Busy doesn’t cut it. We are all busy, running from one meeting to another, putting out fires, keeping an open-door policy for the “do you have a sec?” conversations, an overflowing inbox, and more…all while making sure your company is running smoothly and your team is always at their best.
Many wear “busy” as a badge of pride, while most of us know it’s rarely something that should be bragged about. The person who is extraordinarily busy, but still has time to eat dinner with his or her family, exercise, contribute to his or her community, and work on hobbies is the one who wins; not the person who wears the busy badge.
To do that—and until they invent clones—you likely look for technology to help and, I would guess, are often interested in the latest and greatest gadget that promises to save you time.
Here are six apps to help with exactly that.
Six Apps Leaders Should Have on Their Mobile Devices
Personal Growth. Let’s start with you: Investing time and effort in your personal growth ensures you are always prepared for the challenges you encounter in your journey.
Igniter helps you identify your core values and how to incorporate them throughout your organization. You likely already know who you are and what you stand for, but a little introspection, from time-to-time, helps us find balance.
Communication and collaboration. It’s important to keep in touch with your team beyond their daily work and, let’s face it, in a SnapChat-era, sending emails to ask your team how they’re doing can be perceived as cold.
While we don’t have time to make personal phone calls or have weekly one-to-one meetings with everyone, there is an app that will help! It’s called Slack, and it’s the new kid on the block.
With Slack, you can receive project updates from your team, assign to-dos, talk about their day, create a virtual water cooler, and even have fun with the emojis they’ve created. But that’s not all, Slack can be synced with other apps, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, making life incredibly easy and convenient.
Zoom is another great collaboration tool for teams with virtual workers or even for people spread across the country. It can also be used if your team is in the same building, but on different floors.
It saves a lot of time to call a meeting through Zoom, rather than gather everyone in the same room.
You can share your screen while talking to your team (up to 25 members). It also works on desktops and mobile devices, and has a chat bar if you want to share documents during your meeting.
Productivity. In this information overload world we live in, being productive is quite a challenge.
You have your to-do list, yet sometimes it seems like everyone is trying to get your attention at the same time and it’s impossible to do any work. By lunchtime, you’ve forgotten what was on your to-do list that morning because several other things have been added.
2Do is an app that keeps track of your to-dos. It’s fast, it’s accessible from any device, and it keeps you on top of your daily tasks.
Nozbe is another app that can keep you on top of your tasks, so you can always be on top of your game. It’s easy-to-use, fast, and invites team collaboration as well.
Creativity. We’ve looked at personal growth, communication and collaboration, productivity, which all make sense for technology use, but can you also inspire creativity with an app?
While there isn’t an app that can brainstorm ideas for you (not yet, at least), there is one that can collect your ideas and organize them, so you can share them with your team.
Remember the colorful sticky notes we used for so many years? Well, now there is an app called Post-it® Plus.
With Post-it Plus, you can snap a picture of the notes you wrote in brainstorming meetings with your team, you can add more notes later and share them with your team, and you can group or move them around. Just like you would if they were all stuck to your computer screen.
Using technology like this helps you gain more time back in your day, be more efficient, and be able to effectively engage with your team. And the next time someone complains about how busy they are, you can smile and know how much more you accomplish with technology on your side.
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