Hey everyone, Jason here digital marketing consultant.
And in this complete productivity apps review, you're gonna learn about the five best and
essential productivity apps for entrepreneurs.
Timestamps table of contents in the description along with some other helpful videos, that
go through how to hire freelancers and manage a virtual team, and actually use some of these
applications.
So these five are based upon not dealing with software bugs, the value you get for the price
and of course just testing over a couple of years figuring out which ones actually work
the best.
And the first manager we have on the list is going to be your project manager, because
as an entrepreneur, one of your most important tasks is getting tasks off your plate and
delegating.
And so, a good project manager can either add to the headache or reduce the headache.
And in this particular instance, the one that takes the top spot is, “asana”.
Now, I’ve tried podio I’ve tried asana, Basecamp, Trello, outlook, Google Tasks and
even Evernote for a brief week.
Evernote I think was the shortest one ever we tried to use.
An asana comes out on top, simply because it has the most features most flexibility
for the best price, which is free.
So asana is actually free as long as you're under 15 people.
Now, if you need advanced things like Gantt charts and you want to take a look at tracking
how many hours people take or taking a deeper dive into workloads on your team, then you're
definitely going to have to pay for the premium version.
But I’d say for nine out of ten business owners and entrepreneurs, the free version
of asana as long as you have less than 15 people, will give you plenty of features and
pretty much everything you need to run your business.
Now, one of the biggest drawbacks to asana was that it didn't use to have boards.
So something that made Trello very popular is, you could visually see all of your tasks
and projects.
And some people really like that personally.
Personally I’m a list person so I like the way the default asana looks, but if you like
the way Trello looks, you can actually now create boards inside of asana, pretty much
eliminating the need for Trello at all.
In fact, the asana CEO was pretty harsh on Trello, calling that just a feature not necessarily
an entire platform.
So it's cool you can have your boards, you can also have your lists.
Inside of asana, you can have a task and a sub task and a sub task and then another sub
task.
Although, if you're working with other people, it can be very hard for those other people
to understand your entire hierarchy.
So maybe you only want to go one or two deep and it's very easy to add people to add and
remove people to asana, and assign them tasks you can make reoccurring tasks and you can
also have conversations on your actual project.
So if you're looking for a project manager, I would recommend asana.
If for whatever reason you don't like asana, then number two would be Basecamp.
Simply because for $100 a month.
Basecamp doesn't charge per user.
So if you have a large team, Basecamp might actually make sense, especially now that they
finally added reoccurring tasks.
And one final note with asana, you can easily add all of your documents from Dropbox, Google
Drive, OneDrive, and whatever other drives there are or just directly uploaded to asana.
So you really can do everything you need in one place with asana.
And on the topic of storage, next up we have your file manager.
So here the big players, we have box, Dropbox then we have Google Drive and we have OneDrive.
And out of all of these solutions, for us and me personally Google Drive makes the most
sense.
At five dollars a month or twelve dollars a month, it gives you the most amount of features
and storage for the price.
At $12 a month, you're going to get a terabyte and if you have five people on your team,
then it becomes unlimited.
And when you look at Google Drive compared to the other two big solutions Dropbox and
box, you actually don't have to pay for every user who has access to the drive.
So a big downside of something like Dropbox, is if you have a terabyte of storage, and
you bring someone on your team you say, “hey I'd like to give you access to that” well
all of a sudden, doesn't matter that you've paid for the terabyte.
Now your person under team has to pay for the terabyte.
Whereas with Google Drive, if you've paid for the terabyte and you add their Google
account whether it's a business one that's under you or it's just a normal Gmail account,
this person does not have to pay for a terabyte of storage.
So you only pay once whereas with Dropbox you pretty much pay for the same amount of
storage for each person who needs access to it.
And the reason this is so great is because with Google Drive, you can now actually make
something called “team drives”.
And what team drives allow you to do is make a drive that's independent of everyone's accounts.
So it's not like a personal Google Drive any-- it's not like your personal Google Drive anymore.
And you can add and remove users and you can even make entire drives for each part of your
team.
So as you can see here, we actually have a lot of different team drives and we have a
specific team drive for training, we have a specific team drive for the management team,
for us as founders and then we also have specific team drives for different parts of our business
or different media properties that we run.
So it makes it really, really clean and easy to organize all your files and make sure the
proper people have access plus you get all of the G suite applications of Docs slides
drawings and sheets.
Something that you're not really going to get with the other solutions, where you're
actually gonna wind up paying for office 365 on top of box or Dropbox.
Of course, if you're using OneDrive, then you're probably already paying for office
365 and you're happy with the online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Although, I will say if you're looking for something that's going to be completely online,
the G suite for business definitely beats office 365.
I've gone back and forth on that a lot and we've just stuck with Google Drive, because
it's been the most consistent when it comes to doing everything in the cloud, especially
because most of our team is virtual.
Now, before we move on to number three, I want to quickly address Zoho, because if you've
heard of Zoho, you might be wondering why I didn't have it on the list.
If you haven't heard of Zoho, just skip the next 20 seconds.
But essentially, the reason we didn't put Zoho on this list is because the pricing is
super confusing.
And it becomes very, very expensive when you need multi users and it's not really so much
a file storage system as it is more of a business CRM management system.
So that's the only reason we're not including Zoho here.
Now, number three comes to your idea manager.
So as an entrepreneur business owner, chances are you have a lot of ideas.
There are a lot of projects you want to do, but the problem is if you put all of those
ideas, inside of Google Drive or you put all of those potential projects inside of a asana,
you'll have the problem of clutter.
And clutter is something that you don't want as a part of your business system.
So I recommend using Evernote to keep everything that goes on in here in a safe and secure
place that is outside of what everyone else on your team is looking at.
And now there are two reasons for this.
Reason number one, your brain is a processor.
It's not designed to be a file cabinet.
So once you've processed and you have that idea or you're thinking about this project,
you can go ahead and pull that out and stick it in Evernote and then just let it stay there.
And then-- and reason number two you want in Evernote and not these other places is,
you want to keep asana clean!
Asana tasks should be things that are actively worked on.
One of the great downsides of asana is it's very easy to have just endless to-do lists,
right?
That's not really productive.
That's not really gonna help anyone get anything done.
So you want all of those ideas, so all the things that are not now to be in Evernote.
And this will make sure that asana stays clean, this will make sure that Google Drive stays
clean with things that are actually relevant and actively being worked on.
As opposed to a bunch of documents that have half ideas or projects that you'd like to
do in the future, but you don't necessarily have time for.
I definitely recommend paying for the premium version of Evernote, but I don't recommend
paying for the business version of Evernote, because I think it's ten or twelve dollars
a month per user.
When you compare Evernote to what you get with G suite for business, it makes a heck
of a lot more sense to just pay $12 per user per user for Google Drive and just use Evernote
personally.
I also really like Evernote, because of their Web Clipper it's very easy to just clip YouTube
videos or a blog post that I think would be helpful in the future.
And that's just the giant file cabinet.
So number four on our list is going to be your talent manager, because at the end of
the day, of course you need talent on your team to help you grow and scale.
And the best tool for that right now is, actually Upwork.
So what Upwork allows you to do is to post jobs and then freelancers around the globe
or in specific geo locations that you specify, will apply to your job.
Now, they recently change the pricing, so there are different pricing tiers.
I don't recommend paying for the $50 to $500 a month for Upwork.
I think the pricing just is a really, really too much for new businesses.
So what I recommend doing is using the free plan and then if you have a really important
job or task, you can actually pay 30 or 40 bucks to boost that specific job posting,
so that it goes to the top and you get a lot more people to actually apply to your job.
I'll link up in the description to a full playlist that walks you through how to use
Upwork to find great talent.
And finally number five is going to be your money manager, because we all need to make
money as entrepreneurs at the end of the day.
And this comes down to that good old accounting software that is necessary, but just so boring
to talk about.
So that's why we put it at number five.
Now, speaking as a former accountant, I’ve used a lot of different accounting softwares
app out there from enterprise all the way down to small things like fresh book and quickbooks.
And I can tell you from personal experience waive accounting is going to be the best solution
as long as you're not doing seven figures a month.
And the reason wave accounting is so great is, because it costs $0.
It will directly connect to your bank account, it will easily; which means you don't have
to manually key things in it anymore, if you remember quicken.
And then also you can easily categorize all of your expenses and it has all the basic
report you need to hand off to your CPA at the end of the year or whichever country and
your accountant at the end of the year, who prepares your taxes.
And so I really, really like waveaccounting, because it simplifies the whole accounting
process.
It doesn't cost anything and it's really easy to get sucked into the marketing messages
of quickbooks and fresh books, especially with fresh books and their project management
stuff.
I won't even get into that fresh books the project management thing is a joke inside
there and quickbooks is just overkill for I'd say 90% of the businesses who actually
use it.
So waveaccounting has you covered if you're looking for advanced reporting on your business,
you're doing a lot of e-commerce sales or you want to look at how your leads are working
and actually turning into clients, then I highly recommend looking at a different solution
or having someone build you a custom reporting solution using Google sheets and smart sheets,
because all of these accounting solutions on the market right now, that are actually
reasonably priced, are not going to give you a deep dive into actually seeing exactly how
much time someone on your team is spending or giving you enough clarity on projects and
costing, that it's gonna make sense to actually pay for those.
So I highly recommend just sticking with waveaccounting for free, and using a different non accounting
based software if you need some advanced tracking of your sales data, or how people on your
team are spending their time.
And so that does it for the five essential productivity apps for entrepreneurs and business
owners.
Go ahead and comment below which ones on this list you actually use and which ones you disagree
with and you have a different solution for, because your insights and questions are going
to help others make the right decision for their entrepreneurial journey and business.
So go ahead and hit that like button, subscribe for more reviews just like this one.
And until the next, keep building the business you love.