These 4 Tools Save Me Hours Each Week
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TL/DR:
There are too many productivity tools out there—but only a few are truly worth the time investment.
I use and recommend: TickTick, Calendly, TextExpander, and Granola.ai.
These tools help me manage tasks, meetings, emails, and notes with minimal effort.
I’ve personally saved hours each week using this stack, and many of my clients have, too.
You don’t need every tool, just the right ones that support your actual workflow.
The Whole Shebang
Last week I have having lunch with an old colleague, and we got on the subject of time-saving tools.
He’s already adopted a couple of tools I recommended to him in the past, and I was excitedly telling him about another. (Yes, I’m a huge dork who gets very excited about time-saving tools. And yes, I’m including the tool I was yapping about down below.)
And then I realized, I need to tell YOU, too!
Look, there are SO MANY tools out there, all of them touting to be the "next big thing". It can be totally overwhelming.
Each new tool has its own ramp up time and it can feel like it might take longer to learn the tools than is worth the effort.
You try something out, only to find out that by the time you've learned all about it, it's not exactly what it's cracked up to be.
Personally, I don't believe that technology is going to solve all of our time problems (no, not even AI!). But there are definitely some tools that are low-effort to learn and pack a big punch.
So, with no further ado, let me tell you about my all-time favorite time-saving tools, the ones I actually use day-in and day-out to save time and help me stay on top of it all.
These are the 4 tools I just can’t live without:
TickTick (Task App)
As I'm often saying, task management IS time management. TickTick is the task management app that I recommend most frequently to my clients, and it's also one I use myself.
I love it for many reasons, but chief among them are:
It's dead simple to use; very low barrier for entry
The free version is great (and the premium version won’t break the bank either, at about $35/year)
Not only can it manage tasks and complex projects but it also has a robust habit tracker and a Pomodoro timer
It integrates easily with other tools (like your calendar, email, Siri, Google Home, Alexa, etc.)
You can add tasks and comments by voice, on the go (you know, for when you have that brilliant idea while driving, or running)
It syncs seamlessly from mobile to web and BOTH UIs are great
One quick anecdote about TickTick:
When I work with my coaching clients and they already have an app they like to use, I don’t try to get them to switch to TickTick because:
1) the method of task management I teach is platform-agnostic and
2) I fundamentally believe that you should use what you like.
That said, a number of times I’ve had a coaching client tell me that they checked out TickTick because they’d heard me talking about it and decided to switch to it because it was so much better than whatever they were using (that they previously thought they loved).
Calendly (Meeting Scheduler)
Calendly is a meeting scheduler that saves me hours each week (and lots of headaches). I love this tool because it avoids all the time-wasting back and forth of trying to find a meeting time/date, especially with external parties.
Calendly is inexpensive and allows for multiple "meeting types" so that you can have the right amount of buffer time built-in for travel related to in-person meetings vs. calls or in-house meetings, different lengths of meetings, etc.
Because Calendly syncs directly with my calendar, and because I can select windows when I want to be available and I never worry about double booking or people choosing times that aren't ideal for me.
There's a free version if you only need one meeting type.
And, if you want this type of scheduling functionality, but don’t want to use yet another platform, both Outlook and Google Workspace have built-in options now:
TextExpander (Writing faster communications)
My love for TextExpander knows no bounds. Seriously.
TextExpander allows you to create snippets of text, or whole templates (including links, images and formatting) and then easily expand those templates with a quick keyboard shortcut in ANY app you're using (from your email, to Word to Google Sheets, to webforms).
At least 70% of the emails I write either start with a template in TextExpander, or contain a snippet from TextExpander.
Gone are the days when I used to spend time looking up my LinkedIn profile link, or my EIN, or what I said to a client last year about “how to say no”. It's all in TextExpander, just a couple of keystrokes away.
TextExpander has a free 14-day trial and after that, it's a few dollars a month. (And that's why I resisted it for so long. I like free tools!)
But honestly, I'm happy to give this company my money because this tool saves me SO MUCH TIME.
Granola.ai (An AI notetaker that actually works!)
Until recently, I thought AI note-takers were pretty much all trash, wrapped up in a bow.
I'd tried many of them, and found them severely lacking.
Ensuring my notes are clear, succinct, actionable, and easily searchable has been the bane of my work life for many years. And many of my clients, especially those who think of themselves as "paper people", have struggled with this, too.
In fact, I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I used to spend up to 30 minutes a day or so just ensuring that my notes were transcribed in the right places, and action items made their way into my task system.
HOWEVER, late last year someone (a very tech savvy client, actually) told me about Granola. and notes are no longer an issue for me, AT ALL.
And recently, I've been telling everyone I know about Granola: my colleagues, my clients, my friends, and now, you.
Heck, at my last book club meeting we even had a short love-fest about Granola because others were also finding it so useful.
And so, if you've been a been a bit AI-shy, or convinced it's just hype, or you've also tried a ton of AI notetakers and found them to be OK, but you're still taking your own notes for backup, you might just want to give this one a shot!
In my experience, Granola captures thorough notes and has a few key differentiators from other AI notetakers:
You can jot down a few notes in the integrated notepad while the AI notes are being generated, to ensure that the AI knows what YOU care about from the meeting.
You can turn it on for voice-calls, or even in-person meetings, no Zoom required.
You can customize various templates so that your notes are in exactly the format you want, for different types of meetings (and you can apply different templates to the same notes to get the notes in different formats if you like!)
You can chat with the notes! Ask the notes a question and it will answer. Ask it to draft the follow email for you. You can send the link to the notes to others and they can chat with it. It's honestly pretty amazing.
I've found that since I started using this tool, I've reduced my paper note-taking to almost 0, and I've reduced the time I spent dealing with notes by about 90%. I'm never looking back.
Do you have a tool you’re LOVING?
I want to hear about it.
AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: If you purchase something after clicking on one of the links above I’ll probably earn a few bucks from it. However, please know that I only use affiliate links AFTER I’ve already been recommending a product frequently; I will never recommend something I don’t actually love.
