Are you a founder overwhelmed by the loads of business tasks on your desk? If yes, do not worry; you are not alone. Startup founders and business owners are usually occupied with many business tasks. This leads to default on some duties and a reduction in productivity.

At Tribesquare, we have built high-flying teams and helped many founders and entrepreneurs with team management. We fully understand the headaches these founders face and have noted the tools that boost their productivity the most.

In this article, we recommend essential productivity tools that boost performance in several key business areas, including time and task management and project management.

After reading this article, you will understand how to save time and enhance productivity using tools tailored to founders’ needs.

HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS

Before choosing tools to enhance your productivity as a founder, consider the following:

• Ease of Use: Productivity tools simplify your processes and help you achieve more within the same amount of time you usually spend. Hence, the tools you choose must be easy to use and effective.
• Integration with Existing Systems: As long as your existing systems perform optimally, productivity tools should not disrupt but improve them. Hence, you must confirm that your chosen tools can seamlessly integrate with existing tools and workflows.
• Scalability: Can the productivity tool be scaled across different teams and processes for improved performance? If yes, then that tool is a good addition. However, if the answer is no, such productivity tools should not be considered.
• Cost Effectiveness: All businesses need liquidity to stay afloat. And as a founder, it is your duty to keep your business up and avoid expenses that cut through your cash flow. Hence, the productivity tools you choose must be within the company’s budget.

With that said, let’s get to know the best productivity tools for founders and entrepreneurs.

Project/Task Management tools:

Hitting organizational goals involves setting and meeting tasks, projects, and milestones. And all these must be managed effectively to achieve the desired result. Here are two tools that can help you manage your tasks and projects:

Trello

Trello allows you to group your tasks into boards. Each board can contain the project milestones and goals, the status of the task (completed or in progress), and links to the assets involved.

You can create Four Trello boards for your projects. The first board contains the task assigned and its details. The second board houses tasks that has been successfully assigned to a particular team/member and work is in progress. The Third board can contain projects that have been completed and submitted for approval. The last board may carry projects that have been completed, approved, and successfully implemented.

Feel free to name these boards accordingly or tweak them according to your organization’s needs.

Asana

Asana helps you manage your team’s projects and progress online. With it, you can specify your company’s goals, state the work and tasks required to achieve them, and track how well your team implements those tasks.

Communications and Collaboration Tools

The success of an organization depends so much on an effective communication channel. The following are some essential tools that enhance information flow within your organization:

Slack

Although this platform is not everyone’s favourite, it effectively handles team communications. Slack is highly customizable, so you can create different channels that align with your company structure and objectives. Also, it has a free version that supports most activities that an average business needs.

Loom

Loom allows you to create and share quick videos with your team or partners. It makes remote video communication more effective without the need for long meetings.

Writing Tools

Running your business as a founder or entrepreneur involves a lot of writing. Pitch decks, announcements, press releases, and other important company information involve writing. Even videos come as written scripts before the production is done. You can’t just run away from writing. But there are important tools that can assist, including the following:

Jasper AI

Jasper AI helps you convert your ideas into writing within seconds and communicate with your customers in a tone that resonates with them. It is powered by advanced language models and generates articles when prompted. However, the quality of the write-up generated depends largely on the quality of the prompt you input. Hence, be as detailed as possible in your prompt to help Jasper understand the direction of the article you want to write.

ChatGPT

This AI tool from OpenAI enables you to create articles speedily from a prompt. However, you must still edit and revamp the generated text to suit your target audience. ChatGPT is more effective for drafting outlines and content briefs.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a writing assistant that automatically detects both spelling and grammatical errors in your documents.

You can copy and paste your writings into a blank document on the Grammarly Web App, set your writing goals, and scan for errors. Otherwise, you can install the Grammarly browser extension in your browser and allow the grammar checker to point out errors in your documents as long as you’re connected to the internet. Grammarly also has a plagiarism detector that helps you fish out duplicate content.

Time Management

Is there anything more valuable to an entrepreneur than time? Every task or achievement a founder or entrepreneur desires is accomplished with time. Hence, how you manage your time determines how much you can achieve. These tools help you manage time effectively:

Calendly

Calendly allows you to schedule appointments and book sales calls, automating meeting set-ups and reminders. With Calendly, you can eliminate the hassles of back-and-forth email reminders and manual meeting set-ups.

Toggl

Toggl helps you track the time you spend on tasks. Are you spending more time on marketing than on team management activities? How much time do you spend on meetings? Toggl helps you keep track of all these. This will force you to be more organized in your time allocation.

Presentation Tools

Founders regularly create presentations for pitches and speaking events. While slide presentations can take time and effort to create, the tools listed in this section make them less difficult.

Beautiful AI

This tool provides easy-to-use smart templates to help you create presentation slides in minutes. You don't need to worry, even if you are not good at PowerPoint. Beautiful AI’s templates and auto-formatting ability help you create professional presentations effortlessly.

Canva

Canva provides free templates plus AI assistance to help founders design their logos, presentations, social media graphics, blog graphics, and videos. You can also import existing designs into Canva and improve them with the platform's fantastic tools.

Automation Tools

These tools help you automate your entire workflow and prevent the time you might lose jumping from one platform to another.

Zapier

Zapier helps you automate all your workflows, from marketing, lead management, and data management to sales and team management. Interestingly, you don’t need to know how to code before you can integrate Zapier into your workflow.

Notion + Automate.IO

Notion helps business owners integrate all their Apps in one central place and automate everyday tasks. Notion recently acquired another popular automation tool, Automate.io. Together, they aim to empower businesses and teams to centralize and automate their workflows to avoid duplications and switching from one platform to another. This is a massive development for founders as even more Apps would be integrated into the notion environment.

Team Management/Hiring

Founders and entrepreneurs need teams to achieve their business goals. The tools and services listed in this section can help you build and manage your teams effectively.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a powerful career and recruitment-focused social media platform. You can post your vacancies in the job section. Also, you can walk into a prospect’s DM and shoot your shot at them. Inform them of the vacancies, and let them know you have seen their work and feel they are a good fit for your teams.

For example, you can enter a prospect’s DM with the following message:

“Hello, I am John from Tribesquare. I have followed your posts for a while and seen the quality of the products you’ve built so far.

We need a full-stack Developer to join our team, and I believe you would be a great addition. Let me know what you think, and we can schedule a call to discuss this further.

Regards.”

Alternatively, you can make a brief post inviting prospects to reach out to you. See the example below.

“We’re looking for a highly skilled project manager to join our team. If you have a minimum of 2 years experience in project management and are interested in working in a fast-paced and rewarding start-up, please send me a direct message.”

With this, project managers who meet your requirements will reach out to you, and you can make your choice.

However, one caveat with this type of post is that it works perfectly when you have built a personal brand online, and people already know what you do. If not, you have to state the company you work for and explain what they do as well.

Job Boards

Job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, and RemoteOk help founders reach more talents by posting vacancies on their boards. These job boards get thousands of daily visits, potentially displaying your open positions before hundreds of thousands of talents in a few days.

Tribesquare

One significant difference between Tribesquare and the other solutions listed in this section is that LinkedIn and job boards only help you hire talents. Meanwhile, Tribesquare does not just hire talents for you; the company also takes away the hassles of team management from you to allow you to concentrate on other parts of your business journey.

Also, if you need to hire top African developers, Tribesquare is your best shot to get the right candidates for your teams. You can reach out to Tribesquare and let the team handle your team management and hiring needs.

Go ahead and try these tools out and watch your productivity skyrocket. We’re rooting for you.