09: The one about our most-used apps
Buckle up, team. We're sharing some of our favourite apps that we use the most in our businesses to help us get more shit done and make us look great. It includes social media scheduling, time tracking and fancy-ass autocorrect.
We also come up with some ideas for webinars, would you guys be interested??
Number of fucks givenin this episode: 21
Mentioned in this episode:
Adobe Creative Suite (for creative stuff AND documents)
Typinator (Mac only soz, but try Phase Express on Windows)
reMarkable 2 (not an app, but god we love it so much).
Episode transcript
Christine: Welcome to the Fuck Around and Find Out Podcast, where your hosts, Rah, Emily, and Christine. We're three women who are built and run our own businesses and are here to shoot the shit on everything about women in business and running your own business. So welcome to today's episode. Hey, Rah, how you doing?
Rah: Good. I am amazing. And right as we hit record, my cats just started a fight. So, there may be fur flying across. The joys of having a home studio, hey? But yes, apart from that, I am amazing. My name's Rah and I do digital marketing and systems for women in business. Hey. Em. You. Who are you? Now that, now that you know where that song's from.
Oh, you mean my CSI song? It's not just from [00:01:00] CSI. I know. I was listening to that episode just before. I listened to it and I was pissing myself laughing again.
Emily: I am from Juniper Road, which is the other half of, um, the lovely Chris, which I was just calling her my manager because I'm useless at doing some things that she's so good at.
And that's why we work together. So you're Karen? Yeah. In a nice way. Um, and we are operational support services. Uh, Shared Services, whichever floats your boat. We look after everything that a business might need, from finance to marketing to human resources. I cannot provide you a man that's six foot five with blue eyes in finance, but we can provide the services of a fucking fabulous GST registered bookkeeper or two.
Um, So that's us, and I'm going to stop because I don't think I'm doing this very well. Now, over to Chris. Who are you? You haven't
Rah: said one stop shop yet. Try really hard to not [00:02:00] say it. Oh, Soz, and now I'm mentioning it.
Christine: Yes, I think you've provided us beautifully, um, so I don't think I need to say anything much more.
So, but, um, maybe perhaps we, I can introduce our little topic today. Um, and, And ladies and, um, gentlemen and kids and pets who are listening, um, we, uh, gonna have a little bit of a chat about, um, our top, um, picks for tools. So if they're, you know, like web based or Um, cloud based or app based kind of thing, but tools for productivity and collaboration, marketing, that sort of thing.
Um, and just, you know, make some recommendations. Some of what we're going to obviously talk about is not going to be applicable to Every business, um, but you know, if they're good, they're good places to start and [00:03:00] what better place to get information is from people using them. So without further ado, Emily, what would be your number one Freebie marketing stool that you call, stool, oh my God, tool.
Stool. Okay. All right.
Emily: Let's take her to the studio places.
Christine: Yeah. That's right. And maybe it shouldn't be your top one. What are, what are your top picks for free?
Rah: Maybe your number, your number two tool.
Christine: Stop it. Stop, stop making my faux pas last longer than it
Emily: needs
Christine: to. It's not like we hadn't
Emily: rehearsed this before we started recording either.
It's the funniest part.
Christine: That's right. So yeah, uh, Em, uh, a top three tool for marketing from you, please.
Emily: Look, I'm all for having a toolbox, not a number two, but a tools of the trade. Yes. Um, I will caveat by saying, I'm roused to say we are both Mac Apple people, um, through and through. I am the [00:04:00] harder core Apple human being.
I have more devices than I probably ever should. Um, so everything I do, I use on my Mac. So that may or may not affect people's decisions and their choices for whether or not they want to use programs. Cause it's how they work on the operating system. Um, and as a person that does predominantly social media management, marketing, building websites, you know, running a business, that kind of stuff.
Aside from the like, organizational and productivity tools, which I know Chris will talk about, so I won't mention them yet. I live and breathe in Canva as my probably number one, um, tool. I can't find the words today. Um, Canva obviously is a free version and a paid version. There's two different versions you can have and you can get a lot out of, um, Canva.
Both, really, if you don't want to, though I do highly recommend people fork up and just pay it because it's not that expensive and you get so much more for it. Yeah. And it's super beneficial. [00:05:00] Um, would be Canva. I, I am a big, um, later. com social media scheduler. Yep. I love Later. Um, Later is a scheduling tool that allows you to schedule, um, social media platforms.
It does Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest. It is a paid tool, um, but I do like it because it gives you, it's very, very easy to use. It's drag and drop, very visual, and I'm a very visual human being. And it also lets you, um, have a preview for your Instagram feed, which is to me super important because I'm, wildly OCD about my feed.
Um, so that kind of helps. So I use that astronomically a lot. As well, and I sit, now I'm pulling a blank as to what would be my third one. I feel like I
Rah: do have a lot of these things, but that's okay. While you're stewing on the third, I'm going to jump in and say with later. com, um, the most beneficial thing for using or what's really worth the money investment on later.
com [00:06:00] is the link and buy a feature. Oh yeah, without a doubt. Everything else that tries to do that is a. Poor imitation.
Emily: Yeah, like it, it does it so beautifully. You can link, um, your current posts and it pops up. I think the Daily Telegraph and some of those big news outlets
Rah: use, heaps of them use them.
Pedestrian TV, Mamma Mia, like all those big newsy, um, Cheek Media, who's another, um, independent media. News, political outlet. Yeah, they all use it. And the
Emily: benefit of later is you can upload stuff on your phone on the fly. Like you download the app on your phone. So as you're taking photos, you can upload content immediately and quite easily for anyone.
You can allow different users to have it. I mean, it all costs, but at a, at a minimum for a client to have three profiles on there with just one person accessing it, it's like no more than 30 a month.
Christine: Yeah.
Emily: And that to me is like, it's beneficial if you've, if social media is a really heavy part of your business.
Yeah. Yeah. And we offer social media as obviously a service as does, [00:07:00] um, as do you Rob, but for us, you know, we ended up convincing one of our clients recently to come onto it because the time it took me to then. schedule for Facebook and Instagram through Meta and then basically repeat scheduling through LinkedIn.
It took me a quarter of that time through later because I could, instead of having to go to two different places to schedule the same content across,
Rah: it was
Emily: all in the one place.
Rah: Yep.
Emily: And once you, if you're just happy to like replicate it onto each platform, you can then. Copy, post, and then flick it through to the next platform.
So you don't have to then sit there and redo it. And it's just so much easier to kind of, to do it that way. But there are other platforms that do a similar thing, which I know you introduced me to one recently that was free version, right? Which is that social champ.
Rah: SocialChamp. Yeah. The thing that I like about SocialChamp is that it's got a free plan that lets you connect up to three profiles, but the more hardcore features, if you're willing to pay for it, that I love is you can add [00:08:00] multiples of multiple accounts from the same platform.
So you could have two Instagram accounts. Um, you can have, um, Um, multiple Google business profiles, that kind of thing. But also it's one of the few schedulers that has a decent price that can do LinkedIn carousels. So the difference with, so obviously people are used to seeing carousels on Instagram, which is like a post with multiple pictures and you scroll and you get to see them.
You can only do that on LinkedIn by. Turning those images into PDF and you upload the PDF as a document and a majority, and fair enough, of platforms, uh, scheduling platforms can't do PDFs, but for Social Champ, they can. Do have that. I was about to say they do do that. And then I was gonna laugh at saying do do
Emily: Well that's good to know. 'cause later doesn't, yeah, it doesn't let you carousel schedule for LinkedIn, you have to do one post at a time,
Rah: which is fine, like, which for a lot of people is more than enough. But if you wanted to get fancy and do [00:09:00] your document format. To have the PDF that allows people to flick through, um, like a carousel.
Yeah. Which for some of my clients, that's a deal breaker. Like they were going to go with later, but then I ran through what their needs were. And then they realized, Oh, actually as much as we would love to use later, it's not going to be the right thing. I mean,
Emily: there's so many socials, get media scheduling tools.
Rah: That whole one size doesn't fit all what works for some people. There's so
Emily: many tools out there. I'm used to quite a few others in my time, but I think there's some stuff that are better for different sized organizations. But I use Hootsuite for a client. I've used Skinsocial for a client. It also comes down to what they need in terms of reporting tools
Rah: as
Emily: well.
So if they want Like Scansocial, for example, has very extensive reporting abilities, as does Hootsuite, for what I've seen. Um, so Hootsuite will even allow you to benchmark yourself on, on the industry. That's really handy. Yeah. So depending on how deep you want to go into analytics, you can do quite a bit with them.
Um, there's a lot of different tools out there cause there's also, um, [00:10:00] and there's also Hubspot and there's also, um, there's Buffer. Is that Buffer's one, right? Yep. Two.
Rah: Buffer.
Emily: There's a whole bunch.
Rah: I always refer to that one as Bugger. Because I always type it wrong.
Emily: That's fair. Um, so this all comes down to what you need in terms of reporting and
Christine: functionality, I guess, really.
And I suppose, really, if you're wanting to, you know, if you're starting off small, free, anything you can get your hands on for free. And if they also have a paid version, which most free things do have paid versions. Um, and you know, you can test it all out and, and then go, yeah, this is working for me and for a cup, the cost of a cup of coffee a week, I can have the paid version of this, you know, of later, for example, um, and it's going to be awesome because it's going to save me a shit ton of time.
Um, when I'm posting across or scheduling across multiple platforms.
Emily: Yeah. And that's the, that's the, I [00:11:00] mean, the thing that people forget when you do engage an outsourced person to come in and do the work is we do have tools of the trade and that stuff does come at a cost. And yeah, there are things that you need to factor in when you're engaging someone that might be part of their rates for one, but it's also something that you factor in for your own.
So as a service offering or business is. Your own tools of the trade, you know, that comes, there are things you need to spend the money on and it's important to spend money on to help your operational efficiencies because You cannot quantify the amount of time that you will save.
Rah: Yep.
Emily: To be honest, I don't really have a third one that, like, I think my, that's the other one I live in all day every day is Slack because that's how we run and manage our team.
Yeah. But.
Rah: I love Slack. You
Emily: know, from a, from an actual operation, well, like my actual work work that I do, I sit in scheduling tools and I sit in Canva. And I will occasionally use the Adobe Suite to design, and that's kind of the main pieces that I sit in all day every day from actual doing the, doing the dirty work kind of piece.
But, [00:12:00] yeah, if you're anyone else, I'm sure you've got some different ones to me though, because you, your suite and skill set's different to mine.
Rah: Yeah, so in terms of my one, so obviously, yeah, I use Canva a lot. Um, and it's great because a lot of my clients use it as well. So it's just an easy way to share resources, you know, in that way, like have our individual teams and that kind of thing.
Yeah. That's the word collaborate. Um, but I am a big Adobe user. Um, I tried going without Adobe and I lasted about three days. Um, I primarily use, um, Photoshop. I do a bit of Illustrator and InDesign as well. So that's. you know, for fancy illustrations, but, um, InDesign is for like publications, like magazines, like traditional printed magazines, usually using InDesign to lay out their magazines every month.
So that's something that I've used as well to create eBooks and things like that. But I also use, um, Premiere, which is a video editor. [00:13:00] So sometimes for video content, I find that's the best tool when I'm creating social content. And then, so Audition is one that I use for audio editing. So I do. Our podcast editing on there and I do some client podcast editing on there as well.
But then in the same vein as that, another app that I use pretty much on the daily is called D Script. So DE script. And I use that for transcribing, but it's an audio and video editor. So I do podcast editing and video editing, um, in there. But it's got a really great transcription option. Um, people who use, what's the name of the transcriber?
Otter. Otter. Yep. Everyone loves Otter. And then so many people I know have moved from using Otter to using Descript, even though it's a video and audio editor, because its transcription is actually a lot better.
Christine: Well, and that's good because, you know, sometimes, um, you know, in through our client work and, you know, we've needed to pull the [00:14:00] transcription from.
A video of a guest. So we've got somebody who does a lot of guest speaking, keynote speaking. So it doesn't naturally come, you know, podcasts come with transcriptions, but it, but a video of a keynote talk doesn't. And we've often, um, or I've often had to pull the transcription from that because obviously, From that comes all the social media, the blog posts that we build from it, um, and finding a good tool to do that.
And I've tried a few different versions, but often, you know, if I've got the, yeah, I've got the video going and not everything will pick up all of the sound. Um, so it's really good in that respect to find, you know, different tools that are better than what has been used, especially with that video to transcription
Rah: need.
The best way to explain DS script as a, as a app compared to other apps that can do [00:15:00] the same thing?
Christine: Yeah.
Rah: You can edit your audio or video like it's a Google document. So you look at the the script. Yep. And if you don't like that word, you delete it from the script and it deletes it from the recording or from the output.
It doesn't delete it from the source file, so you never actually lose it. Yeah. If we wanted to remove every instance of fuck in our podcast, all I have to do is find the word fuck and delete. Wow. And just do a delete. And that's how. That's, you know, a really easy way of editing.
Christine: Let's not do that. No, we need to keep all the fucks in.
But it's an awesome, awesome example of the, of the ability. I love a good fuckity fuck. We got to keep the fucks in. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I know. I don't think we've said enough fucks tonight actually. No. Fuck. We've been very tame. We have not. Yes, we have. Well, I mean, you know, we're, we're being serious business.
Rah: Yes. That's right. We're serious. We're, we're, we're women in podcasting now.
Emily: Yes. That's right. We're also people that run our own businesses that are more professional than we'd like to come across sometimes.
Rah: Sometimes, sometimes we hold on to our P's and Q's and our fucks.
Emily: Hmm. Exactly. [00:16:00] Hmm.
Rah: So my final app favorite, I use it a lot for my social media, um, but I use it in absolutely everything that I do.
So it sort of moves into a more operational type app as well. The one that I use, it's called Hypernator. So it's like the Terminator, but for typing. It's basically Autocorrect on speed. There's lots of other versions. The reason I like this is that it's not on a subscription model. A lot of these apps you have to pay by the month.
Yep. Because that's how they keep their money coming. Oh,
Christine: exactly.
Rah: Yeah. But this is one of the rare ones and this is why I picked it is that it's, you just pay once. You might pay every couple of years when they do a big upgrade. But the reason it's coming up in my marketing toolkit is because for every one of my clients that I do social media for.
I have keyboard shortcuts for common hashtags that I use in their posts, the URLs when I'm doing a post that says, this is the link, the email address. So if we're putting an email address or a phone number in their social media posts as well, [00:17:00] anything that you have to type and or go back and think about it or grab it and copy and paste it in to make sure it's not incorrect.
I put it into my typeinator and I just have my keyboard shortcut. And so I can churn out the business name, calls to action. Like I have so many. So wait, I'm trying to get my
Emily: head around what it is. So it's basically a way to create shortcuts for a magnitude of different things. Correct.
Rah: So like the, you know, traditional version of autocorrect, if you type ADN and word will change it to end because it knows that that's what you're making.
With these specialist apps, you create sort of past phrases. So it's a bit like people, um, on iPhones, you can have your text replacement.
Emily: Oh yeah. I definitely changed it. So every time I wrote the word duck, I did
Rah: not mean duck. I meant fuck. Correct. It actually will say fuck. So it's like that, but it will work with these proper, you know, third party apps.
It will work on absolutely everything on your computer. So, you know, I've got some, my key phrase always starts with an, with a semi colon.
Christine: Yeah.
Rah: And then it will have a key phrase. And because I'm so anal, like this is why [00:18:00] you and I, Chris, get along so well. So if, if it's a URL, I will have semicolon URL. If it's for me, it's rah.
If it's for fuck around and find out it's F A F O. So that way I can just easily remember in my filing cabinet brain of what do I need to type out? Oh, what's this? I love them. And then for a particular client, like I will have Allie. I will have chat. I will have Funeral, you know, whatever the client is, I will have something that that will make it unique.
And, you know, even if I'm working within Canva, some parts where you go to pick the color picker, you can't pick your branding colors based on your brand kit that's in Canva and you have to go back and copy and paste that. Whereas I just do two hashtags. and type whatever brand it is and it will bring up that hero color for me that I want to use.
That's clever. I am, I get so bored. Like my brain just can't cope with that repetitive stuff. And so do I. Did it
Emily: take you long to set all that up? Because I feel like that the idea of setting all that all up is going to be like also triggered by ADHD.
Rah: [00:19:00] Yeah, it can take time. I mean, I've been lucky because I've been using, um, a competitor to Typeinator.
Um, I was using that for about eight years and then switched over to Typenator when I started working for myself. Um, so TextExpander is the one that I originally used, which is great with a team because then everybody has the same shortcuts.
Christine: So
Rah: you can easily go, this is how old I am. We updated the fax number for my old business that I worked for.
So, I updated the text replacement and it would just tell everybody type in fax and it will put in the new fax number. That kind of
Emily: thing. I feel like it's good to start from like the ground up. Oh, yeah.
Christine: I'm, I'm, I'm feeling a real need to have a little bit of show and tell, you know, because this is fascinating, fascinating stuff.
I don't use, you know, that kind of tool, but I'm kind of like while you were talking going, Oh my God.
Rah: And even if you started slow with it. Hashtags, if you're using hashtags in a social media post, if you always put the same thing at the bottom, almost like I first learned about text replacement when people had custom email signatures [00:20:00] in Outlook back in the day.
Christine: But
Rah: all, all that was actually different. They kept the email signature the same, but they just changed what the message was about
Christine: so that they didn't
Rah: have to retype it. And it's just the evolution of that.
Christine: I remember back in the day that, you know, you're, so you could create multiple e signatures in Outlook that were, you know, Oh, and I could name it, Oh, well, this is the response to this inquiry.
And this is the response to that. to that, and you just popped it in and it will just populate everything. You just changed the two, you know, dear John Smith kind of thing. Um, so, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking about some stuff I do repetitively for you for a client. So yes, I think that I can, I can see a bit of a look see coming.
Coming up for my sales. Yeah.
Rah: Yeah. For like one example, in terms of business, I have my ABN as a tax replacement. So I just go semicolon ABN and it puts it in there for me. My tax file number, my bank account details. So if someone's messaging me, you know, pay you back for this. And I just go account details.
Oh my God. Yeah. [00:21:00] Okay, cool. I will give
Christine: you a driving lesson. I do like a little bit of a driving lesson. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm getting a little bit highly excited and motivated. Maybe,
Rah: maybe we need to run a webinar. Maybe that's a great idea. Maybe. Oh, let's move into fuck around webinars. The masterclass is online.
Yes. You're exciting. See, I'm so sorry. I get a bit excited, as you can tell, about tax replacement, but it is.
Christine: No, well. Such a.
Rah: It's something that seems small, but then you start to realize it could be quite huge and could be a pain to set up, but if you set up in a way that suits you.
Christine: And put it this way, I know everything takes time to set up.
If you want it to be productive, save you time in the long run, you have to invest the time to begin with. And it'd be far better to do it properly. For one, rather than having to type the same thing hundreds of, hundreds of times over the course of a year or a month or whatever it is you're, you know, creating.
I'll, I'll, yeah. No.
Rah: I get an email report every month that tells me how much time I've [00:22:00] saved, which I'm sure is a number pulled out of there, out of the air, but basically it tells you how many times you've used a shortcut. Okay. And it would at least be two to three hours each month. And that's just on typing.
And you just think, holy shit. And that's assuming you were typing it correctly. The number of times you would type it and get it wrong and have to fix it or make an apology because you sent something out that had a mistake in it. Cause you had the URL wrong and then the post didn't work. You know, that kind of stuff, the stuff that
Christine: gives us
Rah: the
Christine: heebie
Rah: jeebies.
It just removes all of that.
Christine: No,
Rah: that's a lie
Christine: scheme. I don't know. That's a great talk.
Rah: Yeah. So Chris, I've started talking about an operational app. So how about we move on to what you. Well,
Christine: I've, I've got two that I live in and one is, is, um, the other side of Adobe. So, you know, you, you talk about Adobe and Photoshop and all of this stuff for your social media and, you know, and the marketing and editing and everything.
But for me, um, live in Adobe because I'm all about. [00:23:00] Um, e signatures, fillable forms and pre filling. So I've got a client that, um, I live in, um, their Adobe every time I'm doing their work because We need a signatures and, um, and in and, um, and by the nature of here, um, their industry, um, which is in the financial industry, um, things have to come with audit reports.
Um, so no longer you know, wet signatures are required in some instances and wet signature means just put your pen to the paper, um, but Adobe for electronic signatures and audit reports. Um, so very important, um, very important tool, especially in this industry, but I just love it. Can go in and just, I can just, it's not about, you know, he's talk about manipulating PDFs or something like that.
And it's not manipulating them in a negative, naughty, you know, [00:24:00] underhand way, it's just because, you know, back in the old day, you know, you'd convert them to word, then you'd need to go and do certain things. And, and so, you know, it's really important again, productivity about moving fast. So Adobe works for me.
Um, I have to say another tool that, um, I use and absolutely love. Um, and it's a free, a free tool is, um, Clockify. Um, it's not just about timing to see how much time I spend in working on our bids or in our bids and timing myself. If I've got a client who, you know, is on some kind of hourly kind of like package.
But what I love the reports feature of, um, of Clockify and the fact that you can create a client, create a project and create tags for it. So, you know, if we need to, um, and I can convert them into Excel [00:25:00] documents so I can sort them and by, you know, time and months and, and tags, but, um, got a client that, um, I needed to tell her how much time I did.
On a particular one of her projects, that particular piece helps her, um, helps inform her about how much time overall is spent on this client, which is her project. And of course, when she wants to come time to maybe, you know, looking at how much she charges.
Rah: Yeah.
Christine: Um. Um. For this client, the work that, um, she will do for a client.
And I love the fact that I can go through and I can say, yes, I've got, um, six projects built into Clockify for her. And I can go and split, I can give her a, A total for the month. I can give her it broken down. I can remove something and, and give her finite information. And I love the reporting feature.
[00:26:00] That's so cool. Um, in Clockify, not just for the business, but for the clients that I service. Because, you know, everything that a client It does. It needs to be on costed somewhere. So, you know, they need to know how much work and what kind of work I'm doing. It goes far beyond going, Christine, did you do the, what I asked you and what I paid you for?
It's way beyond that. It's just about productivity and helping them. They know the cost of their business, therefore they can price themselves properly out to their market. And, um, yeah, and I, and I just absolutely love Clockify for that.
Rah: Yeah, I hadn't, I hadn't heard of Clockify until you guys mentioned that that's what you use.
Um, because Toggle is, you know, a really popular one.
Christine: Oh, Toggle's, Toggle is really awesome. And there's some good ones. Like, I remember when I started in the game, my hours was one, um, that you could do [00:27:00] as well. But Toggle's another, um, equally, um, popular. There's also software
Emily: that has it built in, like CRMs and built in timekeeping,
Rah: you
Emily: know, we'll talk about this probably another time, but we use, um, ClickUp a lot and ClickUp does have a timekeeping feature in it.
So if you're using that, you can get people to track through the project management software. And then also, you know, both Chris and I, and Rah, I think we all, At one point, Chris and I used to use Rounded.
Rah: Yep. And I'm still a Rounded user. Yeah.
Emily: Yeah. Which is, for those that don't know, an accounting software, a really good one for small businesses.
Really, really good if you don't want to pay a zero subscription. Yeah. So, um, really good. But you can do that through Rounded. It's got the timer in that then. Yeah. Yeah. Which is perfect for invoicing because it's like automatically done. Yeah.
Christine: Yeah. A absolutely. But yeah, I find that, yeah, that's, um, something, I mean, very, obviously I'm in it every time.
I mean, I'm not timing myself, you know, for doing podcasting, but I, you know, like if we do, you know, client meetings, it's good idea to [00:28:00] keep a record, uh, because of, you know, just, you know, because we wanna know, we wanna know the stats and everything. Yeah. 'cause as we, yeah. We all know that small business is not a 38 hour week, you know.
Rah: No. And even over time with those reports, I imagine they're quite powerful because then you'll be able to say, Mrs. Kafoops has called me in for these meetings this many times, and it took up this amount of time. That's where your money's going. So if you're penny pinching, Call less meetings and be more organized or something like that.
There's ways that you can use that data to your strength. Yeah, definitely. We've got clients
Emily: who blow monumental amounts of hours in meetings that are just unnecessary.
Rah: Yeah. And it's fine if that's what they need to feel like they're moving forward with their business or whatever, but financially you just think, Oh God, we could save you so much money.
Emily: you know, Clockify 2, which I'm sure Chris has just mentioned, is the, is the reporting functionality as well, because it actually gives you pie charts. Oh, I love a pie chart. And you can quantify it in graphical form, which is really nice, because it's, I think that catches people's attention more than just numbers on a [00:29:00] page.
So it does give you a beautiful, um, level of detail when it comes, and reports that you can export to then send to each client. Yeah. Which is why we've kind of stuck with it for our, you know, Um, for business purposes, which is really good.
Christine: Yeah. And, and it started purely as for our business purposes, but it then became like, it's like, Oh, I could help you client number, you know, two, because I could give you this information.
And, and that's absolutely. Um, fantastic. And I know that this client that, um, it helps her inform, you know, charging, you know, she said, I don't expect you to have this information, but if I know you, you will be able to get that. And it's like, oh, baby, I can, I can give that information because it's, it's there, you know, the generator, it's, it's, it's, you set it up.
As long as you're setting up the projects, you're setting up the tags and doing all of that. Correctly at the start and make sure that you use them. Then it's just, just a really, really awesome. Awesome tool. And I think that's the thing, like, [00:30:00] we can all get very excited about flashy stuff or new tools of the trade because somebody all spruiks it and talks really positively about it.
But if you don't set things up, if you don't take the time to understand the functionality and the capability, um, and then what is required to set it up in the first place.
Rah: Get in the weeds and understand it and set it up and play with it, fuck around and find out.
Christine: Fuck around and find out.
Rah: Absolutely.
Yes. But then if your efficiency can go up and also your client satisfaction, cause if you're able to say, here's my report on my time. Absolutely.
Christine: Yeah. Like, I've had
Rah: a client who, um, I was sending my timesheets to, even though she said she didn't need them because she said she trusted me, which is lovely, but I still sent them.
And then over time she was like, Oh, well, if it takes you this long to do this, how about you just quickly show it to me and then I can do it. I was like, yeah, sure. No problem. Cause I was still going to get paid, but I would just get to do other [00:31:00] work, you know, and then, you know, cause I'd refined the process enough that I could just do it.
Train her and then she can take it back. And then I can do the stuff that she cannot do. And even, um, a friend of mine, she's really savvy. So she has lots of project work, but what she has been doing, um, she's been experimenting over the last few months, or maybe most of this year, where she's using the time tracker even for her project work.
So that she knows where that's all going. And so now she's getting to the end of a project and realizing just how much she is undercharging.
Emily: Exactly. And it blew my mind. We've, we've had that as well, especially with project based work, like website builds and the stuff that goes into, to that. And we've kind of gone, oh, fuck, like we've, we've had a lot more meetings, a lot more time, just that we haven't factored into the package that we, we've tried to, but it's been more than what we originally factored in.
Christine: And so, you know, it's about, okay, well, it doesn't help us with the now, but [00:32:00] oh, the next step. We know that it took us, you know, five more hours longer and nobody wants to work for free. So, um And this is why
Emily: I need
Christine: Chris, because I'm
Emily: terrible at this stuff. I'm terrible at time tracking because I just plot on long Chris, can I
Rah: adopt you?
Because I'm terrible at it
Emily: too. Yeah. I'm so bad at it. But Chris is always like, put in your unbillable time or she'll do it for me. So we can keep, which is, I mean, it's very, I do understand it's very important to kind of capture the unbillable costs behind things as well, or Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and stop just pulling a general estimate, which is what I spend a lot of my life doing.
Rah: Yeah, with the ATO now, they're starting to require more detail as to when you're actually working.
Christine: Yeah. Whether it's at
Rah: home or otherwise. I forget all the actual details, but they're like You know, basically it's like a log book, but for you working in your own business. Yeah, well, that's, that's
Christine: right. Oh, I mean, there's, there's lots of other, um, yeah, wonderful, um, tools in my toolbox.
And I know that'll be, you know, and you guys have that as well. So it'd be nice for, uh, [00:33:00] for, um, you know, another conversation, um,
Rah: for,
Christine: uh, For next time really, unless you've got some sneaky, cheeky, awesome thing you just need to declare right now. I've got too many to go through. I know, but sometimes just the um, the really old fashioned stuff.
There is nothing wrong with this, with the Merriam Webster Dictionary online. I'm an online thesaurus user. I love to find a synonym for a lot of different words. Yeah. When you're writing, so, you know, you take it from chat GPT or Gemini, which we'll talk about in another episode, but you know, you take that and you still need to put it into, you know, your words, you need to take it and put it into English, you know, Australian English sometimes, and, or the one word is repeated too many times, whatever the topic is, and you need to actually not have.
Um, You know, the word juniper, I mean, not that we want to not have the word juniper, but say we want to find some word for [00:34:00] juniper because it's in there 53 times. So sometimes we do need to talk about the berry that makes gin, but we need to find that information out. So. And it's also too,
Emily: like, I know one of my big tools that I use constantly that isn't a software tool is, you know, my Remarkable.
Oh, we need a whole episode dedicated to your Remarkable obsessions. Oh my. Both Chris and I have a remarkable, and that's a massive tool of our trade because it's, we live and breathe by this beautiful digital, it's a digital tool. Yep. Like it's a note, like it's a digital notebook, but it's, it's not physically on the computer even though the app is on the computer.
So it's a bit, different, but it's a physical thing and it's a big thing. Maybe that could be a webinar
Rah: too. Ooh. webinar about the remarkable. I'm like, yeah, how many tags you can create. And then I can put up my iPad and talk about how I broke away from my remarkable and went back to iPad note taking.
That's right.
Christine: You can
Rah: little rebel that. I am. There was like a week where all three of us used a remarkable, it was very exciting
Emily: just for that one week . [00:35:00] I mean, I'm all for a good iPad 'cause I do love me some Apple and I need to use my iPad a bit better.
Rah: Yeah. The, the, um, iPad is nothing compared to the Remarkable.
The Remarkable writing is, it's pretty amazing. Beautiful. Yeah. It certainly
Christine: is. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's it for today's episode. No, having a little bit of a chat around about some, um, Um, tools around productivity, touched a little bit on collaboration, but mostly, you know, spoke about marketing and was pretty good share.
Rah: Yeah. And if anyone's got any apps that they're desperate to tell us about, competitors to the ones that we've been talking about that are amazing. We want to learn about them.
Christine: Oh my God, absolutely. Every time
Emily: Rara and I catch up in person, she's always like, Oh, I've tried this new plugin. Like, yeah, you know, I learned so much.
I, Oh my God, let's
Rah: do an episode on Chrome extensions and plugins. Yeah, we should. Cause there's so many good ones.
Emily: And Lovergood. So
Rah: if anyone's got any, share it.
Christine: Please absolutely share to us. I literally, I
Rah: literally in, so I use Asana for my [00:36:00] task management and project management, and I literally have an entire project dedicated to all the apps that other people tell me about so that I can find them down the track.
Cause there are so many good ones.
Christine: We need to know more so we can keep adding to the Asana board.
Rah: Excellent. And so. If you haven't already found it in our show notes, we now have a link that says text us and that will give you a special link to, um, send us a text message. It opens up in your messaging app.
Be sure to send us a message and tell us about your apps that you use cause we want to learn about them.
Christine: She's technology, technology is awesome. I know. What a time to be alive. Oh my god, yes. Absolutely. We've been
Emily: talking a lot, Rah. Rah and I have been talking about if we ever got good at computer coding and all that stuff or teed up with the right person, we could create a software that would, you know, be a unicorn amongst all the things that we need.
That's, that's the beehag.
Rah: One day. Yeah. Well, as always, amazing to talk to you two.
Christine: Absolutely. So, I [00:37:00] think we should say hurrah. Hurrah. Farewell. Adieu. Hurrah.
Rah: Adieu. Hurrah. Hurrah. I'm off to have a gin. Good night. Um, insert the theme song.
