Using Old Tools More Efficiently
So this past week one of my main focuses has been on going back and using some of the tools that already have more effectively.
This has been doing part of the fact that I have injured my hands. I have some sort of repetitive strain injury which makes typing pretty painful after more than say an email’s worth of typing.
Seeing as usually I’ll write a few thousand words a day, this is entirely expected. It’s also a pain because my workday has been altered.
I wrote about this on Twitter to kind of excuse my bad behaviour. I expected to lose productivity over the week because I can’t type.
However, a lot of people contacted me and said I should try out a text to speech software.
Now, I have tried text to speech in the past. I never really enjoyed it because I was using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I found that I spent as much time editing as I did writing.
But I thought I’d give it a go because I had no other choice. I got an upgraded version of Dragon, and to be honest it’s a lot more accurate than the old version I had.
This made me think about some of the other tools I had in the arsenal and so I set about going through what I had and using it more effectively.
Online Business
I don’t know about you guys but very few people use all the tools they have at their disposal to the greatest efficiency.
This can be anything from free tools that are available to everyone, like installing a Facebook pixel or setting up Google analytics so you can work out where your traffic comes from and who your traffic are, all through to expensive subscription programs and other tools.
For instance; I’ve been looking at buying a scheduling tool for social media. I am not a big fan of social media, and while some slowly getting the hang of it, I’d much prefer if I could schedule things so that I don’t have to rely on moments of creativity happening when I’m at the computer.
So I logged in this morning to my twitter account and I saw this:
This is a program that I bought many months ago called Missinglettr. At the time it was a one-time fee, but that seems to be not the case any longer where it is a monthly subscription. Anyway, Missingletter is a social media scheduling program which take your articles and syndicates them automatically to your social media profiles. (Maybe I’ll write a full review of this at some point.)
I never liked it because it is pretty ugly and at the time I bought it you couldn’t control the words and pictures that it sent out. So it looked like the jumbled mess above.
But when I went online earlier, I saw that the tool was completely updated and now you can schedule tweets, add more profiles and most importantly, you have control over what is actually being treated out.
This means that I don’t have to buy anything new and so I am happy.
Why Am I Telling You All This?
There is a tendency to think that you need constantly better equipment as you progress in any. I certainly feel for it. It’s always, “I need more expensive tool. I need more expensive hosting. Oh, and I need to make everything more complex. And better systems.”
If your skills and your knowledge are improving, then you can in most instances make more of what you have. For instance, somebody like Steven Spielberg could make a better movie with his mobile phone now then he probably could with all the equipment he had when he first started as a movie producer and director.
And he certainly could produce a better movie with his mobile phone than I could with all the equipment in the world.
So really this article is just a public service announcement to say that every so often you should go back and see what you have at your disposal that you could be using more efficiently. Chances are if you read this website then you are on the right path, you are improving your life and you are getting better things.
If that is the case, then there is no reason that you should not go back and improve stuff for very little cost or effort.