I wish I knew about these when I worked in the corporate world.
In today’s high achieving businesses, everyone is being asked to do more with less. When I left my last job, I had a lot of experience under my belt in the ways of business. Productivity had been the name of the game for many years but not necessarily creativity.
Previously you had many administration staff, who were versed in a range of areas including design, formatting, creating and keeping things on track.
With the reality that businesses are no longer employing these people and are downsizing, skilled staff are being asked to take on challenges to do more admin work and increase their output.
In starting my business I have been exploring frugal ways to be both productive and creative and I thought it was about time to share these with you.
Here are my top 5 free online tools I have discovered which have made my life a whole lot easier.
1. Chrome – Momentum
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/momentum
A daily in your face productivity tool.
It is a beautiful replacement for your Google search home page tab with daily inspirational photos from around the globe and sometimes outer space.
If you use Chrome as your web browser, I highly recommend you install Momentum. Each day it asks you to enter your key focus for the day, which is then displayed on your homepage tab as a reminder to keep you on track along with the current time.
It also has a great easy to use To-do list to help you focus on your tasks right on the front page.
As a bonus it has the local weather and daily motivational quotes.
It’s an amazing pick me up each day when I log in and ensures I set my intention with thought as it is right in front of you whenever you open the home page.
2. Canva
Creativity gone wild!
If you need to be super inventive with the design of anything – Canva is amazing. It will engage your imagination with loads of done for you templates for social media, presentations. flyers, worksheets, business cards, invitations and most other business or media oriented advertising.
Why is it so special? It takes photo collage to a professional level for the everyday person.
I have used it to create training worksheets, my strategic plan, Facebook ads and headers as well as PDF’s and JPEG’s that I use on my website and in my training courses.
It’s all so simple.
3. Picmonkey
Flexible design options
While Canva is great for cool, creative design on a bigger scale. I love Picmonkey for its usefulness on smaller creative forays. Adding text and arrows and to pictures for reports. Adding logos to documents, and using overlays creatively to make an impact.
It is so easy to add shapes, cut-outs, banners, textures and backgrounds to your own images or you can create sensational designs from scratch.
I love the sheer number of fonts available through Picmonkey or if theirs don’t suit it has the option to use your own computers fonts.
It is so easy to import things you are working on and add benefit to them through this free design studio.
4. Smallpdf
Big documents will no longer be a burden
When you create reports or presentations and add loads of photos they become huge, RIGHT? If it is for you own use it is not too bad, but if you want to share it by email you come unstuck due to the sheer size of it all.
I recently discovered Smallpdf. It was like the sun came out. I no longer needed to buy memory sticks or dvd’s to send large documents through the post. This amazing free website lets you compress PDF’s without reducing the quality. You can also merge or split PDFs, convert Microsoft documents to PDF such as those huge Powerpoints you have created. You can also turn JPGs to PDF and vice versa for systems that only pick up one or the other.
You never know when you will have issues with sending a large document, so keep this in the back of your mind to use if and when you need it.
5. PDFescape
Create fillable forms easily
This is a free PDF editor and form filler. How many of you create forms to be filled out electronically? Most people use Adobe Acrobat Pro. Which is expensive and in todays market not a lot of businesses are willing to license such products.
PDFEscape doesn’t have all the features of its expensive counterpart but to create fillable forms for free is a huge bonus.
It will allow you to add Textboxes, checkboxes, radio, list, and drop down fields. It is fairly simple to use and Free is always good.
If you learned anything new from reading this blog – please go ahead and sign up below for my weekly eMentor email where I share my mentoring journey with you. It’s also FREE.
By the way – I am not an affiliate of any of these product, I love them so much maybe I should be.
Share to be inspired, be inspired to share.
