work, in the car, on vacation, etc. so if my boss randomly calls me up and needs something right away, it’s no more than a few clicks away. One downside of Dropbox is that there is a storage limit, but you can easily increase that limit for a very affordable price (which I think is completely worth it). If you’re not convinced it’s right for your business, check out their website for a list of their valuable benefits. I guarantee it will cut down on time spent searching for files when you can’t remember where you saved them!
Pocket is a virtual “pocket”; a place to store things you see that you might want to access later. It’s similar to Pinterest in that you can create online bulletin boards with your ideas, articles, videos, and pretty much anything you see that you want to save. You can view your “pocket” on your computer, tablet, or phone, and you can save items in your pocket from your web browser, email, and thousands of apps that work together with pocket to keep your ideas organized. This is perfect for the creative mind that is constantly coming across new ideas for their business and can’t explore them right in that moment, but doesn’t want to lose track of them for later.
Incorporating one or more of these tools into your business plan should increase your company’s effectiveness while also giving you peace of mind and more time to devote to the daily activities and decisions that matter most. I don’t advise trying to utilize all these tools at one time; pick one or two to start and then go from there. If you’re still not convinced that workload automation can help your growing business, check out this article from Tech.co. Let us know what you think, and how you’re going to get started. Comment below!