Invest in Tools That Make Your Life Easier

Working smart - not hard - is the best way to get the biggest return on your time investment. Life hacks and delegation are essential for making life and business easier. Whether it’s having a team to maximize your output, or apps and management tools that do the work automatically, having support is essential.

One of the pioneers for using tools in business is Tim Ferris. Ferris book The Four-Hour Work Week broke the charts and stayed a best-seller for over four years. Written in 2007, it contains cutting edge ideas about time management and delegation that were obscure at the time. Nowadays, his tips and tricks are relatively mainstream and easy to apply.

Here’s a list of three tool categories that will make your life easier:

Graphics Tools- A huge part of social media engagement comes from graphics. Designing graphics can be tedious and time consuming. Having a tool that generates graphics easily is a must. Not everyone understands Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, which can be very confusing and discouraging. For easier graphic design, there are affordable websites that have no-fee and low-fee plans. Check out PicMonkey, Canva, or Relay That for easy to use graphic design tools.

Social Media Management Tools- There are multiple websites designed to help integrate and manage social media platforms. These tools allow you to preplan your output and content, and post to multiple social media platforms at one time. Love Twitter? Consider TweetDeck- a dashboard that lets you plan tweets, monitor engagement, and simplify your Twitter experience. Hootsuite is a great tool to manage posts to Facebook. The platform allows you to pre-schedule your posts and alerts you when you have engagement.

Personal Assistant Tools- Sometimes the best tool has a beating heart. Hiring a personal assistant or virtual assistant (VA) is an excellent way to be two places at one time. Or three or four. Being able to delegate and have work done on your behalf is easier and more affordable than ever. You don’t have to know everything about your business to be successful. Successful people aren’t the smartest in the room; they surround themselves with great people who know a lot about something very specific. The teamwork makes the dream work.

Utilizing tools is the way to go for managing your time wisely, but don’t overdo it. It’s important to keep a personal touch with your engagement. If you use tools to post automatically, make sure you go back and engage with your community when they begin to respond to your content. Also, make sure any virtual assistants are engaging with the community in the tone and manner consistent with your brand. It’s great to have tools, but they must be managed with a personal touch.


Thanks for reading
Val