One of my favorite podcasts, the Cortex Podcast, does an annual State of the Apps episode. And I’ve imitated this on a few occasions because I think it’s interesting to know what other apps people are using for different things. Now, I’ll say my overall app ecosystem has been fairly stable this year, but here are a few of the apps that we use daily at Adelsberger Marketing to keep the work flowing. Of course, all of ours are done through G Suite and the Gmail app. There have been moments when I have thought, is there something better out there? But not really taking any time to investigate it. Google Calendar keeps us all on the same page for scheduling. With our team continuing to grow, I wish I could get Google to make one change to the calendar, and that’s to let us pick how events are stacked, because right now it seems to make the smaller events stack on whatever other events are on top of the calendar, and it gets hard to read. All of our file management is done in Google Drive. The tools set up can be frustrating, but we figured out a way to make it work for us.
It’s crucial to all that we do. We not only keep client files in it, but all of our internal documentation as well is in there. File backup is now taking place in two places. One, we have Backblaze set up on everyone’s computer who does creative work. And then Backblaze is a latent backup software that slowly backs up your computer constantly so that everything is eventually online, but it doesn’t drain all of your internet at the same time. This year, we rewrote our storage standards to better help us protect clients’ projects and future proof our operations. We have also started moving our ever growing stack of cold storage hard drives into AWS, which is Amazon Web Services for the uninitiated. This year, we rewrote our storage standards to better help us protect clients’ projects and future proof our operations. One tool that’s been key to our workflow in the last two years is Picter. It’s a review tool that allows us to make sure that we’re getting good comments on creative from staff internally, but then also allowing customers to leave detailed feedback remotely. It’s not a perfect tool, but it has been really helpful for us.
And a side note about Picter, Picter came to us through AppSummo, and I have a hard time not buying everything AppSummo has to sell. It regularly has some really interesting software for amazing lifetime prices. This isn’t sponsored, but it’s a great place to find some affordable software to make your life easier. Slack is our internal communication tool of choice. It is the industry standard for internal chats, and truly, it’s just as important to our company as email. Our company works to keep internal communications in Slack so that everything in the inbox is actually from outsiders. And of course, we are using Zoom, but we’ve expanded to using it for webinars this year, and it’s worked really well. We’ve tried different time trackers in the past, but we’ve converted solely to Clockify now. Our passwords are managed in 1Password. We love 1Password. It’s been a great tool for the entire team to use and a great tool for helping us to use really strong passwords on all of our accounts. One small change in the last year is that while I used to be a big Evernote fan, personally, I’ve switched to Notion for a lot of my notes.
Notion has become a very popular app in the last couple of years, and it’s obvious why if you use Evernote. It seems that Evernote has stopped investing in features and has become very annoying with marketing. Every time I log in to the app, there’s a “Are you sure you want to skip this once in a lifetime offer?” For something every time I get in the app? It’s the same offer every time and every time I say no. Notion’s flexibility has been really great to play with this year, and the ability to nest information inside other information in different formats is really useful, and I anticipate it becoming a more important part of my daily life. This year, I also got into audiobooks for the first time, and so Audible has been used on my phone a lot. This year, I got The Lord of the Rings by Andy Serkis, and it is top notch. It’s really hard to beat. My weather app of choice is Carat, but I’ve also installed a second weather app because I live in Tornado Alley, and it’s called Radar Omega. It’s a once a year subscription fee, and it gives you professional grade radar and allows you to map storms and track them.
Much like the tools that TV weather people use, you can plot a storm by speed, and it will give you times where it will get to towns in its path. Yes, I am a giant nerd, and unfortunately, we’ve already used this several times this year. Then a fun app that I like because I’m, as mentioned, a giant nerd is Flightradar24. So Flightradar24 is a fun app that allows you to see what planes are flying overhead. And so if I’m out for a walk or I’m out playing with the kids, or I hear a jet fly overhead, I like to look up on my phone and see where it’s coming from and how fast it’s going and what model it is, and the kids enjoy it, but I do it for myself. The kids just happen to like it as well. And then finally, one game that I spent too much time on this year is called Retro Bowl. It’s a relatively straightforward football game, but it’s way more complicated than it lets on at the start. It’s a point-and-click football game on your phone. And football on mobile is really hard to do, and Retro Bowl crushes it.
So do you have an app that’s made your life better this year? I would love to hear about it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com, and thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast and we hope to catch you on the next one!
