Tech, tools and frustrations
When your tech has a meltdown, do you do the same?
Last week, one of my favourite and most essential business tools wasn’t working. Trello, which is my day-to-day planning and task list, was down. Well, it was frozen, then it was glitching, and then not working at all. I did a quick search to make sure it wasn’t just me - it wasn’t. So what next?
I shared my frustrations on LinkedIn.
I’ve written about moving away from Big Tech previously, but I still have a fairly chunky tech stack for my one-woman business. I don’t use any paper in my business at all, and all my notes are scribbled onto a tablet and filed accordingly. (Most of the time.)
I’d like to say this is part of my eco-credentials, but in reality, it’s because on paper, I would have different notes for each client and each project, never mind the random notes, ideas and reminders for my own business. I work between home and a co-working space and I can guarantee I would never have the right notes in the right place and it would be too much to remember and carry around.
Most of the time, this set up works well. I have my digital notes, plus various other marketing, planning and organisational platforms (I’ve listed my favourites below). It gets unwieldy when clients’ preferred tools are added into the mix, or if I get distracted by something new and shiny.
I am sure we can all relate to:
Feeling like you’re using a computer for the first time when having to switch from Zoom to Teams (and vice versa)
Sounding like you’re speaking in code when trying to locate a file. Is that on Airtable, Notion, Sharepoint or Google Drive? 🤷🏽♀️
Heated debates about where to record actions and accountability. I stopped doing white-labelled work (ie working for agencies under their brand) because having multiple inboxes, planning tools and file locations nearly broke me 🫠
It’s a lot. A lot of tech and tools that (for me at least) have really crept up on me over the past decade. And the numbers back this up: in 2011 we had 150 online tools available to us, and now it’s over 11,000. (Big thank you to Monét McGee who brought this stat to my attention at the last Nottingham Marketing Meet Up).
Since I started my business and I have more control over which tools I’ve used, I have learned that less is more and a good test of their usefulness is how much I miss them when they aren’t working. So, not including email/calendar/file storage (which would pretty much bring my client work to a halt if they were down), here are my most essential tech and tools:
Trello as my day-to-day task planning tool. I have a list for each day, which runs to a week in advance, plus a task queue. My board for the day will include my meetings, my tasks, plus any personal commitments. At the end of each day I plan the days ahead.
Airtable and Trello for project management, depending on the complexity. Airtable is fiddly, but I worked off some templates and now I have my own template for chunky client projects.
Samsung notes (sorry, I do not own a single Apple product!) and I have heard good things about reMarkable too.
WhatsApp/Messages for quick and group-based client comms. Perhaps controversially. But I like having everything in one place and it’s usually the quickest way to get hold of each other. And also the reason why my phone storage is 90% screenshots of work for approval.
WorkingHours for tracking client work. I have honestly tried so many of these apps - there are LOADS available - and I ended up liking this random one I found on the Microsoft App store (again, sorry to Mac users). It’s really simple, plus it includes a pomodoro timer and an Excel export for invoicing.
Trello’s downtime ended up being just a few hours, so in the big scheme of things, it was fine. In the context of some of the tech my clients work with and provide (this includes medical software and property tech), it’s definitely fine. Lives and homes are not at risk if I can’t access my to-do list.
In my last newsletter, I wrote about navigating self-employment through big personal changes. It felt like quite a lot of myself to put out in the world, but I had lovely responses on Substack, LinkedIn and directly. Since then, as well as regaining focus, I’ve had several new business and new project conversations which have felt really good. So I’d just like to say that things do get better. And it’s all extra resilience and context for those pesky tech meltdowns!