One good way to better understand your own process is to evaluate what tools you most often use.
In my function as something like a small publisher, my roles span business development and account, program and project management to strategy development and, still, limited tactical efforts on editorial, events and product creation and maintenance. That means my workflow roughly resembles what our digital media company looks like across the board.
Take a peek into my workflow below.
Here are the most commonly opened tabs in a web browser for me:
- Gmail (email): I try to only check my email three times a day but many of my tasks involve external communication too.
- Asana (task management): I rely heavily on this tool to drive my daily tasks. We brought this into our company almost two years ago but in the last year I turned up my usage of this, becoming an absolutely dominant part of my execution strategy.
- Slack (team communication): Replacing internal email, team IM and even some water cooler chat, I use this tool for quick team collaboration and updates. You can risk being distracted by a tool like this so we coach our team to limit its use.
- Google Cal (calendar): I sync both my personal and professional appointments here. I also use this to block out time for me to work on projects or deliver deadlines that might otherwise get lost.
- GDrive (file management): This is where we keep documents and files and where I build out proposals and initial strategy documents.
- Hubspot (client relationship management): We’re still testing out the rather expensive tool but it’s where we keep and track deals and proposals.
- Quickbooks (budgeting): We use the cloud-based tool for accounts receivable and payable.
- WordPress (content management system): They still let me climb into our CMS for the occasional byline.
Note that social platforms and tools (like Twitter and Buffer) are mostly for personal use, not professional, for me these days.
