Whether you're a New Year's resolution person or not, I find it valuable to take time at some point in the year to create a plan and set goals. After the holidays, and with a full year ahead, January feels like the perfect time to do that. A lot of us head into the new year with ambitious goals, and inevitably some of them we fall short on, but we set these goals for a reason and it’s good to see them through.
I’m pretty sure that “staying organized” or “creating a schedule” shows up on my goals just about every new year in some form. Every time I get one area of my life organized, it seems that a new area now needs attention. If there’s one area I'm always on the lookout to improve, it’s my business workflows. I haven’t mastered them by any means, but over the years I have implemented different tools to keep me on track and I want to share some of those tools with you if you’re looking for ways to improve your systems in 2024!
Monday is a great resource for working with a team or for managing multiple projects and tasks on your own. This platform allows me create an organized overview of the week, month, quarter and year, and add projects and tasks. Since I'm always working on multiple businesses and projects at once, and collaborating with my team, this software helps us stay on track and make sure no tasks fall through the cracks.
If you’ve been reading my blogs for any amount of time, then you know how much I love HoneyBook. It’s the best platform to book clients, sign contracts, send invoices, and get your clients all the information they need. You can also create workflows that Honeybook automates to make it even easier for you to manage all of your projects! I’ve laid out the whole process for you in a past blog post, check it out here. Click here for 50% off your first year of Honeybook.
Slack is an online communication software that allows you to communicate with a select group of people. It has channels (essentially group chats) and private messages to keep all my business communications with other professionals organized and in one spot. It even links with many other platforms to keep things organized and integrated. I use Slack for my internal team communication and we recently implemented Slack for our Rise members to have a place to connect!
If you’re a photographer, you probably are familiar with Pic-Time, one of the most well-known photo delivery softwares. It’s my personal favorite out of all the ones I’ve used because of how aesthetic it lays out galleries and how easy it is for clients to use. Another nice thing about using Pic-Time is the “smart store” feature that allows your clients to purchase prints directly from the platform.
Later is the resource I use to lay out, schedule and automate my social media posts. Out of all the scheduling platforms I’ve tried, Later is the one I’ve found to be most helpful and user friendly. Plus, Later provides analytics and insights to help you generate traffic to your account.
Last, but certainly not least, Canva is my favorite and most used app to date. I use it for all my content and design needs. Whether I'm creating an instagram story or an entire course. It’s extremely user friendly and customizable so you don’t need to have any design experience to benefit from it. If you want to get the most use out of Canva for your business, grab The Brand Toolkit to gather some inspiration and define your brand before you start creating.
There are so many other platforms and apps I use, but these definitely fall at the top of my list. I hope they're helpful in optimizing your business this year!
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