5 essential mobile apps for entrepreneurs in 2020
You did not choose to be an entrepreneur to make life easy – at least not in the short term. The typical business owner will spend lots of time away from home, on the road, in meetings and chasing payments. Anything that can make life a little more organised can reduce stress and increase productivity significantly.
The mobile phone can be a huge help, or a massive hindrance when it comes to business and getting things done. Self-discipline is obviously crucial; once you look at your phone and get stuck in a social-media-wormhole of endless scrolling and clicks or a 5-way WhatsApp conversation with your friends, you can waste valuable time without even realising it.
We look at some of the best ways to use your mobile phone for streamlining your business operations and your family life; as well as how to prevent wasting time on social media.
Simple but highly effective, Wunderlist is great for organising your life and your business, especially if you employ people. Having everything you need to do, in one place is a great starting point for getting more organised. Wunderlist enables you to do this. It is very easy to get started, you just select from a range of categories like “Work” and simply at items that need completing.
You can then share the list via email or phone number with co-workers. A very simple yet effective way of being structured with your approach to business, making sure everyone knows what they are doing.
You can, of course, set due dates and reminders on your phone and synchronize everything across all your devices – mobile, laptop, tablet etc. so that if you are in the office or on the road, you can keep tabs on all your staff and maintain your own organized approach to the working day ahead.
As Wunderlist was shut down on the 6th of May 2020, a lot of Wunderlist users are searching for an alternative. It seems to be that at the moment Zenkit To Do is the closest Wunderlist alternative: https://zenkit.com/todo
A big part of the business-owners juggling act can involve keeping & retaining customers with outstanding customer service, while prospecting and advertising for new clients.
Social media marketing is often a big part of a small business’s marketing plan; with experts such as Gary Vaynerchuk recommending that you share ‘micro-content’ on a daily basis, preferably several times a day on all the major social media platforms.
Many people will use the Buffer phone app in conjunction with the Google Chrome add on. You can navigate to a webpage that you want to share, click on the Chrome Extension and either schedule for a specific day and time, or just click ‘add to queue’. You can edit the snippet and image that are pulled in automatically and add more hashtags if required. You can then check everything using the phone app.
A handy feature on the app also, is that you can ‘rebuffer’, edit and re-share old posts at a different time of the day and/or week. This is a great feature for Twitter, especially if you create a lot of evergreen content.
Fantastic for start-ups wanting a point of sale payment system without the large setup fees, Square utilises a small device that attaches to a mobile phone before taking card payments. In response, PayPal have recently released their own credit card payment processor with very similar features.
Customer service begins with the first interaction. If you miss a phone call, you will almost always, lose a lead to a competitor. Having a professional call answering service on hand cannot only give you peace of mind, it can help you focus on what you do best – your job! Hiring a call answering service can be just like having your own 24/7 receptionist, for a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately, this app does not have a free version but it does come with a free trial.
Use the Chrome Extension and the Feedless mobile phone app to prevent any time wasting on Facebook. You can still access all of your messages and notifications but with no newsfeed, you will not be able to scroll through a newsfeed, which is only going to waste your valuable time. If you do not want to delete your newsfeed completely, another workaround is to ‘like’ interesting business-related pages, and click the ‘Following’ button then – ‘See First’ in the drop down menu:
If you do this a number of time, on pages that share a lot of content, you should have a newsfeed full or informative business news & tips.
Apps for Wellbeing
Life as an entrepreneur can be tough. If you are feeling overwhelmed and burnt out at any point, I would also recommend the Waking Up app by Sam Harris – you get the first 6 sessions free and you will be surprised at how effective 5 minutes of meditation every day can be. If you do not have room for another app on your phone, there are dozens of guided meditations on YouTube.
Also, consider installing a blue light filter for both mobile and desktop devices. Blue light has been shown to alter the circadian rhythm and too much of it can have a dramatic impact upon sleep quality; it can also cause eyestrain and even macular degeneration.
There are hundreds of apps for your mobile phone that can help with business – but that’s often the problem – there’s too much choice; we get ‘analysis paralysis’ and can’t pick an app that best suits our specific needs. The list found above is certainly a good starting point that should help you become more organised and more productive.