5 (Totally Free) Tools to Boost Your Focus & Productivity

Oct 16

As busy parents, there are always more demands on our time and attention than we can meet!

Over the past 5 years, I’ve discovered these totally free tools that have boosted my productivity, allowed me to best use my time, and stop chasing after notes, emails and tasks to try to figure out what is going on.

Give them a try and let me know if they help you!

Notetaking:

Fathom

AI bots for video calls are all the rage now but Fathom is a clear standout for me. It’s free, it makes you look good, and you’ll never miss an action item or decision again!

Benefits:

Automatically joins your calls
Easy to navigate
Produces the best AI-generated summary from a transcript
Highlights key questions asked and clear next steps/action items
Easy search tool so you can search by keyword within a meeting or across your library of meetings so you never have to wonder what was decided
Allows you to turn off auto send to all participants (not all notetaking bots do!)
Share link to share with anyone, in or outside the digital ecosystem

Otter

Otter is another AI notetaker tool, but it has different strengths from Fathom that justify keeping it in my toolkit. I don’t use it for every meeting, but here are the features I appreciate it for:

Benefits beyond Fathom:

Works on a phone app (Fathom does not) so you can record in person conversations
Provides real-time transcription in case you step out (or zone out) in a meeting, you can get caught up quickly and look like you never skipped a beat.
Also generates an AI summary from the transcript, but I prefer Fathom’s summary.

Task Management

Asana

If you know me, you know how much I love Asana! I run my business and my personal life in it and I truly would be lost without it.

If you are a client of Heron House Management, you know every client gets their own “board” where we track all projects, tasks, comments, deadlines, priority, status, etc, for everything we are working together. No task is too small!

Once I started treating my family like we treat our clients, I saw the true power of Asana and how it transformed our lives. Here are a few ways we use it that have transformed my life.

I never forget a deadline - every task gets assigned a deadline, even if it’s just to revisit the issue in the future. You can change deadlines, but if you don’t attach one to the task, it will get lost in the ether. Plus, you can use Asana’s calendar view to see all your tasks laid out for the coming week or month.
It allows me to work with my husband on personal projects the way I work with my colleagues on professional projects. My husband and I assign “ownership” of a project, use subtasks to split up the pieces of a project, use comments to document decisions, and make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
It allows us to seamlessly fold in our house manager into our lives. Melissa (shout out to her - we’d be lost without her!) can track our tasks, keep us accountable, provide information to inform our decisions and make sure we are all working together as a team.
It allows our house manager to truly “own” a project and assign the smaller pieces to me and my husband. For example, if she is in charge of scheduling doctor’s appointments but needs me to fill out a health survey form with information she doesn’t know, she will assign me a subtask to fill out the form, but she takes care of the 19 other tasks it takes to find the provider and get the appointment scheduled. Her owning that task means the only thing I actually have to think about is my piece - filling out a form and showing up when and where she tells me to. It’s a win-win!

SCheduling

Doodle

There’s nothing worse than trying to coordinate schedules with a big group and being stuck in the middle of the 17,000 emails or texts to get it on the calendar. Skip the cumbersome group chat chatter when planning that upcoming girls trip and use a survey tool like Doodle!

It’s easy to set up - just fill in your available dates and times, then send the link to your friends or coworkers to let them fill in their availability. It splits up the work to each individual, minimizes back and forth or any confusion, and automatically tells you the best time for the group. It’s a win for work or personal planning!

Calendly or SimplyMeet

Calendar scheduling links are my superpower. No joke. I use mine to sync my availability across multiple calendars and generate links for different purposes and lengths. Gone are the days of sharing your availability in an email - instead you can just send someone a link and have them book time on your calendar in one click.

I have a link for a 15-minute touch base with a team member, a 30-minute introduction, or a 30-minute podcast recording. It also allows the other participant to reschedule as needed and auto-populates the meeting invitation with your meeting platform of choice.

I can also share one link with my house manager so she can see availability across all my calendars without needing access to every single calendar (particularly problematic if your work calendar has restrictions on sharing outside the organization).

Calendly and SimplyMeet are comparable but I prefer SimplyMeet as I can connect multiple calendars without a hitch or upgrading to premium.