Hey. What Productivity Tools are you Using?

What Productivity Tools does Chambers Pivot Industries Use?

The number of productivity tools out in the market is simply staggering. When it’s time to find software to help with the day to day, it’s easy to fall prey to “paralysis by analysis”. That state of consuming endless information looking for the “exact right solution”.

I hate to break it to you, but exact right doesn’t exist. . .but you know that. It’s still fun to see what other people have under the hood, right? Let me tell you about what technologies/programs Chambers Pivot Industries runs on. I’ll cover a group of them today and the rest in a future post.

First things first. This is not an endorsement of any one product over another. Familiarity triumphs in most cases. I won’t be going into much detail about how the decision was made unless pressed to do so.

Second, I like to keep expenses to minimum. Sometimes, it’s not about how much you make as it is about how much is left over. Unless I can tie in some direct ROI in revenue, time savings or stress reduction, it’s all about the Benjamins and I’ll go with a small investment.

Third, I’m all about sticking things in the cloud. I am willing to give up some freedom and take on some risk in order to have near full time access to any reports or articles that I’ve clipped or saved.

Let’s get into it.

Here’s a quick list of tools I use: WordPress, Flywheel, IFTTT, Google Apps, Google Alerts, Hootsuite, iPhone, Chromebook, Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, GoodToDo, Evernote, and Moleskine Notebooks.

WordPress is a good place to start because it summarizes one of my beliefs: working in a “box” is a good thing. In case you’re not familiar, WordPress is software that allows you to build a website. Evolved from software for blogs, it has become a strong Content Management System (CMS) that is relatively easy for anyone to learn. WordPress has a hosted product at WordPress.com, but I use the open source software found at WordPress.org and host it at a 3rd party facility. The choice of WordPress or any other “off the shelf” software bundle comes with limitations. Those limits are the “box” that actually makes it easier to work in than a custom build.

A long time ago, I read a book by Barry Schwartz called “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less” and it went into great depth about why having unlimited choices leaves us feeling empty. Software is that unlimited choice. There are no limits to what can be be built and that is a daunting task. How do you know what you want? How do you know what you’ll want or need in 12 months? I was part of dozens of custom software builds and it’s a painful process. Choosing an “off the shelf” pile of code makes choices for you. It builds the playground you will work in. Our minds open up when restricted, so stop looking for software that does everything and start looking for software that is widely adopted and stable. This mind-shift would have saved me thousands of dollars and countless hours if applied back in 2000.

Just sayin’.

Once I had the platform picked, I started looking for the major complaints about the software. #1? Speed. People seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time troubleshooting the speed of their build. The major culprit? The ISP that hosts the website needs to be optimized for WordPress. Simple fix for this: work with a host that specializes in WordPress builds. With 60MM installs, a cottage industry of WordPress specific ISPs have sprung up to host your site. You may pay a little more, but the #1 complaint about WP disappears. I started with WP Engine, but switched to Flywheel because it’s a startup in Omaha and the owners are great people. The net result: the site was easy to build, runs fast and I get all that for only $30 a month plus my initial design fees. ($200 for the purchased theme and a coffee shop consult with my design guru) $500 a year.

The other joy of using out the box software is that there are a lot of plug-ins. Other software programs have built interfaces for the wide user base of WordPress and they are called plug-ins. A quick example of this is a little online tool called If This, Then That. IFTTT.com. Here was my problem: I would spend time writing these little articles on my site and then I’d have to go push them out to my social networks. Manually. The fix: WordPress has a built in RSS feed. IFTTT can read changes in the RSS feed. IFTTT can also hook up to my various networks: Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. Change happens in the RSS feed (the If This), and the content link is pushed out to the networks (the Then That). Saved me time and made me a little more effective.

That follows for newsletter subscribers too. I’m a big fan of the Email Service Providers like Constant Contact, AWeber, iContact, Vertical Response etc. It started way back when because I needed a way to manage unsubscribes, double opt-ins and updates. I can’t remember what I used first, but I do remember when I bumped in MailChimp. It was an integration with the shopping cart I used at the time. I’m a sucker for anything boring that gets a bit of personality injected through branding. That little monkey coupled with a pretty robust email platform set me on their path and I’ve been using it ever since.

The coolest feature? Auto-responder. It lets me set up a few more of those “if this happens, then that happens” logic statements, so I don’t have to worry about someone not being on the same page as other subscribers. If you sign up today, you get the double opt in, a welcome email, an FYI email and a common questions email. I wrote them once and can do other things while that basic customer service tool does its job for me. MailChimp has another feature that I love using: Hairball. It’s a small program that allows me to super-segment my audience based on behavior. If you clicked this link and then did that action, I can pull you into a group that matches your behavior. That way, when I run a note out to you, it can be targeted to the content you find interesting. The applications here for a single sales person out in the wild are tremendous. It’s $10 a month.

The last tool I’m going to cover today is the combination of Google Apps and GoodToDo. I use the Google Apps suite ($5 a month) for a few reasons. 1 is the giant email storage in the cloud. I know that it puts me squarely in the Google world, but they make the trade off worthwhile. The ability to archive (removing emails from my inbox) and search that archive make my life easy. I love the book Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst. While I’m using a bastardized version of his methods, it’s amazing how well it works. I look at each email, decide if it needs action, take action if I have time or push that action into the future by sending it to GoodToDo. If I shoved an action ahead in time, it shows up via my daily email ToDo list and I attack.

Tied to that are my liberal use of filters in Gmail. One of my favorite mottos is “what has happened, will happen” and email notifications fall right into that category. Mom’s emails? Priority #1. If I wait too long, her mind races and soon I’m somewhere in a ditch bleeding out so it’s best to acknowledge those right away. LinkedIn group notices? Subject line scan and archive for some, automatic archive for others, and quick preview of topic for yet others and then buh-bye.

I could go on, but my major recommendation is to read the book. I think it’s in the Amazon Prime lending library if you have that. Good read.

I’ll go into the other tools before the month ends. If you want more information on any of these tools before that time, send a note. I can go into my love/hate relationship with all of them.

Good stuff.