Time is money. The right combination of strategies and tools can help to significantly increase productivity in your day-to-day work and save valuable time. We show you a selection of our favourite free tools and tips that we use in our daily work in online marketing. The ideas are universally applicable and can also be used in other areas of work and industries.
OPTIMISE YOUR PERSONAL HABITS AND SAVE TIME WITH THESE TOOLS
Before we move on to specific tips, it is worth taking a look at our personal working methods. One of the most basic strategies for working more efficiently is setting clear goals and establishing routines. Apps for developing new habits and tracking success, as well as time analysis tools, motivate you to first familiarise yourself with your own strengths and weaknesses and work consistently on personal goals.
Habit Builder: The app helps create habits you want to work on, track your progress, set reminders for yourself and build healthier and stronger (work) routines over time.
Habitica: An app that combines task management with gamification elements to increase motivation. For gaming fans and people who want to take a more relaxed and playful approach to habits.
Pomodoro Timer: A tracker that divides work into time blocks and takes regular breaks to increase concentration.
RescueTime: The time tracking tool analyses how you spend your time on the computer and helps you to recognise and change inefficient habits. (Attention: chargeable after trial period.)
HELPERS IN EVERYDAY WORK: LET TOOLS TAKE OVER YOUR ROUTINE TASKS
Tasks that don’t really require you to think in depth, but simply need to be completed, can be handled by these tools in future:
IFTTT„If This Then That“: The app links the most popular web applications with each other and automates processes. Connect your apps and smart devices and specify that a certain action, ‘if this’, results in another action, ‘then that’. Get creative yourself about which recurring tasks you would like to automate, or be inspired by suggestions on the tool’s website. Here are a few examples:
Automatically mute your mobile phone when you arrive at the office
Mark a Google email and automatically save it in a to-do list
Automatically use new X profile photo as Facebook profile photo
Automatically save Instagram photos to Dropbox
Receive SMS message when receiving emails from a specific sender
Automatically turn emails into Trello cards
Automatically post YouTube videos on your own Facebook page
Record in a spreadsheet how much time you spend in certain places such as the office or at home
Receive an email from todoist summarising the tasks you have completed in a week
Otter AI: This meeting assistant creates transcripts of meetings in real time, summarises what is said and automatically creates notes. Audio is recorded, slides are captured and action points are extracted. (In the free version, however, the number of meeting minutes is limited).
Grammarly: Do you often write texts in English? Save time by not having to proofread emails, blog posts and other articles in future. The writing assistant checks your spelling and punctuation and makes suggestions for optimising your writing style.
FAMILIARISATION WITH NEW TOPICS: NOT ONLY HELPFUL FOR CONTENT MARKETERS
Working efficiently also means being able to familiarise yourself quickly and comprehensively with new topics. The following tools can help you save valuable time, particularly in content marketing and text production:
PDF Drive: A website that offers access to hundreds of free ebooks on various topics. Perfect for in-depth research and knowledge building.
Littlerbooks: This site offers summaries of books, which is particularly helpful if you want to quickly grasp the core ideas of a book.
Glasp: A tool that allows you to highlight website content and save summaries in a note document. This is highly recommended for researching and collecting information on a specific topic.
Quillbot: This tool paraphrases texts and helps to avoid plagiarism. It’s not just students who appreciate this tool – it’s also a regular occurrence in everyday working life that texts need to be quickly paraphrased and put into your own words.
EXCURSUS: USING CHATGPT MORE EFFICIENTLY
ChatGPT can be a powerful tool that makes day-to-day work much easier. It is important to use the tool ‘correctly’. To avoid having to start from scratch with every enquiry, it is worth creating individual conversations for different topics that you can return to again and again. ChatGPT then already knows the general information on the topic. With regard to social media, for example, you can organise the preparation of posts more efficiently. Do you want your texts for LinkedIn to be a little more formal, while your language style on TikTok is more casual? No problem, simply use a separate conversation for each channel and save yourself the trouble of describing which communication style should be used, which hashtags you use regularly or which buzzwords should be used repeatedly for each enquiry.
The ULTIMATIVE CHATGPT PROMPT
The so-called ‘universal prompt’ is a real game changer when it comes to using ChatGPT. You have to tell ChatGPT that it is an expert in a certain subject area and make it your personal assistant, which virtually triggers the assistance to take on a life of its own. The prompt can be as follows:
You are an expert on {THEME}. Write me 10 detailed prompts for the AI text generator (ChatGPT) to generate high quality responses. The prompts must have a benefit for me. You should use the first person and explicitly tell the AI what to do, using phrases such as: ‘You are’, ‘You must’, ‘Tell me’, etc. The topic I want 10 detailed prompts on is {INSERT TOPIC}. The prompts you create should contain the variables inside {} so that I can insert more information for better results.
In our example, we make ChatGPT an expert in {content marketing} and ask for 10 prompts on the {efficient use of ChatGPT in everyday work}. ChatGPT’s answers are marked in blue.
We then receive 10 ideas with the corresponding prompts. The first three are:
Of course, here are ten detailed prompts for the AI text generator (ChatGPT) that focus on how to use ChatGPT efficiently in your day-to-day work:
Improve work time management: “You are an expert in time management. Explain to me how I can organise my working time better in order to work more efficiently. Use specific techniques and methods that will help me to better organise my tasks {specific tasks or activities} within {time period, e.g. a week}.”
Communicate effectively with colleagues: “You are a communication pro. Show me how I can use ChatGPT to improve communication with my colleagues. Give specific examples of {types of communication, e.g. email, Slack messages} and how I can make them clearer and more effective.”
Project planning and management: “You are a project manager. Explain how I can use ChatGPT to plan and manage my projects. Include tools and strategies that will help me to successfully complete {project type, e.g. software development, marketing campaign}.”
We play it through using the 1st prompt:
Example 1: Improve working time management:
We use the suggested prompt and receive the following response and suggestions on the subject of time management:
I am an expert in time management. Here are some specific techniques and methods that can help you to better organise your working time and complete your tasks more efficiently, especially if you want to organise {specific tasks or activities} within {time period, e.g. a week}:
Eisenhower matrix
Pomodoro technique
Time blocking
ABC method
Pareto principle
ChatGPT then provides a prompt including a response for each technique. Using the Eisenhower matrix as an example, the explanation is as follows:
Eisenhower matrix:
“ChatGPT, help me to use the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritise my tasks according to urgency and importance. Explain to me how I can organise my {specific tasks or activities} into the four quadrants of the matrix to work more efficiently during {time period}.”
Answer:
The Eisenhower matrix is a simple but powerful tool for prioritising tasks.Divide your tasks into four quadrants:
Important and urgent:Do it immediately.
Important, but not urgent:Plan and schedule time for this.
Urgent, but not important:Delegate if possible.
Neither important nor urgent:Omit or postpone until later.
Example:
Important and urgent: deadline for a project, important customer enquiries.
Important, but not urgent:long-term planning, further training.
Urgent, but not important:routine emails, phone calls.
Neither important nor urgent: unnecessary meetings.
Example 2: Automate routine tasks:
If we enter ChatGPT’s suggested prompt
“You are an automation expert. Explain to me how I can use ChatGPT to efficiently automate my routine tasks. Give specific examples of {specific routine tasks, e.g. data entry, scheduling} and how I can simplify them with AI.”
we receive three prompt suggestions including answers on the topic of process automation:
I am an automation expert. Here are some detailed explanations and concrete examples of how you can use ChatGPT to efficiently automate specific routine tasks:
Data input:
“ChatGPT, show me how I can automate my data entry processes. I need to regularly enter data from different sources into a spreadsheet. Create a sample script that extracts data from emails and enters it into an Excel spreadsheet.”
Answer:
You can use ChatGPT to generate a Python script that searches emails, extracts relevant data and inserts it into an Excel spreadsheet. For example:
Scheduling:
“ChatGPT, show me how I can automate my scheduling. I often need to coordinate meetings and add appointments to my calendar. Create an example of an automated system that processes meeting requests and enters them in my calendar.”
Answer:
You can use ChatGPT to create a script that automatically processes meeting requests and adds them to your calendar. Here is an example with Google Calendar API:
Task management:
“ChatGPT, show me how I can automate the management of my daily tasks. Create an example of how I can automate recurring tasks in a task management tool like Trello.”
Answer:
You can use ChatGPT to create a script that automatically creates recurring tasks in Trello. Here is an example using the Trello API:
These examples show that the universal prompt helps ChatGPT to help itself (and us) by showing us how to formulate specific requests. The highlight: ChatGPT formulates the prompts itself and we can sit back and relax.
Conclusion
Working efficiently is not rocket science, but the result of targeted strategies and the use of helpful tools. By using the apps and tips presented here, you can significantly increase your own productivity and save valuable time. It is worth integrating the tools into your daily work routine and continuously optimising your own working methods.