Apps are prevalent in day-to-day life right now, so I thought I would share a few of my favourite apps that I’ve found really beneficial for business in three different areas.
We will be covering this topic even more extensively at the Natupreneur Experience Conference in 2019, so this post will be a little sneak peek of that.
Business Apps For Natupreneurs
There are several apps I cannot live without. They are on my phone so I have access to them all the time which it makes it super easy to run my business wherever I am on the planet.
Because I travel a lot for work, and juggling family-business-hobby time, I like to be able to do my work on the go from my phone. If this sounds like you, definitely check out the apps mentioned below.
Apps for Content Creation
One of the big ones from a marketing perspective that I love, love, love is Word Swag.
Word Swag was about $2 when I signed up for but it’s a little bit more now. It is an awesome, awesome, awesome app from a marketing perspective.
If you love those pictures that have quotes over them or you like your own pictures that you want to put words over the top of, Word Swag is for you. It’s really good for Facebook, social media, Instagram posts, and even for putting stuff online in groups and other things.
It allows you to select from a whole range of free stock photos. You just put a word in there and it actually picks up the pictures for you and then you can select all different text, and you can even add your logo to it. Then you can share it on social media.
I think it’s an amazing app, really worthwhile. Very quick and easy whenever you just get that moment of inspiration and you want to make it pretty and share it with somebody, it’s a really good option.
Graphic Design Apps
Word Swag’s best buddy app is Canva. Canva has an app but you can also use it on your desktop.
I love Canva for creating ebooks, pdfs, and even actual books. It’s a really easy way to create good-looking graphics and documents.
Idea & Voice Recording
Do you ever get that moment when you are driving around and you get a divine download? Or you get a random list of stuff that won’t get out of your brain. One of my favourite apps for this is Rev. Rev is a voice memo recorder and you can just use it as a voice memo recorder but you can also get the recordings transcribed.
It’s a perfect app for people who are speakers more than writers, like me.
It records your voice and then you can get it all transcribed and written down. I wrote a lot of my book this way. It really helped me get the words out. Just pressing the Go button and getting those notes transcribed, was super helpful.
If you want to save heaps and heaps of time with all of the stuff that’s in your head and get it out if you have a hard time writing blog posts but you are better at speaking, just imagine you’re speaking into your phone and then get it transcribed.
Social Media Scheduling
Social media can get overwhelming. When you are worried about having something to post every day and you just don’t have the time or brain power for it, using a scheduling app is the best in the investment in time and a little dash of money.
My two favourite scheduling tools include Later and HootSuite.
If you are really strapped for cash then HootSuite is the way to go. If you have a little bit of leverage then Later is my favourite.
These are scheduling tools that allow you to essentially get a whole bunch of content scheduled all at once. Say, for instance, you’re researching for one of your clients and all of a sudden you find a bunch of stuff about fibromyalgia, and a couple of scientific publications you could use for quotes, maybe you find some blog posts that are interesting or some statistics that are amazing.
Literally just chunking those down into 30 different pieces and being able to schedule them out right then means that you have a month’s worth of stuff and you don’t even have to think about it. You spend an hour putting it all into your social media scheduling app and it’s done.
You can connect all of your social media to them and then they pop it out for you at the scheduled time. You don’t have to think about it anymore for the whole month. So when you get inspired, when you get a bit of a flow on, Later and HootSuite allow you to share little drip feeds of that content and you don’t even have to be there because it automatically goes out.
To-Do Lists & Information Organisation
Next is a type of app with a lot of options available. Which one you prefer really depends on the way your brain thinks. There are multiple different versions of the same type of tool and you might get attached to one particular one even if other people hate it. So you find the one that works best for you.
A favourite organisation app for a lot of people is Evernote and it’s a very similar to digital post-it notes. You can cluster a series of notes all together and add them to a folder. It’s a great place to store information and research.
Another one like this is Google Keep. Google Keep is a to-do list with a bunch of different varieties of to do’s. You can add little pictures, you can change the colours, and follow it. It’s awesome, I love it!
A couple of other peeps that I work with use Wunderlist which is a very similar program. Instead of having multiple to-do lists and notebooks everywhere, you can keep it all in one spot.
Money Apps
From a business perspective, it’s really important to keep track of your money. There are some great paid products like Xero and Stripe. But if you’re just starting out and don’t have a lot of money, Wave is amazing. It’s a free app and you can invoice, look after your money, and even create reports for your business such as a profit and loss statement.
If you are considering going with or without an EFTPOS machine then you can go and get the Square device from any office works or similar. You can get it online as well. Square also has an app so you can accept payments with your phone.
Project Management Apps
One thing is to write the to-do list and the other thing is then doing the ABC of the to-do lists. The A’s being your things to do, the B’s being not so much of a big deal, and C’s are the things that you can palm off to someone else. You can delegate or you can transfer or you can give to a team member or your partner or someone else.
Evernote and Google Keep don’t really help with sort of thing, so for delegating and keeping track of tasks and projects, Trello and Asana are the bomb!
You can literally sit on your phone and write the to-do list, then send it to somebody else and it all gets done from your phone. It attaches to email, you can store information like screenshots or pictures that you want to share with a graphic designer or virtual assistant, or if you want to keep it for later.
It makes life so good especially if you are running a slightly larger business where you have multiple people on your team and you need to talk to one another.
So those are all the business apps. I wanted to keep that nice and distinct and I tried really hard to stay with just the ones I couldn’t live without. If you want to be consistent and persistent in your business, you need to be organised and using apps like these can really keep you on track.
Self-Help Apps for Natupreneurs
Apps can not only do cool things, but they can make your life easier as a human being. We can’t just be business, business, business all the time and forget that we are human and we need to look after ourselves. To help with that I’ve found a few great apps that make my life easier. Here’s my top 5.
Burnout is a real thing in our profession and I’ve had enough of hearing so much about it. We need to start looking after ourselves. Don’t go giving all the self-care advice to your clients and not doing it for yourself.
Affirmation Apps
First is ThinkUp. Do you use affirmations? You might not be using them now but maybe you’ve used them in the past, or maybe you still need to give them a try.
Some of the affirmations I’ve used in the past have been things like, “I’m always in the right spot to meet the right people at the right time to have the right conversation.” And I’ve had affirmations when I wanted to manifest a particular amount of people on a program or a particular amount of money to go to a particular type of training. Sometimes I turn them into my password on my phone or my computer.
ThinkUp is an app that allows you to record your own voice saying your own personal affirmation. And then you can listen to your own wisdom.
I know it sounds a little bit weird and wacky, but lean in and try it out. It’s really cool if you’re an audio style person who listens to things and then is able to understand them better. This is an amazing tool and we know that repetition is the mother of all achievement. Repeating and repeating and repeating that affirmation and having it in the background of your mind is going to make it just a real normal neural pathway for you.
It’s called ThinkUp so instead of thinking down or sideways or getting distracted, ThinkUp.
Personal Productivity Apps
Who gets sidetracked easily? I know I do. I have used all sorts of productivity tools to stay on track. One of my favourites is the Forest app. It’s based on the Pomodoro Method. There are a lot of apps based on the Pomodoro method which is working for 20 minutes, then you take five to ten minutes off, then 20 minutes of concentrated time and then 5 to 20 minutes off.
I didn’t want a tomato-like timer and it was just a little bit weird for me but the Forest app is amazing because actually, it’s an applet attached to your computer or your phone. Every 20 minutes that you sit for it will create a Forest. It’s gamification for your productivity.
So you actually grow a forest as you do it. You start with one tree initially and then you get multiple trees and then you start growing a forest. Then you’re contributing in a way that you couldn’t have imagined. I’m super excited about this game. Forest helps you focus and concentrate for the 20 minutes that you might need to actually get a task done instead of getting randomly sidetracked.
Meditation Apps
The next one is Insight. Insight is one of my favourite meditation apps. Insight has heaps of different meditations and you can select what amount of time you want to meditate for, what type of meditation you want to do, who you want to listen to and it’s free.
We all know the benefits we of meditation yet interestingly enough not a lot of us actually meditate every day.
My favourite thing about Insight is again gamification (I’m totally a suck-up for getting gold stars!). At the end of your meditation, it gives you a little sticker that tells you how you’ve done your meditation for that day. You can start to build up how many stickers you get and you can play against your friends or your group.
We’ve had a couple of sprints on this in the Club where we collect all of the dots and we see who can get their meditation in for the week. I now start my day with the meditation and it specifically came from me doing that. Now I can dive deeper and get more from my meditating by being in it rather than doing it for the special sticker dot. But the stickers were a great way to kick me off and get me going.
I also like that I can listen to whoever I want to listen to. You can choose a male or a female voice, or an Australian or American – all different varieties. You can go from body to mind to motivation to other things.
Audio Books
Next is Audible.
Audible is not a free app. It’s actually an app that helps you consume information, and for all of us information consumers and learners, we love our knowledge.
I love books and what I found in running my business was I was missing out. I was getting piles and piles and piles of books next to my bed. Even now if I took you in there, you would see there are about five books that I have on the go at the moment. The reason they continue to stay there is because I can’t read a book while I’m here, I can’t read a book while I’m waiting for my kids or driving in the car, I can’t read a book while I’m running programs or doing other things. It’s really difficult to be able to focus on that at the same time as doing other things.
I love Audible which is audiobooks. For $14 a month, I get a new credit into my inbox and it tells me I can go buy an audiobook.
The cool thing about it is I get on my podcasting app and I listen to the podcast. They often have people who are just releasing their new books and I get to listen and if I love that book, and because I’ve got a couple of credits, I can then go download that book and then listen to it in the car, on the plane, on the way to events or on the way back.
I get to share it in a way that I hadn’t been able to consume that information before. It’s great for mums who are busy running around the house. I listen to stuff while I’m making dinner and other things. It’s really good quality and most of the time it’s the author who is actually speaking the audiobook. t
Do you do audiobooks? I love a game-changer and for me, it really did change things
Personal Health Apps
The last one is on our own personal health. This one’s for the girls.
It’s called Seed Concept. Seed Concept is an app to track your period. So often I have found with my mentees especially that we forget – and I’m talking to all the ladies out there. We forget we’re a woman because we’re so busy doing all the things for our clients and we’re busy doing all the things for our clinic and we’re busy doing all the things to get more clients in and we’re busy doing all the things for our team and we’re busy doing all the things for our family. All of a sudden, our periods show up and we don’t acknowledge the fact or slow down or take the time out to understand what’s going on for ourselves because we’re too busy noticing all of the things for everybody else.
I really like this app – it’s good for clients as well but you should try it out first and figure out for yourself what’s really cool about it and what’s not.
Clinical Apps
This is what everybody waits for but the business ones are the super good ones and then the ones for looking after yourself are even more important. The clinicals are actually a bit of a bonus. Try these apps to make your life as a clinician easier.
Meal Planning
How you can make your clients lives easier?
One that we’ve talked about in the Natupreneur Hub recently is for anyone who has ever had an issue with meal planning for their clients. I know a lot of nutritionists (me included) and naturopaths who love talking about food, about the vitamin and nutrient contents and things, like to write an entire meal plan for somebody who has food intolerances or other food-related issues.
If you love doing this, you should definitely make a business model out of that for other practitioners to buy into. But for the time being, a super easy way to get this is an app called That Clean Life. This is a paid app but it is really beneficial. It’s for meal plans and you can select the different types of things that are going on with your clients such as intolerances, foods allergies and things like that. Then it will spit out healthy meal plans for you.
Herbal Reference
There are a couple in this category.
I love this one! This is Herbal Pro by Melissa Schultz (she’s a hubster!) and it’s an awesome app to get your monographs as well as how to put together different tinctures and mixtures. It’s really cool, you should go check it out. It’s very cool.
About Herbs is just an easy, accessible way to find out about herbs.
Nutrition
There are tons of these available out there, but these are a few notable ones for you.
You know when you get stuck finding nutritional values for things? This is a super easy one that everybody can use and it’s quite economical. MyFitnessPal is one of the quickest, easiest ways to get the nutritional panel or value of foods. You can just pop it in and then it spits out the numbers for you.
There is also newer app by the Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) called FSANZ Nutritional App, but I don’t think it is as innovative as my fitness app. It’s a bit more techy to use.
This is another new one. It’s interesting to see apps that come from the academic world and then join into the app world, or apps that come from the app world and how the difference is in being able to use it from an end-user perspective. Monash FODMAP App is a really good one. You can put food intolerances and other bits and pieces in there and it spits out information on food and dietary stuff for FODMAPs in particular. But again, it’s very data-driven and not quite as easy as some of the others to use.
Make Your Life Easier with Apps
These apps cover the three prongs of running your own business as a natupreneur – business, personal, and clinical. Most of the ones that I’ve described today are free so check them out.
These are all available on Apple (because I’m an Apple user) and over half of them are also available on Android.
The next place that you can see the business, personal, and clinical streams of information will be the Natupreneur Experience 2019 conference. Visit that link to find out more about that!
As with all my videos, if you find something beneficial in this and you can take action on it, that is awesome! Go and download it now, especially if it’s free.
If it’s useful for somebody else because they’ve been having the same problem, definitely tell them about it or tell them about this video so that they can watch it as well and we collectively as a profession can move forward and make our lives easier and yummier and more abundant.
Have an amazing day!
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