Boost Your Productivity With These 7 Apps
These seven apps will help reduce the stress of tackling your never-ending to-do list.
The skills needed to run a successful veterinary practice are constantly expanding. On top of being a sought-after veterinarian, you also need to be an expert in human resources, marketing, social media, time management and client relations. It may seem like there aren’t enough hours in the day to give 110 percent to everything, yet the job still needs to get done.
As the roles expected of practice owners and managers grow, so do the number of programs and apps available to help manage your day-to-day. From securing your passwords to organizing a website redesign, these seven apps are meant to increase productivity and cut down on clutter.
Have you ever read an online story you wanted to share on your Facebook page only to completely forget where you first found it? Evernote can help you remember. This online workspace allows you to capture, collect and share notes from anywhere on the web or from just in your head. You can clip and save sections of a website or PDF, save handwritten or typed notes from an iPad or smartphone, attach photos and files, or even upload audio recordings to the app. In addition to organizing all these assets for your personal use, Evernote can be used collaboratively with members of your veterinary team who may be working on the same project.
Think of Grammarly as your own personal, virtual writing assistant that will catch spelling and grammar errors before you send an email, publish a Facebook post or submit a research paper. You can install the plugin directly to your preferred web browser, add the app to your smartphone or copy and paste text directly into a document on the Grammarly website. The free version of the program will alert you to spelling errors, misplaced punctuation and misused words, or you can upgrade to receive additional feedback on sentence structure, passive voice and word choice enhancements.
HootSuite is a single platform that lets you manage multiple social media accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. In addition to scheduling future social media posts, Hootsuite displays updated newsfeeds and accounts interacting with your profiles in real-time. The program also provides basic analytics so you can track how well your posts are performing, which content is generating the most engagement and how quickly you’re responding to messages and comments. The free version of the app allows you to manage up to three profiles under one user, but you can upgrade to add more.
Where does the time go? Hours is an app for individuals and small businesses who need to track the time being spent on various projects. To get started, you specify a project or task and choose a coordinating color code. Then, you simply hit the clock icon on the screen to start the project timer. While in use, the app displays a running total in hours, minutes and seconds, as well as a cumulative total for the day. Hours also has reporting capabilities, which allow you to analyze how you or your team is spending time, and convert timesheets into billing spreadsheets.
Rather than constantly resetting passwords you’ve forgotten, store them in LastPass. Available for single users ($2 per month), families ($4 per month) and businesses ($2.50 per month), LastPass stores all your passwords and remembers all your logins for the websites you visit most frequently. The program can also generate new passwords for you as needed.
Slack — one of the fastest-growing and most-used business applications, boasting 9 million weekly active users — is a digital workspace. To begin, an administrator creates a workspace (i.e., Midwest Veterinary Practice) and adds necessary team members to join. From there, team members can create different channels (i.e., website updates) where they can share content, ideas and files on that subject without having to meet face-to-face. Dozens of plugins are available to integrate your most commonly used services, such as Google Drive, directly into your Slack workspace so you don’t have switch back and forth between programs. The app also has various chat features to save and archive conversations.
Trello is an easy-to-navigate project management system available for both desktops and smartphones. The app lets you track ongoing projects, create task lists and manage projects easily. Trello is loosely based on the Kanban scheduling system developed and used by Toyota to improve efficiency. It has been best described as a digital whiteboard filled with post-it notes that can be easily moved around as your priorities change. The app is free for individuals, but also offers premium plans starting at $4.99 per month.
