The Best Organization Tools to Optimize Your Time
When running a business of any size, it can feel like a tremendous amount of work balancing every project and task that needs to get done. Things can easily slip through the cracks, important emails can be missed, and ideas can be forgotten. It’s not abnormal, but it certainly isn’t optimal.
Here at Vivid, we make it a priority to efficiently manage tasks, get our ideas and plans in order, and make sure everyone is on the same page. We definitely don’t do it alone, though. Here are the tools we use to stay organized and ready to conquer each day without obstacles.
Trello
This website/app is an amazing way to track progress of projects that are in the works. You can create several “boards” to help organize major categories in the workplace. For example, we have a “Content” board, a “Project” board, a “Client” board, and so on. Once you click into these categories, Trello allows you to implement several lists based on what you are trying to organize. For the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on the “Project” board. This is where we store all of our future projects with due dates, reminders, and which team member is going to be on site for them. If we have a project labelled “About Us Video,” we can label the project based on which company it is for. Then, we can manually move the project along as it transitions from the brainstorming phase, to being shot, to being in edits, and finally to being delivered to the client. It is a visually-appealing tool for organization that is great for projects and clients.
Loomly
If you are trying to stay active and engaged on social media, Loomly is the perfect tool to sign-up for. This website/app lets you sync all of your social media platforms and see a calendar view of future posts. You can create posts right from the website, adding photos, videos, and captions. You can choose the time and date of each post (and if you want to post the same photo at a different time on Facebook than Instagram, you can specifically set each platform to a unique time). This eliminates the stress of trying to remember to post something at a specific time each day. We get busy, and oftentimes we aren’t by our phones or computers at the optimal time of posting.
Oh yeah, that reminds me, Loomly even offers optimization advice, like telling you if it is a good time to post or if your content is too long to attract readers. You can also add labels to your posts, which makes it easy to see what you are posting about and when. After your first five posts, you also unlock analytics, which helps you learn what is working and what isn’t. Since we started using Loomly for our social media, we have noticed significantly higher engagement and overall less anxiety about when and what to post. When you have the chance to map everything out, it makes it a lot simpler.
Airtable
Airtable can be similar to Trello, but on a much deeper level. First of all, you can choose from a variety of templates to help you get started on your organization. You can choose from a content calendar (similar to Loomly), project tracker, budget planning, and tons more. At VIVID, we originally used it to create an email list for our newsletter subscribers and to track possible clients. It was also a great tool for us to map out our shot lists for each project we were working on.
Side note-- if you aren’t creating a shot list before shoots, we would definitely recommend doing so! It will save you a lot of stress and you will get better results when you know what you want to capture beforehand. Especially during a Minnesota winter, we want to be clear what we are going to do before we are standing outside freezing!
Another great aspect about Airtable is that it is also very visual. You can still add labels and clearly see everything that is happening. The difference between this and Trello is that Airtable is more of a spreadsheet while Trello is more of a to-do list. Airtable is great for getting into detail about projects, while Trello helps you plan out a schedule.
These are the three top tools that we utilize every day at Vivid. Organization is key when it comes to being prepared, staying on top of things, and balancing your workload. Without these apps, it can be very easy to double book shoots, forget project ideas, and assign more than one team member to tasks. Try these out and let us know if they helped! Until next time, capture vividly.
