7 Productivity apps to use on your smartphone during lockdown

OUR FAVOURITE PRODUCTIVITY APPS TO USE ON YOUR SMARTPHONE DURING LOCKDOWN…

The current Covid-19 lockdown has thrown a major spanner in the works for literally thousands of small business owners who are now forced to try and work from home. Today we’re going to run through 7 productivity apps on your smartphone that will really help you stay on track for business as usual during these challenging times.

For the most part these are all things that you would probably already have on your phone however might not be using to their full potential.

For those of you who have followed us for a while you’ll know that we are MAJOR Apple fans so we do reference the Iphone features within todays video however for the most part these can be applied to Android too.

1] SHARED CALENDARS

Although we absolutely LOVE timeblocking in its most formal sense we are also realists right now and sometimes timeblocking for every single second of the day is just not practical when you have small people and other distractions within your homeworking space. If thats for you then we totally recommend checking out Monday.com for their guide on how to timeblock efficiently. 

However if you’re like us a more practical approach is to use shared calendars to colour code those key things in your diary that are static and can’t be changed so that you can easily see where your biggest gaps are in your day and where you can be more active. Google Calendar also integrates really well with Apple Calendars so all of our Appointments get booked in seamlessly across our devices.

2] NOTES

Use the notes feature on your phone. Again, if you’re using Apple this is great for seamlessly getting your information across all of your devices. We create notes for everything from formulating captions for social media and creating hashtag bundles to be used on Instagram to brain storming content ideas. We also create checklists that both of us can contribute to on a daily basis.

3] VOICE NOTES

We love a good voice note and think that they are majorly unappreciated when it comes to your business and productivity. If you’re busy in the kitchen or have your hands full with the kids, sometimes creating a voice memo is a much quicker way of getting your thoughts down.

We especially love using voice notes for when it comes to creating blog content. When faced with an empty page in front of you it can sometimes be quite daunting. Sometimes is much easier to speak into our phones when the mood takes us and transcribe later.

4] SHARED PHOTO STREAMS

Once again Apple makes life so simple when it comes to creating shared photo albums on our phones. A great job to start whilst on lockdown is to start building a catalogue of images on your phone to use for varying purposes for your business. We have Yellow Tuxedo inspiration albums, examples of our work, screenshots of comments, us out and about at events, working with clients etc. It just makes life so much easier than scrolling through years and years of photographs that we havent put into any kind of order!

5] THE CANVA APP

Like lots of people we absolutely love Canva and its an essential part of the content creation process for our business. We literally use it every single day. We actually pay for the pro version of Canva because we love using it across our team and for the ability to lock in our brand sheet as well as saving our templates. Although I actually prefer to create our imagery using the desktop version for ease, the fact that it works seamlessly with the Canva app means that once I have finished on my computer I can literally pick my phone up and continue working on a project as well as being able to save directly to my phones camera roll with little effort at all.

6] TAILWIND APP

Tailwind has literally been a game changer for our business when it comes to productivity. We’ve played with lots of other scheduling software however we have found Tailwind to be ridiculously simple to use. Each week we sit and schedule the week ahead using both the inbuilt hashtag generator to help. We absolutely love the automated posting schedule it creates for us based on our users activity.

Just like Canva I love how I can start on my desktop and can literally pick up my phone and continue with the task in hand.

7] THE GOOGLE MY BUSINESS APP

Although not strictly speaking a productivity app it really is a great feature for our phones that helps us to stay more visible on Google, especially when we are a business that specialises in online presence! We all have the likes of Facebook and Instagram on our phones so why would you not use Google My Business in the same way? You can update your images, your videos, you can share posts and offers etc right from your smartphone without even needing to pick up your laptop. And the benefit of this? This is actual optimised content you are creating which will massively help your local SEO.

We do hope you’ve found this useful, we would absolutely love to know what your favourite app on your phone right now is. What is the one app you click on every day without fail?! Let us know in the comments….

As always if you have any questions do be sure to chat to a member of our team, we’re always happy to talk things through with you.

Emily x