💡 Intro
Yes, screen time is not good for us and too much exposure to blue light during the hours before bedtime will ruin our sleep. Mindlessly scrolling through our social media feeds rarely brings any benefit, and allowing phone notifications will most probably interrupt our focus and distance us from achieving our goals.
I’m an advocate for limiting screen time, especially outside working hours. However, some apps are helpful for my daily activities and ease processes, which otherwise would be challenging to create and keep track of.
📲 The 7 apps I use almost every day
1. Google Calendar
Pretty basic, right? I keep all my activities in time blocks using Google Calendar and add notes every time I need to prepare in some way for the event. I use it for business meetings, personal meetings, groceries shopping sprees, nail appointments, family gatherings, weddings, parties, trips, tasks, workouts, writing sessions, birthdays, you name it. It gave me a complete overview of my weeks, boosting my time management and planning skills.
2. Notion
I started using Notion about a month ago, and it completely changed my relationship with digital note-taking. I used to prefer writing things by hand and maybe using Evernote from time to time. Notion has a very friendly user interface, and for me, it’s almost like an invitation to write my ideas and organise them into categories, then link them back and forth to my liking.
It helped a lot in organising everything related to this blog, and it’s currently the base for building a second brain. The idea behind this concept is to gather all your knowledge and stuff that resonates with you in a digital, easy to retrieve format. These can later be useful as a starting point for your creative endeavours. Instead of categorising the information you find chronologically or based on specific topics, you can capture and assign it to projects you are working on. This way, you won’t have to go through the fear of building from scratch. The ideas you’ve collected will become the basis for your project, and Notion does a great job of keeping all things interconnected.
3. Grammarly
Grammarly helps you with your writing but, unfortunately, doesn’t write for you. 😄 I knew it wasn’t enjoyable for my close ones to read and correct all my articles, so I did what any modern woman would do: search for an A.I. to replace my friends. I’m still testing it, it works well on spelling mistakes and sometimes gives good suggestions on rephrasing or using different words, but I’m not yet convinced. As mentioned, you still have to do the work, and some of its features don’t seem to work as advertised.
4. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a CRM that helps me organise my sales activities: contacts, companies, deals, leads, following tasks and overall performance.
Even if it doesn’t always feel productive, there is magic in the process of keeping track of your every sales activity. You never forget a call, a mail, a meeting or what your client loves to have for lunch. You always know your next steps and can resume any client conversation, even if it happened six months ago. If you follow the rules you set in your CRM, results will always follow. Call it something cute and just be friends. Mine is Pipey (short from Pipedrive)
5. Canva
I use it to quickly do basic designs, which prove very helpful when running a blog. I also use it for B2B sales presentations. It’s highly customisable and has millions of templates you can use as a base for anything you like to create: a presentation, an Insta story, a logo, a social media post or even a book. You can add your brand colours, fonts and key visuals in just a few clicks.
Besides all the work-related things it helped me with, I also used it to design a cute pdf book that I gifted my father for Christmas. It included short funny stories from our relationship during the years. The point is if you want to make some thoughtful gifts and you are not familiar with professional graphic design tools, Canva comes to the rescue.
6. Picsart
I mostly use Picsart to make photo grids from our campaigns to showcase cv30’s services. It has essential photo editing tools, filters and stickers for anyone to enhance their visual storytelling skills.
7. My Fitness Pal
After experimenting with many diets and struggling to get fit for most of my life, keeping track of what I eat has proved quite efficient. There was a whole mindset shift preceding this conclusion, and I don’t think keeping track in itself will miraculously turn you into a fitter version of yourself. However, calorie counting has helped me stay on track and know when to adjust my diet based on actual numbers. I started to log my meals into the My Fitness Pal app four months after changing my eating habits, right after I decided to maintain my weight and prepare for a period of gaining muscle.
I usually plan my meals one day in advance and log everything in My Fitness Pal App to check if my macros seem alright. For example, if my protein intake doesn’t match my goal, I switch the ingredients here and there to get the overall number closer to my daily protein requirements. I’m far from being strict with the numbers, but they serve me well when I reach a plateau or simply want to maintain my body composition the way it is.
💠Final thoughts
Our lives are getting more digitalised as we speak, and people start worrying we’re going to get sucked into the metaverse and never turn back to the analog existence. I don’t think there’s much we can do to turn digitalisation off. Even if virtual environments are not yet perfectly adapted to our human needs and ways of interacting, there are still many tools we can use purposefully to enhance our experience and move closer to our goals.