Three Business Tools that Have Helped My Productivity TREMENDOUSLY

Kirsten 0:01

you're listening to the creative teacher podcast, a show for busy teachers looking for ways to engage, inspire and make an impact in their teacher businesses. I'm Kiersten, a teacher business owner who is all about simple and actionable tips, strategies and resources that result in wins, big or small. If you're looking for that extra spark of creativity, you've come to the right place. Let's dive in together.

Hello, friends, welcome to another episode. I always enjoy recording these episodes. And the fact that I hear from a lot of you that you guys love listening. I am so grateful that you guys are tuning in. So just just wanted to put that out there. Hope you're having a wonderful day. Today we're gonna be talking about some productivity or business tools that have helped my productivity tremendously in the last year. So these three I don't think I've talked about before, I might have mentioned them in passing. But I'm going to go in depth about some business tools that have helped me. I'm going to talk about how I found it and how I use it and how it's helped me.

t I completed in whether it's: 2023

The next tool that I've used in my business over the last year is something that I've used not just in my business, I shouldn't say that like my whole life, it's been pretty much a game changer. And that's the full focus planner. This was also something suggested by a few friends in my mastermind that I'm in. The main thing is that you have your weekly preview with upcoming activities or plans you have in your business and personal life. But then each day, your big three that you're focusing on, instead of having long to do lists, I can focus on three big things big three big tasks that I need to work on. And there's also space if you have a couple of extra things that you need to do. Once you get those big three the day 83 done, I like it, because it's a great way to combine your personal activities, personal life appointments, certain things you have with your home life with also what you would like to do in your business. And there's also space to write out your annual goals, quarterly goals. So you have this kind of drive to do the things you do. And then each full focus planner has enough space for a quarter and it's both completely blank. So it's it is what you make of it. But it's also just a way for me to kind of really think about what I need to focus on. Most of the time, and I've had this since I think September, I will write in my full focus planner daily. That is like a record so far, I think of, out of all the planners I've used, this is the one I've actually stuck with. Because it for me, it keeps myself accountable. I'm somebody who is somebody who works well with goals. And so if I don't have something to drive me each day, it's quickly going to turn into just a free for all and doing things that don't have that and and I just don't end up accomplishing anything. So I know like you're gonna have those days where you're not going to want to do anything. And of course, I've I've had those days. But for the most part, I try to put things in that are purposeful, that need to get done. One of the main tasks I do in my daily three is my cleaning checklist. This is something recent, I write out the daily tasks that I need to do and the weekly tasks. So like, for example, a daily task would be make the beds, sweep the floor in the evenings, take out the trash, do one load of laundry, and then there's a weekly task. There's the bathrooms on Monday and the living room on Tuesday. So I kind of bucketed all of that in one as my daily three. Just because cleaning organization for me is not my it's not my forte. But having this has helped me kind of be more purposeful and more intentional with cleaning. And actually like, Okay, I need to spend a couple of hours actually working on cleaning my house. So that's kind of helped a lot. And it's, you know, most days it's been working. But also I schedule in things like what I want to do for a workout or like running three miles or doing a 30 minute exercise. And then also could be something just very important for the day like maybe we have a birthday party to go to. Maybe it's something in my business related to editing podcast episodes. There's so many different things you can add in your big three, but it's mainly thinking about what is the most important. Sometimes the tasks I have business wise are as important than some of the things I have to do in my personal life. So that's kind of nice to see. Like, you got to pick your three most important activities for the day. And the other things you can try to do. Has it been perfect? No, but I I think it's something that's been really helpful for me. Speaking of productivity, calendars and project management tools.

The third tool I have that has helped me is clickup and Asana, I guess, because in the last year I should say I had Asana that's something that I've had for a while. But just recently in the last three months I switched over to click up they're both very similar, but I went with click up because I liked the interface it seemed so much more intuitive. And how I've used click up is I created a space for a lot of similar things that I have in my air table bases, but I have one for social media product creation, design, content creation. And I in those spaces scheduled different folders one for each month. It depends on the space but social media is one for each month. product creation is by quarter so quarter one, quarter two. So in those spaces and of course you know me I have things looking pretty color coded so my purple social media once a month I schedule in a task where I am creating my social media graphics for the month of April or the month of May or the month of June. So that's why day a week that I scheduled in my product creation just depends on you know what products I have, most of the time, I only have been doing two or three products a month, because I am working on a pretty big product line. So that is something that I schedule in there as well. The cool thing about these tasks that you can schedule in clickup is you can do sub tasks, you can add a checklist, so you can add like all the steps you need to take, or you can do that. And then the subtasks, you can add attachments. So if you have any files, or you want to connect it to your Google Drive or Dropbox, you can add any of that in there. You can also my favorite thing about it is you can track your time, this is something I've started doing, I needed to do a time audit, because sometimes I'm like, where did this? Where does this time go? How much time does it actually take me to do certain things. And so you can press that button, you can track it manually, too, but you can press the play button, and it will track the time, you don't have to stay in the same window. And it'll track the time for you. And you can pause it and restart it. So that's been really cool and kind of eye opening to see how much time it actually actually takes me to do certain recurring tasks, and even just certain projects in general. So this kind of helps me predict in the future as I'm planning tasks for the quarter three or quarter four, do I need to break apart the task next time because it took me six hours? Or do I need to kind of pull back something so it doesn't take me six hours. That's how much time it took for me to do social media graphics in April. But I did a lot of social media graphics, and I'm not gonna do that again. So that is something that's been helping, that's something that's one major thing and clickup that I really love, that has kind of helped me predict how much time it's going to take me for the following months. And if I need to kind of split it, split a task into two days instead of one big day, just based off of past experience. And I can even go back into that specific space, go back into that folder and see oh, okay, I did that task and it took forever. I'm going to make this done over a few days instead of just one day. You can also schedule in due dates and starting dates. I think with Asana, you got to do the starting dates, but it was like you had to pay for it. But this so far, I've been using the free version, and it'll let you schedule a start and finish date. So that is something else to consider. You can also schedule, you can add do boards, you can do different views, I always like using the calendar view where you can see everything. So I click everything. And then I click the calendar. And it shows me a nice pretty color coded schedule of what I'm doing. And if you're in the calendar view, you can easily drag and drop different tasks into different days, and it'll automatically changed the day. So there's a lot of really cool features in clickup. And it's really, you know, I like the logo, its gradient. I just have an affinity for gradient, I guess. And I think that it's just kind of helped my productivity keeping me on track, there is an app, and I scheduled email notification. So I get that in my inbox knowing what I need to work on. And when. And I even have a zap that connects my honey book calendar for clients. If somebody scheduled something, I automatically put his app in, it automatically zaps into clickup. And so it schedules it on that day that they scheduled. So there's so many cool things about clickup And I don't know I'm not gonna turn back to Asana. This, this is pretty much set for me.

So if you are looking for some productivity tools, and you have not heard of these three, I definitely recommend you check them out. That's airtable the full focus planner and clickup All right, well, that is the end of this episode. Hopefully you got some great tips from this. I will talk to you all again soon.

Thanks for tuning in to the creative teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode, feel free to subscribe and leave a review. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern Each. I cannot wait for you to join me in the next episode for more tips and inspiration. Have an amazing day