5 Productivity Tools To Help You Crush The Rest Of 2019

We’re more than halfway through 2019. Just let that sink in for a moment (!!). Maybe the time’s flown by as you’ve been working through your list of goals for the year. Or maybe it’s just flown away and you’re still trying to figure out how.

Whether you’re mastering the art of crushing your goals, or just stumbling your way through another project, there’s no time like the present to increase your productivity.

At Kimp since we deal with a wide range of activities and projects, we’re always on the lookout for tools that will help make our operations more efficient.

We’ve listed some of our favourite productivity tools below. Check ‘em out and let us know if you have any you would add!

Project Management

1) Trello

If you’re a current client, or considering using Kimp, chances are you’ve heard us singing Trello’s praises. We love it.

Trello follows the Kanban methodology beautifully, allowing you, and your team members, to view your projects, and the various stages that they’re in, all at a glance. Trello also makes it easy to collaborate.

Just set up a board for each of your projects, departments, programs, etc. And within it create lists and cards to represent the various stages of your workflow.

It’s kind of like having a white board filled with lists of sticky notes. Except each of your sticky notes has the ability to store endless comments, links and files, without ever taking up more space on your board.

AND you can access your board or boards from anywhere you go with your phone or computer. Pretty awesome.

Here’s how we use Trello:

Trello is available in free, business class and enterprise versions. So test it out and then consider rolling it out to your team if you think it’s the right fit for you.

Messaging and Collaboration

2) Flock

While our Kimp teams work together in our offices, we rely heavily on Flock to streamline our communications. For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, Flock is a messaging platform and collaboration tool. And it’s a powerful one.

With Flock you can communicate 1:1 with team members or in private or public group channels based on departments, projects or common interests (like being foodies and sports fanatics or geeking out over design trends).

The platform makes collaboration super easy. Whether that takes the form of sharing files and links (which you can search for afterwards), making a quick audio or video call, or creating shared to do lists or notes.

Plus you can integrate your favourite third party apps so once you’ve hopped on to Flock you can cut down on the number of apps and tabs you have open.

AND you can also set up reminders and processes to help you automate your workflows and focus on the parts of your business that bring you the biggest results.

So if you’re still having endless meetings, trying to dig yourself out from underneath your inbox, or yelling across the room to your teammates, it’s time you consider a messaging and collaboration tool.

We adore Flock, and since it has a free plan for small teams we’d definitely recommend giving it a go.

3) Loom

How many hours have you spent writing up instructions that you could’ve explained more easily in person?

But explaining things in person isn’t always an option. And since teleportation isn’t either, thankfully there’s Loom.

Loom is a screen recorder that can be downloaded as a Chrome extension or desktop app and allows you to capture recordings in three different ways – your screen only, your camera only, or both.

With just the click of the icon you can get started and then you’ll have a unique link generated which you can share with your colleagues, clients and anyone else.

The best thing about screen recordings is that you minimize the chances of misinterpretations occurring because you can show exactly what it is you’re talking about.

And one of the best things about Loom is that their free version is fantastic.

Time Tracking

4) Tick

Want to start running your projects on time and on budget — or maybe even under budget? Enter Tick. This time tracking app (which has integrated apps for mobile, desktop and browser extensions) is great because it allows us to figure out how effectively we’re managing our projects.

From there we can do some deep dives into where we need to build capacity in order to achieve better results.

Another great perk – with the ability to produce quick reports by company, project, and timekeeper, Tick provides us with metrics that help us plan for when and how we’ll scale different parts of our operations.

And, maybe one of its most important functions for our team, it helps us recognize our successes as we set and meet goals for productivity.

Tick can integrate with different project management software which allows you to bring time tracking and budget feedback into your workflow. You can also export your time entries for invoicing.

Tick offers a 30 day free trial – plenty of time for you track your progress on a few projects and jumpstart your productivity.

Automations

5) Zapier

Ever find yourself repeatedly doing the same tasks over and over, switching from app to app, and wishing you were free to do work that matters more? If this sounds like you, maybe you are trying too hard to manually bridge all of the apps that you love so very much. Well it isn’t for nothing that the old saying goes, love is blind. It also happens to be highly inefficient.

With Zapier you can connect your apps and automate your workflows and get to focusing on the tasks that create the most value for you.

You sign up for a 14 day free trial, grant access to integrate your web apps so that they can share data, and then set up automations so that the information flows between your apps in workflows that don’t require you to lift your finger.

You’ll be amazed at the number of things you can automate as you go from identifying ways to make existing processes faster to creating processes you didn’t even realize you needed.

There’s A LOT you can accomplish when you remove tasks that are just time fillers and free yourself up to reimagine how you approach your work.

Which is exactly what we hope you’ll be doing next, after you finish reading this blog. Because 2020 is in about 5 months. And it doesn’t matter what kind of excuses you’re telling yourself – it’s time to get out of your own way and push hard toward the finish line.