As a business owner, you don’t want to play around with technology. You want to find something that works, stick with it, and continue working.

Here are my top productivity tools:

1. Agorapulse – The Ultimate Social Media Dashboard

Of the best business productivity tools mentioned here, this might be the ultimate time-saver.

NealSchaffer.com has more than 1,000 blog posts that have been published since 2008. That’s a lot of evergreen content. The ability to leverage that content is very impactful because it lessens the burden of needing to create or curate more content. Agorapulse provides that ability through its Queue Categories feature, and it’s what made me go from an occasional user to a heavy user this past year.

At its base, Agorapulse is a social media management tool that enables users to schedule content and get reporting on it. But digging deeper, Agorapulse seamlessly enables finite control over publishing evergreen content—any day of the week, any time of the day, even down to the number of times content publishes. I haven’t found another social media management tool that offers this critical feature.

Another element of Agorapulse that is extremely helpful is called Social Inbox, and it enables users to engage with followers on all platforms from one place. Respond to comments on a LinkedIn post, share a comment on a Facebook post, like a comment on an Instagram post—all from one dashboard, not logging in to each account. In addition, the comments are in line, not hidden in a new comment like some of the other social media management tools. It’s a very eloquent solution, especially for those managing multiple profiles. Also, users can monitor comments on Facebook ads, which is very helpful.

All of these features are why I use Agorapulse—coupled with the fact that it’s robust, it’s stable, it’s constantly innovating, and, frankly, it works.

2. Loom – Easily Create Videos and Screencasts for Free

Video has become increasingly important as a marketing medium, so it should come as no surprise that one of the best business productivity tools making this list is one that will help you efficiently create videos: Loom. Especially in today’s remote work world. Having a tool like Loom to easily make videos to share with co-workers or clients is an absolute must.

A tool that records your entire desktop, processes the video, provides you with a link for sharing (or emailing or downloading), and is free: Welcome to Loom. An extension for Google Chrome, Loom is simple to use, and it works. Imagine being able to record a quick video, explaining how to do something a little more complex than you can type at the moment. Loom enables just that.

Loom is now beginning to roll out a desktop version, which is already proving to be very robust. The Chrome extension alone still works very well. Either record your tab within Chrome, showing your face talking in a smaller window; or switch to a program like PowerPoint, and Loom records the entire screen. No need for a heavy app—just a Chrome extension and the ability to use your computer’s video camera and mic.

Loom can be a great tool to create videos for YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Create a quick how-to video with a screenshare, for example. And if you want to enhance the video with another program, adding an intro and outro, you can. It’s a great tool, and it’s absolutely free, so there’s no excuse not to try it out.

If you start a site and register a domain, you can host all your videos on your site.

3. Boomerang for Gmail – The Ultimate Gmail Business Productivity Tool

I’m an email person, and my inbox is my work dashboard. If someone DMs me on Twitter about doing business together, I’ll still ask them to send me an email because I don’t want to lose track of the DM. But managing an inbox can be difficult. That’s where Boomerang for Gmail comes in; it’s a very easy email efficiency tool.

I use Boomerang in a few different ways, but here’s a great example:

1. I receive an email request for a quote from XYZ Company.
2. I’ll respond with the quote and ask for a decision timeline.
3. XYZ responds that decisions will be made in a week or so.
4. In Boomerang, I will set the email to return to me in a week—but only if XYZ hasn’t reached out to me first.
5. In a week, I haven’t heard from XYZ, the email appears in my inbox, and I can reach out to check in.

Look at that control! I don’t need to use Google Calendar or another task manager; I just have Boomerang email me. I also use the tool to track things that I’d like to keep on my radar, things that aren’t necessarily important. Boomerang will remind me in whatever time frame I provide.

Boomerang has another feature that I haven’t used as much: Inbox Pause, which stops emails from coming into your inbox. All of the masters of efficiency say to stay off email except for a few times a day. I use another tool, SaneBox, which is very similar to Inbox Pause but incorporates a bit of AI. 

SaneBox keeps messages out of my inbox if it thinks that the email is not important to me and stores the messages in a separate folder. Then, I get a daily or even weekly digest with a list of those emails. In short, both tools accomplish the same mission: Enable you to have strategic thinking or working time without constant email interruption.

And overall, Boomerang is quite robust and comes at a very inexpensive price.

4. Monday.com – Your Remote Teamwork Dashboard

This is the newest edition to this list because, let’s face it, in the current pandemic, we are all working more from home and need an efficient way to manage our remote teamwork. While tools like Slack can help you stay in the know from a communication perspective, Monday.com helps you visualize and manage your entire team workflow.

One of the cool things about Monday.com is how easy it is to get started with one of their ready-made templates to get your team onboarded quickly. You can completely customize the platform to fit any and all of your needs without the need for any coding skills. For some ideas, check out how they can help you manage marketing projects.

I am still early in exploring Monday.com’s functionality, but if you have a large enough team (because of its business model – see below for pricing) and want to truly invest in the efficiency of your remote work, Monday.com deserves your attention.