4 Automation Tools to Superpower Your Workflow in 2024
We are all busy, all the time. It truly is a common theme across nearly everyone you know. Think about it, how many times have you thought, if I only had more time in the day I would read a book, spend more time with family and friends, or *insert fun activity you could do with more time.* Time truly is money, and it seems like there is no way to add time to your day.
So now let me ask you a question: How much of your day do you spend doing menial, repetitive tasks? According to an independent research firm, Americans typically spend over 50% of their day working on tasks like emailing and scheduling meetings. And this may not even seem surprising to you as it seems like a necessary thing to do to complete tasks throughout your day.
However, think about how much time you could get back if you eliminated these repetitive tasks. Whether it be scheduling, checking emails, repetitive excel sheet cleanups, or whatever you do throughout your day that is a time sink. Imagine if you could free yourself of all of that work. Impossible right? Well, you might want to reconsider that.
Introducing Process Flow Automation Tools
Now you might be thinking, well that’s a nice thought, but let’s bring it back to reality. Well, let me introduce you to Zapier and other process flow automation tools. Now I know you have heard of how incredible AI is and how it’s changing the world, but Zapier and other similar tools harness that power and bring it directly to you. These process flow automation tools are simple yet powerful allowing you to eliminate the menial tasks of your allowing yourself to be incredibly more productive with your day.
These process flow automation tools like Zapier help to send emails for you, schedule meetings and do all the repetitive tasks in your day automatically so you don’t have to worry about them. And while this may seem intimidating, this software utilizes user-friendly UI to make their solutions as easy to use as possible. Here are some of our favorites we recommend you to try:
1. Zapier
Zapier is our top choice because of its wide variety of integrations and ease of use. It is perfect for people who are unfamiliar with coding and automation as well as those who are domain experts. Zapier comes built-in with integrations across various platforms such as Gmail, Slack, and Airtable. These ready-made integrations make automating your workflow a breeze and will without a doubt 10x the amount of work you can do in a day.
2. Covve
Essentially, network marketing is sales, and within sales, it is a numbers game of reaching as many of the right customers at the right time. As someone who does network marketing, you probably call, text, DM, and email as many people as you can to sell your products. Sometimes it can be challenging to keep up with who you reached out too, when to follow up, and how to personalize your message when you follow up. A personal customer relationship management software (CRM) for network marketing can help you remember when to follow up and how to personalize your messages to increase sales.
Covve is the relationship management tool that can digitize business cards, automate networking and keep track of your contacts for optimal relationships and increased sales. Covve is AI-powered to notify you when there is a news article impacting your contacts, when it’s been too long and you should reach out again, and helps you keep track of the last conversation and how you know what’s-his-face from. It is the contacts app you never knew you needed to take keeping track of your networking off your plate. Let the technology organize, update and notify you when you should follow up to not lose touch.
3. ProcessMaker
Similar to Zapier, ProcessMaker is an easy to use solution to automate your workflow. It is an open-source platform that gives people with little coding background a way to automate their work, from Gmail to SAP. The beauty of ProcessMaker is it has a functional API so that its software can also be leveraged for enterprise solutions.
4. Calendly
Although Calendly is not a full process automator like Zapier, it does help automate a time-draining part of our work lives – scheduling. Calendly turns scheduling into a simple link. All you have to do is input your availability, and then Calendly will give you a personal scheduling link that gives whoever’s contacting access to schedule a meeting in your given available times. SO instead of countless emails back and forth, just send your personal link and Calendly will take care of the rest.
So now that we have given you a few examples of how to automate your workflow, we want to encourage you to constantly try and find new ways to improve your work. In light of the pandemic and everything that has been going on, there are always great tools to aid you in being successful, always be on the lookout for automation tools that can 10x your productivity, as that can make all the difference.
How can automated reminders from a digital address book improve business connections?
The old school hard copy address books have been replaced by digital address books. Now more than ever, we depend on our phones and social media to build new connections and foster the relationships we’ve already established. This is not only the case for our personal relationships but also stands for our professional relationships. It’s easier to stay connected with friends and family but relatively more challenging to preserve a professional relationship that is also personal enough to have an ongoing conversation. Having a digital address book is not only convenient because we tend to carry our phones everywhere but also because of the built-in tools that remind us and inform us about our contacts.
A life-changing property for many business professionals, is the smart reminder tool which allows you to set reminders, one time or annual, to be notified of reaching out to selected contacts from your digital address book. Having an organized list of contacts and being able to pick who, among your contacts, you want to regularly reach out to and at which frequency is revolutionary in the sense that it eliminates the need to worry about staying in touch as it is automatically regulated.
Reminders aren’t mandatory for all connections, you can manually select who among your digital address book you want to receive reminders about. Choosing not to receive any reminders to stay in touch with some people is also an option through the “I am in touch” and “never” selections in the drop down menu.
The automated reminders aren’t only limited to notifications underscoring you should reach out to certain people. Some digital address books work in synchronization with news engines that inform you about news affecting you contact list. For instance, if you have a contact in your digital address book that works at Apple and a recent article has been published about a new product being launched by Apple, you would get notified of the news and along with which of your contacts’ job the news is regarding.
This tool allows you to build a deeper business connection by giving an excuse to reach out and stay connected with your business contacts. Even if a business relationship has already been established, being notified about news directly regarding their work still helps you different because it shows that you care and are interested in keeping up with the experience of business contact.
The AI technology is a key aspect of the automated reminders that differentiates it from its competitors. Without AI and automated reminders a digital address book is not much different than a hard copy one where we write down contact information manually, other than the differing convenience and accessibility. However the incorporation of artificial intelligence has revolutionized the way we keep track of contact information.
With artificial intelligence, the information missing about our contacts auto-complete, we get reminders to reach out before we think of it, we get alerted of select news articles specifically picked out and matched with a contact after analyzing more than a hundred different sources. Followingly, we can communicate more efficiently than ever while spending significantly less amount of time worrying about staying in touch.
Our digital address book and the artificial intelligence technology behind it allows us to focus more on the content of a discussion rather than the planning. Furthermore, understanding the technology available saves us time and energy that we can spend doing things we love our pursuing ideas that we’re interested in with the comfort of knowing that we would receive an automated reminder in the occurrence of an important news event or an occasion where we need to reach out to our business contacts.