6 Productivity Apps for the Entrepreneur on the Go With entrepreneurs expected to be 'on' all the time, here are six apps to boost your productivity when you are out of the office.
By Clément Delangue Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
As an entrepreneur, you probably spend most of your days jumping from a team meeting to an investor pitch and swinging by a startup conference to give a talk in the middle. This means that a lot of your time is spent on the go without the ability to open your oh-so-precious laptop and get work done.
Have no fear. There has been an emergence of mobile apps enabling you to be productive, no matter where you are.
As the CMO of a startup, I have found myself using these six apps to stay on task all day, every day.
1. Sunrise to manage your day. A day on the go usually means wasting some time due to bad planning or a lack of preparation. Sunrise is the perfect tool for aggregating all of your must-have information into its sleek calendar interface for easy access. Features like your meetings, LinkedIn profile of the people you're about to see, as well as the places where you're heading, drastically reducing the amount of time you waste.
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2. LinkedIn to get your networking right. Just out of an important meeting? Why not add the guy to your LinkedIn network. Following up by email is better, but who has the time to do it for every meeting? By adding them on LinkedIn, you keep them in your network.
Checking their background -- preferably before the meeting -- is also a great way to figure out if there's any intro or further connections that would make sense.
3. Feedly to read all of your daily news content. Sure, there are tons of articles worth reading every day. But let's face it, it's often a pain once you realize how split up your time has become trying to read them all. By putting them directly into feedly, and keeping them to read in your "off" time, your productivity will skyrocket.
Related: Procrastinators: How to Fight Your Genes and Get Stuff Done Now
4. Intercom to answer your important support tickets. Keeping in touch with your clients doesn't just mean meeting up with some of them from time to time anymore.
With powerful real-time CRMs like Intercom becoming the standard for most startups in the know, you can keep in touch, no matter where you are. So why not spend some of your time waiting for your Uber by closing some support ticket from their mobile app? In addition to keeping you in touch with your customers, the pain of writing long sentences on mobile will force you to draft short and to-the-point answers - the ones that rock!
5. Mention to manage your online presence. You being on the go doesn't mean your users or followers don't keep talking about you. This is unfortunately the time when the bad buzz can happen. By having your alerts set up with notifications in place, you'll be sure to never miss a thing online. And with the release of mention's offline mode, it works even when you're in the subway.
6. Google Drive to brainstorm your next move. Just because you're on the go doesn't mean you should use crappy note-taking apps. As your time outside of the office is often considered some of the most creative and fruitful, organize your thoughts on Google Drive's powerful app. With their offline mode, you can even find existing collaborative docs to edit them. With some luck, the rest of your team will already have a perfect action plan based on your notes once you're back in the office.
