544: Top 10 Productivity Tools
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Welcome to the How of Business with your host, Henry Lopez. The podcast that helps you start, run, and grow your small business. And now, here is your host.

Welcome to the Howa Business Podcast. This is Henry Lopez. And on this episode, I share my top 10 productivity tools. These are 10 of the current tools that I use as a small business owner and a business coach. And I depend on these tools almost daily to run my business and remain highly productive from my home office. You can find all of the Howa Business resources, including the show notes page for this episode. And to learn more about my coaching programs, please visit thehowabusiness.com.

I also invite you to please consider supporting this podcast on Patreon. And please subscribe wherever you might be listening so you don't miss any new episodes. I also would like to say a quick thank you to a few of my most recent business coaching clients, including David, Genevieve, Dr. G, and Shannon. I appreciate the opportunity to serve as your business coach.

I invite you to go to the show notes page for this episode. I'm going to list out all 10 of these tools with links to their respective websites so you can learn more about them in case you're not familiar with some of these tools. So here are my top 10 productivity tools. These are not in any particular order,

But number one is Outlook. So it's what I use for email, but more importantly, it's what I use for my calendar. Everything goes into my Outlook calendar, my personal commitments, my scheduled coaching sessions, my time blocks. If I'm time blocking to research something or work on a project, all of it is on my calendar.

If it's not in my calendar, I will forget about it, but I won't get to it. So everything gets time blocked. Whatever calendar system you use, it doesn't matter. You've got to use it and have everything in there. And I do believe that you combine both your personal and your business or work calendars. I happen to use Outlook for email and for calendar. Of course, Outlook offers a lot of functionality that I use to manage my emails. I like to flag those important emails that I have to come

back to so that I can organize them better. I color code my calendar so that visually I can see what's going on and what my commitments are. So I use a lot of the features of Outlook. Number two is Canva.

Canva is an online, a cloud-based graphics creation tool. It's been around for a number of years. I've been using it for, I don't know, four or five years. I have the paid version, but there is a free version. At least I believe there still is a free version that's very functional as well. I have the pro version that allows me access to more of their stock photos and videos. And now, of course, as with a lot of other tools, they're starting to layer in AI to make it even more.

more effective. In fact, there is integration between Canva and ChatGPT. I haven't used that yet, but I know that it's there and eventually I'll learn how to use that. Number three for me is Calendly. Calendly, a little hard to say, like calendar. Calendly is what I've been using forever. I'm comfortable with it and it handles all

all of my scheduling. So for those of you listening that maybe have had a coaching consultation with me or have scheduled a coaching call with me, you know that I've sent you a link or you go to my website and when you click on schedule a free consultation, that's the tool that you're going to is Calendly that handles scheduling that appointment. It integrates with my Outlook calendar. You can set up different schedules and so it's very effective. And then there's also workflow that you can define within the tool as well.

So that's number three, Calendly. Number four is ChatGPT. Now this has become an essential tool for me. I've been using it for, I guess, over a year now since it came out. I'm using the paid version. It's $20 a month. I use it almost every day. I primarily use it for content creation, written content. So if I'm doing research or preparing for a podcast episode or

help me put together an outline for something that I'm writing or an outline for an interview. I really encourage you to start using ChatGPT. Just use the free version. If you're not using it already,

Number four is Zapier with a Z. And it's an integration technology that they've developed all these APIs that can talk to just about every software imaginable to connect things. So it reduces the amount of manual re-entry or duplicate entry or

uploads or whatever you might have to do now, you can automate those integrations in particular with Zapier. Number six is MailChimp. MailChimp is what I use for email marketing. There are other platforms out there like Constant Contact, which I've used as well. A lot of the CRMs have it integrated. So you need an email marketing platform if that's at all part of your marketing process.

And email marketing is a big way that I stay in contact with some of you perhaps have received my emails. Number seven is HubSpot CRM. For CRM, customer relationship management is what CRM stands for. It's essential if you're trying to keep track of any sales process or contacts or anywhere, anything where you're contacting people and managing those relationships.

So I use HubSpot as I work with clients, my coaching clients, to keep track of my conversations, all of the coaching sessions, all of that information, all of that data is in HubSpot. And I'm using the free version of HubSpot. So that was number seven, HubSpot.

Number eight on my top 10 list of productivity tools is my iPad. Now, specifically what I do in this iPad is what's important here. I have an app that's loaded on there. There's lots of them. I don't even know the name of it. But what I do is I take all of my notes. I used to do that all on paper.

But then I was having all of this paper that then I was scanning so that I could digitize it and add it to the database in HubSpot for that coaching client. Now I upload that to Google Drive and then bring it in to HubSpot and attach it to my notes for that session. And so everything is in one place in HubSpot.

So that was number eight, my digital note app on my iPad. Number nine is Zoom. Zoom is the platform that I use for all of my coaching sessions. And then when I do my podcast, when I interview people, I'm using Zoom and recording it that way. And so that's number nine on my top 10 productivity tools, Zoom.

And 10 is Google Drive and Dropbox. So those two platforms for cloud storage and file sharing, I'd certainly recommend Google Drive because it's affordable and it's easy and it really works well.

As I was putting this together, I just wanted to mention a few other categories of productivity tools that I don't use because it doesn't apply to me, but I want to make sure you're aware of them and that you're using them if it makes sense for you. One of those is a project management software like Trello or Asana or

monday.com. If you've got two or more people working on projects together, then a tool like that I think is essential as well to keep everybody communicating, to keep track of who's working on what and what progress is being made.

Another type of tool is a team communication platform. If you've got multiple team members, especially if you are remote, so you're not in one office, then something like Slack or Microsoft Teams to facilitate those communications, I think that's critical.

And finally, accounting and invoicing software. So I do use QuickBooks and I do recommend every small business owner should have some kind of an accounting and perhaps invoicing software. So something like QuickBooks or FreshBooks. Those are tools that handle finances, including expense tracking, invoicing if you need that, payroll if you need it. It just makes it easier to manage cash flow and to manage your financials so that you can

measure and monitor the financial performance of your business. Those are my top 10 productivity tools. Again, if you go to the show notes page for this episode, I'll have them listed along with links in case you're not familiar with them and you want to know where to go, where to go to learn more about them. Just go to the show notes page for this episode at thehowabusiness.com.

The key takeaway is this. There are so many tools out there now that are affordable and easy to use. Now, that in itself can be overwhelming. Which ones do we choose? So don't overthink this. A lot of these, as I've mentioned, offer free versions or a trial period. The thing is to use something and to leverage that productivity and efficiency that comes from using these tools, in particular AI tools like ChatGPT.

Look for opportunities to automate and leverage these technologies that are affordable and accessible to us as small business owners to improve yours and your team members' efficiency and their communication. This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for joining me on this episode of The Howa Business. I wish you the best as you start and grow your successful and profitable small business.

I release new episodes every Monday morning, and you can find the show anywhere you listen to podcasts, including the Howa Business YouTube channel and at my website, thehowabusiness.com. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to The Howa Business. For more information about our coaching programs, online courses, show notes pages, links, and other resources, please visit thehowabusiness.com.