There isn’t a single person that I know who has enough hours in the day. Everything these days is done at super fast speed and we barely have enough time to breath. So we thought in the interest of saving you time, even if its just a couple of minutes every hour (they all stack up you know.. save 10 of them and you could make yourself a cup of tea!) we would put together a list of time saving tools that you might be able to use in your every day life.
Take a look at the categories that make most sense to you, but we use all these tools regularly to ensure superspeed productivity, so to continue our wimbledon theme (Love – fifteen / Love Thirty) please take a look at our love forty.
Social Tools
Press This Collect and share bits of the web easier and faster than ever with this bookmarklet, then add your comments and you’ve got a blog!
Buffer Buffer makes it easy to share any page you’re reading to your social networks, there is a free and paid for version, but you can put entries into your buffer for distribution at a later date
Hootlet Similar to buffer in a way, this takes the content you want to share, pops in a shortened url and posts on your social networks (or autoschedules for later) – read our original post here
Cyfe this is probably the best all-in-one dashboard for monitoring the information that you need, The free version allows you to monitor 5 items, and whilst you do need to spend some time setting it up the results are worth while
Social Connector stay connected with your social circle without ever leaving outlook, a useful tool to keep you updated and it prompts you to ‘checkin’ with contacts every now and then.
Dlvr.it Whilst we’re not a fan of automation tools this is by far the best free one we can find, you can load 3 profiles into this tool and automatically publish RSS feeds to your social network, we do use it as we do an enormous amount of hands-on sharing too!
Evernote For saving stuff for later, you can instantly save links and videos to evernote and view them later when you have more time. You can snap a photo on your phone, save it to evernote and then find it later as everything stays ‘insync’
Penultimate Sync with evernote for the ultimate notetaking without a paper and pen!
IFTTT This is a very neat app, although it is automation again, its a case of ‘if this happens then do that’ so for example if you are tagged in Facebook the ‘that’ could be that you download it to dropbox. Very cool!
‘Finding Content’ Tools
Feedly A must use application for getting your news directly to you on a daily basis
More Info About You can have a bookmarklet for this website or simply just click on the link..you can search different places on the web for various keywords
Creating Content Tools
Prezi Straight from their website as they describe it the best! – “Prezi is a virtual whiteboard that transforms presentations from monologues into conversations: enabling people to see, understand, and remember ideas.” – We simply love this tool take a look at this post
NCH Software This website is amazing with plenty of free applications, we actually use the simple video editor (for those spur of the moment videos not corporate storytelling ones!) and the podcast software which we can’t fault, read how to create the podcast here
Thesaurus It does what it says, very useful (beneficial, valuable!!) for blogs, the website also has a translator which can come in quite useful
Pinstamatic A neat little tool to help you create more content for Pinterest
Wikipedia Search This is a bookmarklet for your browser, simply highlight the word press the button and Wikipedia will give you the explanation
For Images
pixlr An online photo editor, a really quick way to edit your photos, original post on this is here
picmonkey Easily add effects and create a gallery using picmonkey
Autre Planet Useful social media Icons, A QR Code generator and social media pictures (with correct sizes) A fabulous online tool for you, original post on this is here
Snagit Ok so this does cost £40 (we have tried to show you lots of free stuff!) but this is the best screen capture and basic manipulation tool, its worth every penny for its ease of use
Readability and printing or downloading
Readability A really useful bookmarklet that you can use, it basically saves the website page you are on with out the clutter so it makes it more readable. You can read it now or later and coupled with the Aps for Apple or Android you can store your own library of pages you want to read.
Print Friendly Again this comes with a useful bookmarklet so you can make any web page print friendly as it strips out anything you don’t want printed, you can also put the button onto your website if you want to. read our print friendly write up here
Grammarly Don’t make any grammar errors again – for those of us who are challenged with the English language!
Kwout This enables you to cut out any part of a page and upload it with an image map. Even while playing a movie on YouTube, you can cut out a favorite scene in the movie, can be quite useful for tweets
Pdf Download You can download any webpage as a pdf, there are also free tools for converting pdf to a word and excel document.
For your website
resize my browser Either use the website or download the bookmarklet, see how your website looks in different sizes, especially important now in the world of mobile devices
check my links We have covered this before but its a neat bookmarklet for Chrome that enables you to quickly check for broken links on your website page
Responsive Design Bookmark Similar to resize my browser this will show you how your responsive website will look in various sizes
Quackit A really basic but useful website to use when you need to check html or CSS code
Colorpix – Want to know the colour of a website? (or font or anything online) download this little piece of software and find out what the colour is.
concept.ly We have covered this before but its a really easy way to share design ideas collaboratively
brokenlinks checker Find all your broken links with this tool, original write up here
Screaming Frog Fetch your key SEO onsite page elements with this tool (or use it for your competitors sites)
General Housekeeping
Dropbox If you are not using dropbox you are completely mad! – This is such a useful utility for putting your documents in the cloud, retrieving them from anywhere and sharing them with your team
Passpack For free save up to 100 passwords securely here
Whats my IP The more info about you is such a great tool to find out all those things that on an adhoc basis you might need to know .. whats your ip address, where did you buy your domain name from
Join Me A free screen sharing tool that is really useful if you need to share your screen with a colleague or customer that is remote to you.
BT Wi-Fi This is only for BT customers but download the app and make yourself a BT hotspot, fantastic when you’re on the road and need to get onto the internet
Bubbl.us An online mindmap tool to help you brainstorm your ideas. You can only produce a couple of mindmaps and then you have to overtype them, but as a started if you haven’t used a tool like this before it can help you make up your mind if you want to pay for one (which we have now done called Mindnodepro for the Apple)
Wunderlist For those of you that just love lists, this is a neat free task management tool that creates to-dos out of your daily life and assigns them to lists (shopping /work) a must have for list lovers!
Now you’ve spent 15 minutes reading this blog post, get these productivity tools working for you and get that time back!