5 Top Productivity Tools for Small Businesses

To be productive in this fast-paced and super busy business world can be challenging.

As a business owner, it becomes almost impossible to stay on track to get the results you desire. There are several tasks and duties you need to do at the same time. This slows down your progress and prevents you from crushing your goals.

This is why you need productivity tools. Productivity tools make you organized and productive. They help you to work smarter and faster — making you save hours and keeping your sanity.

With productivity tools, you can automate tasks to help you get work done faster.

Small businesses with distributed or remote teams can collaborate with productivity tools. These awesome tools help such teams to connect and engage. Connected employees give businesses a 20–25% productivity increase.

There are different types of productivity tools. But in this post, we will focus on two types of productivity tools for small businesses:

• collaboration and communication tools
• project management tools

Ever since man has invented tools, they form a very important part of our existence. Tools help productivity — Subroto Bagchi

Communication and Collaboration Tools

These productivity tools help teams to communicate and collaborate to get tasks done. Communication and collaboration tools connect teams and increase engagement.

You can gain 38% more productivity through high employee engagement. And businesses with engaged employees perform 202% better than those without.

1. Slack

Slack is an instant messaging app that helps teams to communicate faster to get work done easily. Slack brings the right people, tools, and information together to get work done.

Slack has inbuilt chat, video, audio, and screen-sharing features that make communication easier. It is free for teams of up to 10 people.

Slack has a feature called channels. You can create different channels to discuss a specific topic or project with your team.

You can create channels for any task or project you want to work on. It could be channels for newsletters, monthly budgets, etc.

You can add teammates to a created channel. Teammates in a channel can chat and have video and audio calls. They can share files, brainstorm, and assign tasks.

Channels can be open to the public or closed to specific people in your team.

This amazing tool connects team members and makes collaboration super easy. You can also connect with different companies on slack.

Slack’s outstanding feature is its ability to integrate your favorite tools. With this feature, you don’t need to move out of your slack app to work with other tools. Slack’s free plan lets you integrate 10 tools. The premium plan has unlimited tools integration.

Pricing

Slack is free. Slack’s free plan has is perfect for small teams. It gives you access to 10,000 of your team’s latest messages. You can also integrate Slack with 10 of your favorite apps.

Slack also has a standard plan for small and medium-sized businesses. The price of the standard plan is $6.67/month.

2. Google Drive

Google Drive is a cloud-based file storage and collaboration tool. With Google Drive, you can easily create, store and share files with your team.

When you share a file team, you can set it to view only where they can only view it. You can as well allow them to edit and comment on a shared file. All the people you share a file with can see comments made on it. They can communicate around your document through comments and action items.

Google Drive has an integration of Google docs, slides, and sheets. You can also integrate several favorite apps or tools for real-time collaboration. This eliminates the need to move from your existing tools.

Google drive supports over 100 file formats which include PDFs, CAD files, images, etc.

Google Drive can be accessed on mobile, tablet, and computer. Google’s powerful search technology helps your team to search files up to 50% faster.

With Google Drive’s backup feature, you can backup files you save on your computer to Drive. With this, you can access them on Google Drive and work anywhere without opening the web app.

Pricing

Google Drive is free. You get 15 GB of storage space on Drive’s free plan.

Google Drive’s business standard is valued at $12/ month per user. This plan comes with 2TB cloud storage.

They also have a business plus plan which is priced at $18/month per user. This plan has 5TB cloud storage per user.

Project Management Tools

3. Trello

Trello is a project management tool that helps small businesses to organize tasks. Trello helps teams to communicate and collaborate to get tasks done.

Trello works with the principle of boards. You can think of Trello as a virtual board for planning and managing your projects.

Each board represents a project you want to work on. This means you can create boards for all your projects. Assuming you want to develop a website for your business. You can create a board for this project and name it website development.

A board has three columns: Todo, Doing, and Done. You can add tasks under each column to show the progress or stage of the task. These tasks are called cards.

Let’s assume you want to build a new website for your business. Some of your tasks in this project would include the following:

hiring a web designer, getting a domain name, purchasing hosting service, etc.

You can place these tasks under “to do”, “doing”, and “done columns”. Each task is a card placed on the board. Just like adding task stickers to a physical board.

More to this, you can click on a card and add details: assign people to a task, comments, etc.

You can move a card from one column to another with ease as a task progresses on the project journey.

Assuming you placed the task “hiring a web designer” under the “to do” column. When you begin this task, you can move it to “doing”. When you hire a web designer, you can move this card to the “ done” column.

Your teammates can view the cards on the board. They can see comments and the people assigned on each task.

With this, your teammates can know who is doing what on a project and the progress of the project. Also, they will all have a single source of truth or information for an ongoing project.

With Trello, your team doesn’t need to worry about abandoning the tools you already use. You can integrate your existing tools with Trello so your team can work in one spot.

Pricing

Trello is free. Trello’s free plan comes with 10 boards per team. It also has 10MB of file attachment, and unlimited cards and lists.

As your team grows, you can upgrade to Trello’s business class plan which goes for $ 9.99 / month per user. This plan comes with unlimited boards and 250MB.

4. Notion

Are you looking for a super clean all-in-one workspace to boost your productivity? If so, Notion is the perfect choice for you.

With Notion, you can write, plan, and collaborate with your teammates to get projects done. You can take notes, add tasks and manage projects with this amazing productivity tool.

Notion’s sidebar that groups your work into two sections: workspace and private. If you are using Notion for personal use, you may only see the private section.

A workspace contains content or work you share with other teammates.

Under both sections — workspace and private, you can add dashboards or head pages. You can add relevant and related documents to each dashboard.

Under workspace, you can add dashboards like marketing, sales, meetings, notes, etc.

To keep a neat, beautiful, and organized workspace on Notion, start with few dashboards. As time goes on, you can add other dashboards or head pages as needed.

For each dashboard or head page on your sidebar, you can add unlimited pages. This means you can add related pages or files to each head page on your workspace.

Let’s say you create content or a file that is marketing-related. You can drag this file into the marketing dashboard.

Let’s now get to the fun part of Notion.

Now, you’ve created different content and organized them in their related dashboards. You can share them with your teammates. You can add comments to specific sections of your shared document.

More to this, there is a unique feature that allows you to add a discussion to shared content. Your teammates can comment on shared content or message. This helps your teammates to collaborate, engage and get work done in one place.

When sharing content with your team, you can mention the name of a teammate. With this, you can draw a teammate’s attention to specific sections of the content or ask them to do a task. You can do this by entering “@” followed by the person’s name.

Notion makes it easy to find documents, files, or pages on your dashboard. By typing the name of a page or topic in the search feature at the top of the sidebar, relevant topics will pop up. You can filter your search results by the name of the sender, date, etc.

42% of respondents in the Mobility, Performance, and Engagement Report think that having access to information quickly and easily has the most impact on their productivity

Notion helps you to plan and track your project in one place. You can share your project with a teammate or your entire teammates to stay up to date with your project. If you have a distributed team, Notion shares the same information with your team so you can work with speed.

Notion’s unique task management feature allows you to organize your projects by status. With this, you can group various tasks into “not started”, “in progress” and “completed” status. Tasks can be easily moved from one status to another.

You can integrate over 500 apps to Notion to help you work in one place. No need to stop using your favorite tools. You can use them in notion.

Notion is available on Windows, Android, iOS. It also supports several file formats like pdf, etc.

Pricing

Notion is completely free for personal use. Teams can also use Notion for free.

This is how your team can try Notion for free:

When signing up, you will be asked how you would want to set up Notion. Choose team, and you will be added to a team trial plan automatically. With the team plan, you will have access to most features of the paid team plan.

The paid team plan costs $4/month per user.

5. Asana

Asana is an awesome productivity tool that helps teams stay organized and connected.

With Asana, you can list all the tasks for your project, assign them to teammates, and add deadlines.

Your teammates can see assigned tasks, their priority, and deadline in one place. Asana has a column feature that lets you arrange tasks according to their status.

Asana has room for over 100+ tools integration, where you can add all the tools your team needs to finish a project.

You can integrate tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack, Salesforce, etc with Asana. This is a better way to make your team more productive. How? Your team can collaborate, communicate, and coordinate tasks in one place.

Asana has real-time charts to help you get a true picture of your team’s progress and project status. You can visualize the progress of your team by looking at the charts. With the charts, you can also spot the challenges your team is facing and even potential problems.

By doing a careful analysis of the charts, you can make the right adjustments to keep your project on track.

These tools can, for example, be used to organize projects, tasks, and ideas; prioritize; check off completed tasks; attach documents or links; set reminders; or assign work to other team members. There are very different approaches to using these systems — Dietmar Sternad Effective Management: Developing Yourself, Others and Organizations

Pricing

Asana is free for teams from up to 15 teammates. Asana’s free basic plan comes with unlimited file storage, tasks, and messaging. It also has 100MB file attachments.

Asana has premium and business plans which are priced at $10.99 and $24.99/ month per user respectively. These plans have very advanced features.

Final Thoughts on Productivity Tools for Small Businesses

Productivity does not come by accident. You need to be intentional about it. To be productive, you need to use the right productivity tools. This post has shown you 5 top productivity tools you can use to become more productive.

By using these tools, you and your team will be more focused and organized. They’ll help you work smarter and faster. Select your favorite productivity tools from the list and start using them to boost your productivity.