3 online apps to organise your business

Have you ever woken up thinking “I have so much time to fill today?” It’s probably highly unlikely with everything you have to juggle every day. You’re more likely wondering where you can find extra hours!

The good news is that making your work hours more productive is almost as useful as finding extra hours.

Here are just a few of the most popular apps and software that may help your small business be productive. Obviously, they’re not a magic solution (wouldn’t that be nice!) but take a look to see if any of the tools could help your business.

And because all of the solutions are online, they may be what you need to stay organised if your team has to work remotely in the future.

Trello for project or task management

The primary reason projects fail comes down to missing deadlines. Using project-tracking software can help keep you on track, so you hit your targets each time.

Trello is an online tool to help you organise projects. And it doesn’t matter if you’re part of a team or working alone – it’s just as useful.

It gives you a visual representation of the status of your tasks. Think of it like a white-board full of post-it notes that you can move around depending on where your task is up to. You create columns for each stage in a project, like ‘in progress’ or ‘completed’ – it’s up to you what you call them – and a card for each task. Then you just drag and drop the cards into the right column as your tasks progress.

Trello is free in its basic form, but you can buy ‘power ups’ to do more advanced features like linking to a calendar.

It has 50 million users across Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and web apps.

Slack for communication and collaboration

Information comes flying at us every day, both in work and personally, and it can be hard to keep track of it all. You need some way of organising it, and to keep your personal and work messages separate.

Slack is an online tool that lets you simplify your communications. It’s like a chatroom for teams which you can split into different ‘channels’ for different projects or workgroups.

It also makes it easy to share files to your team. Altogether it means you can keep all your information together without having to search through emails and folders to find what you need.

It’s free for the basic features, but if you want more functionality, there’s a pricing model with a cost per user/per month. You can use it for web, desktop for macOS and Windows, and mobile for iOS and Android.

Evernote for organising your notes

Do you jot down thoughts and ideas everywhere and then can’t find them? Take handwritten notes in a meeting and want to search them? Find information on the web but then forget where you found it?

Evernote is a cloud storage note-taking app that lets you save and search everything including emails, handwritten notes, photos and screen clips of websites.

You can organise your notes in notebooks and ‘stacks’ of notebooks to keep information together, but the most powerful feature is the search. It searches for keywords in attached documents, photos and even handwritten notes!

It also lets you sync your notes across multiple devices. So, you can take a note while out and about on your phone and then sync it with your computer. And you can even share selected notes with other members of your team.

Evernote is free for basic use, but there’s a monthly fee for heavier users. You can use it for web, desktop for macOS and Windows, and mobile for iOS and Android.

Find more time in your day

So, there you have it. Three tools to feel like you have more hours in your day. It’s not as good as magically making each day 28 hours long, but it’s the next best thing.