With a million tools at hand, it’s hard to find the perfect fit to organize our businesses and lives. As a service-based business owner, I have tried almost every tool there is to organize my business from the ground up and find tools that work well together and allow me to keep the overview. All of these I also use to work 1:1 with my clients to help them grow their businesses!
So this blog is for all the business owners who are just starting out and want to build a solid foundation of systems that work well together and for established business owners who are looking for tools to transfer into to spare energy, time, nerves, and well, having too many tools.
So, without further rambling–here are my top 5 tools for organizing your business (and life):
Notion
If you are not using Notion yet, you are missing out on a gem. This has to be the best tool ever, as it can be customized to your liking in every single element and there are thousands of templates to import (a lot of which are free). Notion allows you to share certain pages or your whole workspace with up to 5 people in the free plan, afterwards, pricing starts at $2/month (in the personal plan, there is also a plan for businesses, when you work in a bigger team).
The reason Notion will be my all-time favorite is that the pages can be created from scratch as well, so I can build my own templates with whatever I need. I create customized pages for all of my clients, so I can see what they are working on, we write out the goals and milestones and there is space for personal trackers, weekly reflections, meeting notes, and more. At the same time, I have private pages where I organize both, my personal and business life with habit and energy trackers, content planning pages, goals and toolboxes with coaching exercises as well as leads, clients, finances, and basically everything else.
This is for you if you are tired of using five different tools and losing information in the process.Notion allows having diverse views of the same data such as timelines, Kanban, calendars, lists, wikis, and more. You can tag, filter and sort everything so nothing will ever be lost (again).
If you want, this can be your one and only tool to organize your business (and life). It even offers integrations with other tools, so you can work without interruptions.
I LOVE it - and so do my clients:
"I love how easy it is to use. Having a Notion with you in on it was also great because I felt like it was a team effort.”
“I now have tools to be able to slowly work towards my goals. I am able to prioritise my tasks and stay motivated to get work done. I will be using Notion for my task lists!”
Summary
ClickUp
Apparently, this one is a controversial tool. I know a lot of people who don’t like it–in my opinion, the main reason behind this is that it has a lot of features and it takes time to get into it. But it’s worth it.
ClickUp is very intuitive and just like Notion, allows you to customize your work process to your needs and likings. In the past 2.5 years, I have worked in jobs where we used ClickUp as our project management tool, even with different teams and ventures working in the same workspace.
Thanks to the structure of spaces (e.g. for different businesses) > folders(top layer in the spaces, e.g. for different teams such as marketing, development, etc.) > lists (next layer in the folder; folders can hold as many lists as you wish, e.g. projects or subcategories such as content creation, posting plan, ideas, etc.) everything is organized clean and organized.
To-dos can be viewed in different formats such as Kanban, list, calendar, timeline, sorted by status, and more. This allows you to have an overview at all times. You can even add the same to-do to different lists and spaces, making it a great collaboration tool for teams and organizing on multiple layers.
Here’s an example of that: The to-do “Writing a blog post” belongs to the category “Content” but also needs to be in the posting timeline and weekly to-do list I use. I can simply add it to all these lists and it will show up everywhere with the same status, deadlines, comments, linked resources, and more. When you are working in a bigger team, you can assign multiple people to a to-do, so it’s shown on everyone’s list and can’t get lost. Organizational masterpiece, if you ask me. (I am planning on creating a detailed tutorial on how to set up your ClickUp space - comment if you are interested!)
The best feature in ClickUp for me is the sprint feature. Sprints are (originally coming from IT project management) small units of time to which you assign certain tasks. After a sprint, you report what has been done, where problems arose, and what you will be doing in the next sprint. Usually, one sprint = one week (but can be any duration). In the graphic above you can see the sprint view in the background and a single, opened to-do in the foreground. In ClickUp you can create sprints to which you assign tasks. After the sprint, you close the sprint and all the open tasks go into the next sprint. It allows you to see what you have been doing, and which projects are still open and therefore, gives indications for the priorities of the next week. It’s like a weekly to-do list of all your tasks.
Summary
Slack
When it comes to communication and collaboration with team members or clients, Slack is my go-to. The free version already provides you with everything you need from inviting endless members into your space to creating numerous channels (private or open) in which you can communicate on certain topics. This can be useful if you have different programs or offers, e.g. group program chats to which not everyone can have access. Channels can be open (everyone in your workspace can join at any time by themselves) or private (only visible to people you manually add to the channel).
Slack works with ClickUp and Notion; you can create tasks right from Slack that appear in ClickUp and slack messages can be shown in Notion, so collaboration gets even easier. On top of that, there are many other apps that work with Slack.
The only negative point I have: in the free version you can only see and access all messages of the last 90 days–if you want to access all messages, you need to upgrade to a pro subscription (starting at around 8$/person/month).
Summary
Clockify
Clockify is a time-tracking tool that is especially helpful when you are starting your entrepreneurship journey or want to get better at time management because it helps gain data on how much time you invest in certain tasks.
It’s easy to use and has a lot of great features such as marking billable and non-billable hours, assigning the tracked time to projects (e.g. certain clients), and summaries of how much time you spent on which projects in total (daily, weekly, monthly, or custom periods).
If you are working in a team, you can see who worked how much and on what projects.
The plugin for Google Chrome enables you to track certain times of website usage and it can even be integrated with ClickUp, so you can track time on your tasks directly.
I find it very useful to see how much time I spend on tasks that I do for the first time so I can learn to estimate my daily and weekly to-do lists better. Why? Because I love finishing sprints and not having 10 open to-dos at the end of the week.
If you are interested in learning more about managing your time and energy, download my free guide on energy management:
Summary
Mailerlite
Of all the mailing providers I have tried, Mailerlite is by far my favorite. It’s very intuitive, easy to build, and offers a lot of great features such as automated flows (sending emails based on special criteria), popup and sign-up forms, templates, and landing pages. The free plan includes up to 1,000 subscribers or 12,000 emails per month.
You can upload existing subscribers lists and download lists at any time. All the templates and emails are customizable so you can really adapt them to your brand.
Perfect for beginners and everyone, that loves clean and easy tools.
Summary
Conclusion
I have worked with all of these tools intensely in the last months and years and when I decided to be a coach and go into entrepreneurship, it was clear to me that I will build my business with these. They are easy to learn, intuitive, have tons of functionality and I always find new, exciting ways to use them as my business grows.
They enable you to be flexible with how you work and adapt your working process to your expanding business anytime in whatever way you want. These are no-brainers for me and I wholeheartedly recommend them to you–not only for business but for organizing in general.
Which one are you going to try out? Comment below!
Need help setting up a system that works for YOU and your business?
Reach out and let’s have a chat: https://calendly.com/laura-werner-one-day/call?month=2022-12
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