Many years ago, I created a post that went viral. It was called “The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your Life: 50+ templates, tools and apps to help you rock at life.” Much of that post was about business workflow optimization and it helped a lot of people. When we recently redesigned the site, we found out people were still looking for it even a decade later.
Since it’s been so long and the world has changed so much (Hello AI!), we figured it was time to do an updated version. When creating this updated version, I realized that it was basically a list of our tech stack that helps us run our business and our life. This workflow optimization tool kit includes AI productivity tools, project management software and more.
Why talk about business workflow optimization?
We are obsessed with business workflow optimization and efficiency not just for ourselves, but also for our clients. One thing we’ve noticed with our six and seven figure clients is the amount of chaos they have going on behind the scenes.
This chaos is a result of not having infrastructure, not having data and not having any actual processes – which means they can’t focus on business workflow optimization to get better results faster.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live and work in chaos.
We’re very streamlined and efficient around these parts – in fact it’s what sets us apart from most businesses and most people – and these are the tools that help us do it.
Why business workflow optimization matters to us:
Efficiency is one of our core values and here are a few reasons why:
- When you’re efficient you can get more done in less time. This means you can spend more time with your loved ones, travel a lot like we do or just focus on the stuff that actually matters to you.
- When you’re efficient – especially through the use of technology – you can slash your overhead expenses and automatically increase profits without having to sell more.
- When you’re efficient, you make your life easier for your team.
- When you’re efficient, you can track the data in your business and actually know what is working so you can make sales easier.
In other words, efficiency and workflow optimization help you make more money while working less and with far less stress. Workflow optimization can also give you back your most valuable asset – your time. From there, you can do whatever you wish with the extra time.
Our Best Business Workflow Optimization Tools
Below you’ll find a list of our best business workflow optimization tools. In other words, it’s our tech stack.
These tools allow us to run a multiple six-figure business while traveling and living overseas full-time. It also allows us to work on average six hours a day four days a week.
Notion
Notion is one of my favorite tools for not just business workflow optimization, but also organizing most of my life. It truly is like a second brain in a lot of ways. While we don’t use it for project management, we do use it for just about everything else including:
- A debt repayment tracker
- A goal tracker
- Our content marketing calendar
- A database of every sales script we use which we can now share with clients
- Manifesting lists
- Digital journals
- House management database
- Finances
- Just about anything you can think of….
I’ve done quite a few videos on the different ways you can use Notion which you can find below:
Free Notion Content Calendar and Walkthrough
ClickUp
Clickup is my new favorite tool for project management in the business and has made workflow optimization so much easier. It’s as if all the former project management tools like Trello and Asana had a baby.
We use this for tracking tasks in the four big areas of the business:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Operations
- Finance
One of my favorite things about ClickUp is that it’s visually appealing and it has reports where you can see where you are with tasks. It makes my productivity heart sing.
Geru
Geru is a tool I recently discovered and fell in love with for business workflow optimization. We use it to map out all the funnels in our business and set performance projections based on the data that we have.
It makes optimizing, planning and forecasting much easier.
In addition, you can use it to visually map out any sort of workflow or process.
Focus@Will
I used Focus@Will for years when I was a financial writer and I’m thrilled to see it’s still around. It’s a productivity app that uses neuroscience to create music that helps you focus – and it works.
VidIQ
VidIQ is one of my new favorite tools for YouTube and business workflow optimization. YouTube accounted for 30% of our revenue last year while I only spent 5% of my time on it. That’s all thanks to VidIQ which tracks the data on your channel and pretty much tells you what to do. You can also do keyword research, competitor analysis and use it’s AI tool to script videos.
ChatGPT
We use ChatGPT on a daily basis for business workflow optimization. In fact, it’s another one of the reasons we’re able to create videos, blogs, emails and social media posts at such high volumes. ChatGPT is doing a lot of the work.
The trick to ChatGPT is you need to know how to train it and prompt it. And then of course you need to revise it for quality assurance.
This is something we teach our clients how to do in our Effortless Sales Engine program.
1Pass
1Pass is a password keeper that Justin turned me on to after LastPass kept having glitches and security breaches. I actually like the user interface much better than LastPass, it always works and Justin and I can easily share passwords with each other.
OneUp
After trying several – and I really do mean several – social media schedulers I decided to stick with OneUp for business workflow optimization. I can schedule an entire week’s worth of content on 20+ social accounts we own in a few hours. Plus, it allows you to repeat posts for up to a year so your workflow becomes faster.
OneUp also has an AI tool you can use to write captions.
Keap
Keap is the MacDaddy all in one sales, marketing and e-commerce system we’ve been using for years for business workflow optimization. This is what runs all of our marketing automations behind the scenes.
While it’s not the easiest to set up and the CRM is not our favorite, the truth is no tool on the market can do the data tracking and reporting that Keap can – or at least we haven’t found it and we’ve worked with just about every CRM and marketing tool imaginable. In fact, Justin used to build sales and marketing software and while he doesn’t think Keap is perfect, it’s the best he’s found for what we need it to do.
We can see every little thing leads do, track where they came from, track how referral partners are doing and create pretty sophisticated automations behind the scenes that do most of the work for us.
Plus, since Keap has been around for so long they have the capital to continue updating the product and have solid support staff. This is typically what is missing from the newer trendier systems and it causes a lot of problems.
As Keap partners, we can get you a pretty sweet deal on the software so reach out to us if you need that.
Slack
We use Slack to communicate with the team as well as with clients in our Effortless Sales Engine program. We have found Facebook and email to be quite unreliable when trying to communicate with clients so we stick to Slack.
Plus, we’ve got these cool automations set up between Keap and Slack so we know when sales are coming in, when people are engaging with our content, when we have new leads, when we have text messages coming in, etc.
Google Calendar
If it’s not on my Google calendar it doesn’t exist. Need I say more?
Calendly
We use Calendly as our main scheduler for client calls, sales calls, collaboration calls and podcast interviews. It’s easy to use and gets the job done.
OpusPro
OpusPro is an AI software that will clip your longer form videos into short form videos, add the captions automatically and even add B roll and emojis.
It’s one of the reasons why we can pump out so many short form videos. It’s not perfect, but we do have some tips to make it better. When recording a YouTube video, I’m making sure to speak in more soundbites. OpusAI then picks those up and automatically creates short form videos from it.
Google Drive
Google Drive is the go-to for collaborative documents. This includes things like:
- Style guides
- Brand voice guides
- Email marketing that performed well
- Marketing photos
- Spreadsheets, etc
Reclaim.ai
Reclaim.ai is a newer tool I’m currently testing and enjoying. It’s goal is to help you better optimize your time. For example, during set up it asked me what kinds of habits and meetings I need on the calendar such as:
- Lunch
- Working out
- Weekly reviews
- Customer feedback calls
- Daily scrums
- Focused work time
- Etc.
The idea is that it automatically plans these things for you based on what you’ve got going on.
If you have a team it also automatically schedules internal meetings based on when everyone is available.
Right now the team is just me and Justin and we’re pretty good at sticking to a schedule so I’m not entirely sure how useful this will be, but I’m pretty excited to try it and see what it does.
Alexa
Justin keeps making the house smarter and smarter and has Alexa configured based on maximum efficiency. For example, all we need to say is “Alexa, downstairs off” and the entire first floor and the patio lights turn off. Alexa also hooks up to a lot apps like ToDoist for shopping lists, Spotify, etc.
On a funny side note, I fight with Alexa almost every day but when we get along things are great.
Freedom
Freedom is a productivity app that blocks websites so you don’t waste time scrolling the internet when you should be working.
ThriveThemes
ThriveThemes is a WordPress theme we find recommending to a lot of our clients. I’ve been messing around with WordPress sites since 2010 and I can tell you this is one of the easiest to use and most powerful themes available.
We were able to redo this entire website in three days thanks to ThriveThemes. We can also create things like quizzes, lead magnets pages, membership sites, etc.
In fact, we’re currently in the process of moving all of our landing pages off of ClickFunnels and into ThriveThemes.
Aura
Aura is an app we use for meditation, hypnosis, sound baths, etc. We’re both health nuts and big fans of energy healing. In fact, here’s a fun tidbit of information. Justin and I are both certified holistic healers. We got certified the first few months we were in Mexico under our holistic healer who runs a practice and now courses.
It’s not our main gig, it’s just another tool in our toolbox for ourselves and for clients.
Descript
We use Descript for editing all of our videos. It’s quick, it’s easy and it’s seamless. Thanks to a combination of Descript and ChatGPT I can have a video, blog post, email and all social media descriptions done in less than an hour.
Riverside
Riverside is a newer tool we’re using specifically for recording podcasts. It records in higher quality than Zoom and it can automatically create short form videos from the interviews.
Otter
Otter is phenomenal for transcribing meetings and creating quick meeting notes. You can then take that transcription, but it into ChatGPT and make whatever kind of content you want out of it.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a great beginner CRM. We use it in conjunction with Keap because as we mentioned, Keap doesn’t have the greatest most visually appealing CRM.
Superhuman
Superhuman has easily become my favorite email management tool. I’d seen it advertised for many years and didn’t see what the big deal was until Justin got me set up with an account.
Here’s what I love about it:
- It automatically tells me which emails are important and puts it into it’s own inbox/tab. This alone saves me so much time because I don’t waste my time sifting through emails that don’t matter.
- I can automatically set reminders to follow up with people.
- It integrates with my calendar so I can see it while I’m answering emails.
- We can create templates and canned responses that are accessible via short codes.
- It’s visually stunning and I’m a sucker for software that is visually appealing.
I can honestly say it has helped me get through my inbox faster and I definitely spend less time in there. While I’m not a super user yet, I look forward to learning all that Superhuman can do.
Business Workflow Optimization As a Strategy
Once you’re set up with business workflow optimization, your business starts to run more like a machine. When it runs more like a machine, it’s easier to tweak and adjust for better results.
Quite frankly, it’s far less work than what most people are taught to do which is function in chaos and like I said, we like to avoid as much chaos as we can.