We’re all about efficiencies here, so we’ve gone around the office and asked the team what they use on the daily to give them that extra time-saving edge. It’s important to note that a few of these will require the Google Chrome browser, but seriously, it’s 2020 - get off Internet Explorer already! So without further adieu, here are our top 10 time-saving tools, tips, & tricks so you can start your year off with a bang! And don’t worry, the tools here are all free to use.
Arguably, email is where most of us spend our time each day, so we should start here. This has definitely saved our bacon 100x over. Yes, we’re talking about the ‘undo’ feature when you send an email. You can set the delay feature to up to 30s, which we definitely recommend for anyone sending lots of work-related emails.
For Gmail, all you need to do is click the gear icon> go into Settings > click the General tab > look for “Undo Send:” and set your preferred cancellation period. Do note that if you send an email and then click to into a Label or Inbox, the Undo pop-up will disappear.
For Outlook, click the gear icon > then View all Outlook settings> then go to the Mail tab (on the left) >Compose and reply and slide that 0 to a 10!
Do you find yourself sending the same type of email week on week, month on month, or answering the same questions from different people? Sounds like you need to create a template!
Jump into your Settings (the gear) > navigate to the Advanced tab > and click ‘Enabletemplates’. From there, start writing what you want to save for later, then click the 3 dots near the bin icon to ‘save draft as template’. Then, when you go to write a new email and want to recreate that template, click the 3 dots again, locate your template, Insert it, and voilà!
Outlook’s a bit of a trickier one, as the Desktop and Browser setup versions differ. Check out Office Support’s guide on sending an email message based on a template.
And for iOS, unfortunately they have recently removed that feature. However, what you can do (particularly if you’re on your mobile device), is create a template in your note app and then send it to your inbox. More on that here.
There’s nothing worse than when someone doesn’t know there their’s from they’re there’s, but their their, there’s a plugin for that now! It’s called Grammarly, and right now it’s going to town on that last sentence we wrote. It’s a great tool to have as a last line of defence for us marketers who are constantly writing ad copy campaigns where the last thing we want is for them to be riddled with spelling and grammar errors.
Well if you’re not using Chrome, we’re sorry but we can’t help you. If you are? Then all you need to remember is 3 keys: Ctrl + Shift + T. Unfortunately, one of the few downsides of Chrome is that they don’t have a: ‘Are you sure?’ pop-up for closing down multiple tabs at once. So if you ever find yourself in that situation, simply reload the Chrome browser you were using, hit those 3 keys in succession, and then thank us later. It also works if you accidentally close a single tab, too.
We told you, Chrome is pretty handy. All you need to do is give that page a quick right-click and go Inspect that bad boy, then give that page a hard-refresh (Ctrl + Shift + R) - that’ll ring out any cobwebs that might be distorting your view of the page. From there, you may need to toggle the device bar - it’s the icon that looks like a phone and an iPad are going big spoon little spoon. That should give you a nice little dropdown option for you to select the device you want to see. You can even view by the type of model of a particular device. Handy if you find people visit your website using a particular type of device and you want to make sure it’s responsive-AF. These aren’t the devices you’re looking for? Use the force to click edit where you can find the right device for you.
To cut out the guesswork, Colorzilla is a cool little tool if you’re trying to identify all 50 shades of grey and then convert them to RGB or HEX.
What if your client won’t return your emails and you need to launch a campaign by the end of the day that needs to include their logo or a particular image on their website? No? Well don’t worry then.If yes, then wait no more! Image Downloader is a handy little extension that allows you to snipe images right off a page in record time.
Full Screen Page Capture is what you’ll need, allowing you to take stock of an entire page in its entirety to pass onto your designer, developer, or even client if need be.
Nimbus Screenshot & Video Recorder takes it to another level, letting you not only take screenshots, but annotate them, save them, and send a link to colleagues or clients. But wait, that’s not all (we feel like an infomercial here), they also allow video and audio recording too, so if you have a few things you need to run someone through on multiple pages, websites, or programs, you can record your entire screen and audio to boot, whilst annotating it as you go along. Now some of those additional features don’t come free, but for the cost of a cup of coffee a year (we don’t actually know how much), it could be yours.
It seems like there are almost as many different kinds of softwares out there as there are websites these days, and they all ask you to sign up and create an account just to use them.But gone are the days of making easy-to-remember-but-totally-hackable-passwords like username is username and password is password in an effort to keep track of them all. BitWarden is our go-to for password protection at scale and it even offers ‘Vault Health Reports’ for Premium Users if you want to find out if your logins are being sold on the darkweb. It makes it easy to safely and securely access our clients digital assets when providing services such as hosting, web-dev, and SEO. Definitely an agency-must! There are other alternatives as well that are free for personal use and scale up in pricing based on users, including LastPass and KeePass to name a few. They also offer 2-way authentication, plugin extension for ease of access, and mobile app features for when you’re on the go.We’re all about working smarter, not harder, so we hope that these time-saving tools allow you to do the same! If you’re looking for a digital partner that will align your digital strategies to your current business challenges, get in touch with us today - there’s a lot to consider, and it all starts with a conversation.
