When you’re working as a business professional, your efficiency and productivity are typically as good as the tools you use. Fortunately, with the advent of mobile data, smart devices, and software, the amount of time you have to spend stuck in the office on mundane tasks can be shaved down to a bare minimum. We’ve assembled a list of the best time saving tools that also help you do more and stay organized. But why do we need a time saving tool in the first place?
Why You Need Time Saving Tools
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why bother using tools that other people have made when you can just do it yourself? We’ve all been there. A few of us who made our own tools even ended up releasing them in public as libraries or APIs. For most of us who did, however, it didn’t end up that well.
Self-made time saving tools that are outside the scope of your core features often lead to more headaches. Planning, developing, and maintaining tools aside from your main projects is difficult. It will also probably distract you. On the other hand, when you use time saving tools, you’ll get rid of these extra steps and worries, keeping you focused and productive. These are called “time saving tools” because, after all, they save us time.
You could also argue that time saving tools will cost you. Some of them might, and other open-source or free tools won’t. But you should also factor in time, particularly for development and maintenance. Do that, and you’ll start to see that these tools, paid or not, actually save money as well. Here are some reasons why:
- You won’t have to maintain anything other than your core features.
- You’ll have the features you’ll need right away.
- You’ll have someone (or a dedicated team or community) to turn to if you need any help.
- Each of these tools came from developers who are experts in their specific field.
- If these tools charge you, then you’ll know exactly what you’ll pay. The costs of development and maintenance are usually more difficult to track.
Time saving tools have now become essential for you to conquer productivity. This is true especially for tech-related businesses, which can directly rely on APIs and libraries to lighten their workload by a lot.
The 6 Best Time Saving Tools
Time saving tools can have widely different purposes, but all of them help businesses stay productive. For example, these tools can range from email platforms to instant messaging, project management, and APIs. Here’s a quick look at some excellent tools for saving time and boosting efficiency.
Communications
Twilio
When you need to push communications for your business, you can do it the easy way or the hard way, and Twilio is one of the best tools to make the process as easy as possible. It allows for easy integration of text, voice and video communications through an easy-to-use API with endless scalability. As a cloud-based service, it’s easily accessible for fast tweaks on the go while remaining fully featured from day one, allowing you access to all the communication tools you need to stay in touch with your client base.
Sendgrid
Need to get massive numbers of emails out to your customers to drive brand engagement for your company? Sendgrid manages that process for a wide range of companies, including some seriously digitized giants such as Pinterest, Hubspot, Walmart and Costco. Regardless of environment, Sendgrid’s API makes it easy to contact customers quickly across SMTP or HTTP with only a few minutes of setup time involved in the process. It deals well with ISP monitoring, SPF, feedback loops and domain keys.
Mailgun
If Sendgrid gets your emails sent, Mailgun makes sure the emails arrive or, if not, discovers why if at all possible. Though it’s easy to send emails, optimizing the delivery process to improve engagement is a very difficult process. Mailgun provides an isolated sub-account for every domain, allowing every customer to establish its own sending queue as well as its own reputation, while allowing clients to manage thousands of their own customers independently with a single account.
Search
Algolia
Need to improve search across the board? Algolia is focused on delivering a better, faster search for its customers with an incremental search for semi-structured data. Not only does it deliver solid results in under 100ms from virtually any location worldwide, it helps to improve the ever-important user experience, lowering your overall bounce rate and improving conversions by helping customers find what they need on your website.
OAuth
Oauth.io
OAuth integration can be a difficult process, but oauth.io makes the process go much more smoothly, promising integration times as low as 90 seconds. This makes it much easier to connect to other facets of your app, shortening your overall development time. It also allows you to incorporate other aspects that improve your app’s usability, such as social sign-in or sign-up. By allowing you to easily incorporate an OAuth 2.0 layer onto your existing API, you gain all the benefits without all the extra work.
Digital Content API
Filestack
If you don’t promote yourself, who will?
Rather than a single tool, Filestack provides an entire suite of solutions for your digital content API needs. By integrating all of these tools within a single setting, Filestack makes it much easier to process the content you need in a much shorter period of time, automating your overall workflow. It provides options for machine learning, upping your digitization game while lowering the amount of human interaction required for each task, such as finding the right picture to post.
There are numerous time saving tools that empower businesses to operate more efficiently, freeing up more time for decision makers to focus on their product. Please reach out if you have any questions or get started with a free, fully featured trial.
Filestack is a dynamic team dedicated to revolutionizing file uploads and management for web and mobile applications. Our user-friendly API seamlessly integrates with major cloud services, offering developers a reliable and efficient file handling experience.