Grab the Free Busy Mama Daily Schedule Reset right here!
Grab the Free Busy Business Mama Daily Schedule Reset right here!
Check out all my meal planning goodness at This Crafty Home!
Find it on Apple Podcasts right here!
Find it on Spotify right here!
Quick Notes:
- Speechify
- Otter
- Focus
- shared calendar + Native widgets
- Habitica
- Goodnotes
- Pomodoro timers
Web browser - Loom
- Grammarly
- Last pass
- Self-control
- Evernote
- Trello
- Click up
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to the Mama Gets it Done Podcast friends, I’m so excited because today we’re talking all about technology that can actually help you be more productive in your home and in your business. So let’s jump right into it.
Real quick, I’m stopping the episode to tell you guys a little bit about the brand new freebie that I have out for new business owners out there. I have a free Busy Business Mama Daily Reset. Yes. And it’s gonna take you step by step through how to reset your daily schedule as a busy business mom who has 3000 things on her plate and needs a little more structure and help throughout the day. So you can grab it at the link in the show notes, it’s excellent
Hello, friends, I am back. It is a new year, we are ready to go and I am so excited this week to talk about technology that actually helps us because we know technology can be such like a time suck right? But this time, we’re talking all about technology that can actually help us.
So we’re gonna jump right into it. I’ve got apps and then I’ve got things that only work on desktop or web browsers. So there are all kinds of things that we’re going to talk about. We’re going to get started right now. Okay, so we’re going to kick us off. We’re going to start with my absolute favorite thing.
That is ClickUp y’all. If you have a business you may have heard of ClickUp. It’s a management system where you can organize your entire business and quite honestly, it’s wild. But what I personally I really love it for my business but I also really love it for my home too.
So we just finished another round of the Busy Business Mama Today challenge and we made a ClickUp template in that for our homes. So basically you know how you know like, every month or every two weeks or how often you mop your floors. It’s really up to you and what’s happening in your house right? You know, you want to do that at a certain time interval. Unless somebody comes walking through your house with muddy shoes like they did this weekend on my house. But you know, there’s a certain time interval you want with that.
With ClickUp, you can go in and put all your home tasks in and set them at a certain time interval so that it pops up for you as a task when it’s time to do it. So you don’t have to remember, you don’t have to have a schedule, it will just pop up and tell you. I’m telling you, it’s amazing. It’s also amazing to manage your business. This is not a time where we can like really jump deep and deep dive into ClickUp as a business tool.
I highly suggest you check out Layla from ProcessDriven for ClickUp. I’m actually going through her membership right now to organize my own business in ClickUp and it has been a straight-up excellent experience and I’m really excited about what we’re going to end up within the end. But basically, you can manage everything. It’s a lot like Trello but on steroids, if you’ve ever heard of Trello that is my first suggestion for anyone who is managing a home or business.
You could put your meal plan in there. I mean there are just so many things. Definitely check out ClickUp. Alright. So that’s one, one down.
The next one I will say that is always super helpful especially if you are working online or you are need to share like how to do certain things online or get feedback is Loom. Loom will capture your screen, as well as your words and your video if you want what you’re saying at the same time so you can get feedback on things and make comments without actually having to type everything out. And for me, that’s a massive time saver and sometimes you can make little “How to” videos that are just super quick and easy. Love that.
The next one I’m going to highly suggest is Grammarly and this is one for our computers as well and this is for literally anyone, anything you’re writing it will go through and make sure that you’re it’s basically like spellcheck for anything that you’re on. And it’s much better than the built-in spellcheck. There is a paid version of Grammarly.
Oh, I should say all these tools that I’m talking about right now are completely free. Other than, there might be upgrades options that they have. So ClickUp is completely free. There are upgrades you can pay for though like I have a paid account and click that because there are certain things that I want to take advantage of that are only an option once you pay. If you are a very light user of it like for your home, no you won’t need the paid version.
Loom, is totally free unless you go over five minutes which honestly is kind of hard to do unless you’re going really in-depth about something. And then Grammarly is totally free unless you want to upgrade as well. I don’t pay for most of these tools like most of them I use as a free thing. So it’s totally doable and totally budget-friendly. So as I was saying Grammarly is just this excellent thing that goes on your browser. And it will edit things for you as you go and tell you what you should tweak. And maybe that maybe something isn’t very clear, or different things like that. So this is a super useful tool if you’re somebody who types on the computer often, regardless of what it’s for.
And the next one that I really enjoy is called LastPass. This one is usable for literally anyone not just anyone in business. LastPass actually stores all your passwords. So it can log in for you. And it will also set, if you ask it to, it can set passwords for you that are super secure, and then you don’t have to ever type them in because LastPass will do it for you. It is for your phone and for your computer. If you want to have it on both I think it’s five bucks a month but you can have it just on your computer or just on your phone and it’s totally free. You can share passwords with people through that, I share passwords with my assistants and people who help me in my business or me and my husband share passwords back and forth that we just don’t remember because one person has the access and the other one doesn’t. It so useful and saves a ton of time and keeps your like internet life a little more secure. If you use that password feature of it, create passwords for you. My husband is in like computer security so he is really into that kind of stuff. So he makes me do all those things that are important or that he says are important anyway, for your online life.
This is another one that is technically for a computer but you can also get very similar apps on your phone and that is called SelfControl. This one’s for Mac and it will block certain websites and things for you so that you don’t have to actually remind yourself and get off of Facebook every like two seconds. You know, you can also set this up there’s a lot of native integrations now on phones to do this. I know especially the iPhone just came out with those things. But there’s all kinds of little apps out there and stuff that will do this for you. So definitely look into that if you need to focus better on the things you have at hand and you need to make sure you’re staying off certain apps. Been there done that friends. Definitely look into SelfControl for the Mac or there’s many many apps on the App Store that will help you do this as well. It is super helpful if you are just struggling with staying off those things. And your like brain is just going back and forth constantly.
Can you tell I’ve done this before? And it really is helpful.
My favorite note-taking app that is on my phone and my computer is actually called Evernote and if you haven’t heard of Evernote, you can take all kinds of notes you can put them up you can organize them into folders, which makes it way better than the Notes app on my phone personally, I found and you can even take like audio notes different things and put them all in these folders. Like I think images are like screenshots and clips and stuff too. There are just so many things you can put together in Evernote to keep everything that you need to remember together and it’s so helpful and it syncs between all your devices. So it just makes it very easy to have all the information you need in one place.
Moving into a very similar app, a note-taking app that is literally my favorite and this is just for iPads and maybe iPhones. I’m not sure is GoodNotes. If you’re somebody who really likes to write notes on paper, GoodNotes might be your answer to move a little bit more into the digital age. So GoodNotes is basically a blank slate where you can write things with a stylus on your iPad or the Apple pen. And you can write all kinds of notes. But the nice thing in the end is you have different notebooks you can separate into and then these things are searchable. So you can search through all your notebooks at one time and be like oh I took notes about this. Where are those notes? What did I say? And you can actually search through everything.
You can also store things like PDFs in this I really like to keep all my freezer meal guides in digital format there so I can look through them. And there are even online all kinds of people who create GoodNotes planners and stuff. I think I put my own business planner I put into GoodNotes and I write everything in there. It’s super helpful because then I can pull it up on my phone and double-check things on my phone, even though I primarily use it on my iPad. It’s a really good answer to that like thing of like I like to physically write things because it helps my brain but I need it digitally stored and not have 3000 notebooks sitting around. Can you tell I’m guilty?
Alright, and we are going to jump right into now a couple of apps that are similar but opposite. So if you’re ever one who needs to read through or wants to read through some things that aren’t made into like a podcast or listening format, there’s an app called Speechify that is so incredibly helpful. I have a volunteer position where I have to read through a lot of files sometimes to go through and things and then like even articles that I find online that I want to read, sometimes sitting down and reading those things are so so so hard. So there’s an app called speechify that I use where you put you can put all these things into it. You can scan like physical documents if you have them, or I think you can put in a link if it’s an online thing and it will literally read it to you. You can pick different voices that are celebrity voices on there for y’all who are really into that. But it is a really easy way to listen to something that you need to get through and you want to absorb without having to sit down and actually read it so you can multitask. I like I have done this while I’ve listened in the car while I’ve been driving different places. And then I’ve also done it while I’m doing dishes or cleaning the house or knitting like a million different options.
On the other side of the spectrum, I really like the app Otter. Otter actually takes anything said and makes it into a transcript for you, it writes everything out. So I have used this to write blog posts before so I will outline like a general outline of blog posts. And then as I’m doing dishes or cleaning or whatever I need to do in my life or walking or whatever I am actually like saying my blog posts in this app and it gets everything down. Now it is not perfect by any means. It’s just a super-easy way to get everything that you’re saying out loud down on paper so you can remember it later. You can use this in meetings. Even if you want to. There are a million applications here and it’s so awesome.
Only a few more left but one that definitely deserves a mention is an app called Habitica if you’re somebody who really wants to build habits, but you’re having trouble actually committing, Habitica like gamifies creating habits so you get rewards and stuff and like you build up your character as you actually like do your habits and market in the app. It’s really fun. Especially if you’re somebody who likes like online games. The really nice thing about this app as well is that you can actually build habits or break bad ones. So you put both of those into the app and your characters can gain help and grow and experience. There are all kinds of fun things that it will do. So if this sounds like something that’s up your alley, definitely check it out to help you build those good and break those bad habits.
Next up is the millions there are all kinds of these but Pomodoro Timers are so helpful when you’re trying to be productive. If you don’t know what a Pomodoro Timer is, the general consensus is I think you are 25 minutes, and then you get a five-minute break. So you’re supposed to really focus for just 25 minutes and then you get a five-minute break to do whatever you want to do. And this is supposed to help you keep on tasks better because you’re giving your brain breaks and then you’re getting back started in a shorter amount of time than if you just sat for hours at your desk and tried to get things done. Because you know sometimes when you keep sitting and nothing happens, right? If you don’t give your brain a break, you just get nowhere.
So with these Pomodoro timers, there’s all kinds of apps out there that will just do that for you. And it is so, so easy to download or you can literally just use the timer app on your phone to do this. There are all kinds of apps native to your phone at this point that will help your productivity. This one you could just use a timer app and you’re totally fine. And that’s going to bring me to my very, very last.
I know this has been a very quick list but that’s going to bring me to my very last point. And that’s gonna bring me to my very last point and that is using those native apps that are already in your device to keep you more productive. So on Apple and Android, either one of them has shared calendars, put a shared calendar in your phone and share it with your family so everybody knows what’s going on. It’s very important. That can make all the difference in everybody staying on the same path. You know, and knowing what’s going on each day. I still recommend like a quick check-in like a physical check-in with each other at least once a week about what’s going on this week. But a shared calendar also really helps that.
And then also with the iPhone, they released all the like new widgets and stuff where you can make your phone look fancier. I don’t know if that’s work. I know Android has had it forever. But what I have personally done with it is I have on my homepage I have a block that shows me important things about my day. So I have a block that has my schedule on it so I can see everything that’s going on that day just about unless I have a lot of things because it doesn’t show everything because it’s just a little widget on the home screen.
But I also include if you guys have taken any of my free daily reset, you know I like to go by a top three. So I have a top three things I want to get done in a day. So I also have a widget that shows me my top three every day. So I can put it in I can type in every single day so I know what my priorities are. And as I get them done, I can check them off on here and I don’t have to carry around my physical planner all the time. To me, that’s super helpful. Because every time I glanced at my phone, I know what my priorities are and I know what should be top of mind. So it’s a really good reminder with something that’s always in your hand.
Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the Mama Gets it Done Podcast. I hope you love all of these tech things as much as I do. If you have any questions, definitely shoot me an email that will be in the show notes and a list of all of these apps will also be in the show notes as well. If you haven’t yet make sure to check out those free Busy Mama Daily Resets, I do have the Business Mama one added as well in the show notes. Thank you guys so much for listening today and give yourself a little bit of grace and a whole lot of coffee this week.
