Hooray! We’re pleased to announce a major integration for Process Street. This time, it’s Zapier. At launch, it connected Process Street with more than 400 services, including Salesforce, Mailchimp, Wufoo, and the Google Apps suite. With over 1,000 apps, announcing our Zapier integration opened far more ways to connect recurring work.

If Zapier were a physical object, it would look a bit like a universal remote connected to an unmanageable tangle of wires, with ends that slot into every kind of machine. Thankfully, it’s a clean-cut, user-friendly SaaS app with huge potential for creativity and workflow streamlining. It makes it easy for non-developers to connect web services together, saving time and improving productivity.

Continue Reading

I was a busy guy.

Between work, family, trying to keep fit, and fitting in a little relaxation, there never seemed to be enough hours in the day to get things done. I’d get to the office at 7am, wouldn’t leave until 6pm, ate lunch while processing email, and rushed home to eat dinner with my family so my son had at least a small chance to remember who I was.

That was life until I got serious about managing my time more effectively.

Like a lot of people, I was trapped in a mentality that equated more work with more productivity. I believed the more time I spent at my desk, the greater the rewards would be. I was also sure that sacrificing some things in the short-term — family time, fitness, even health in general — would pay off in the long-term with a higher salary and more free time to do the things I wanted to do instead of the things I had to do.

Boy, was I wrong.

I managed to break out of that mental state and today I am more relaxed than ever, fitter than ever, have a great work/life balance, and spend more time with my family.

How did I do it?

Continue Reading

Best Real Estate Apps to Close More Deals This Year

The real estate industry has come a long way since a long-dead entrepreneur decided to rent a part of their farm land to turn a profit. Down the line we’ve seen verbal agreements and contracts written in stone, all the way through to the mass of paper stored in unorganized filing cabinets we’re still unfortunately dealing with.

Even though computers have been widely used by agencies for over 20 years, paper documents are still around causing trouble. Maybe it was software industry’s fault for a long time, but now thanks to Android, iOS and the huge number of productivity tools at our disposal, there’s no excuse to be disorganized

Take a look at the 5 best real estate apps for simplifying your operations and closing more deals.

Continue Reading

Ok, so, I am far from an epic content creator. I am, however, aspiring to become a better one and in that journey, I have come across some great resources on how to become a better writer and content creating extraordinaire.

I mentioned some of these in my post – Advanced Content Promotion Checklist (interactive checklist), but this is such a critical point that I thought they deserved their own post. Plus, this is kind of an exercise for me where I force myself to re-read them all. I hope they help you create epic content.

On a side note, if you’re interested in blogging we just released our tool Checklists for Bloggers – a simple way to create checklists that you can embed onto your blog and capture leads with. Check it out here.

Continue Reading

I hate paper and I love Evernote. I use it to store everything. I automatically forward files from my email to my Evernote (including snail mail which is automatically scanned and emailed to me). I take photos of every document I sign and business card I’m given using their iPhone App and I even forward my Workflowy history to Evernote.

Some people may suggest using Dropbox or Google Drive, but Evernote has a specific benefit that makes it kick ass: Search.

Evernote is built around search. All documents, images and photos are scanned and made searchable. This means you can dump everything into one folder and Evernote will make it instantly searchable from any of your devices. No organizing, no tagging, just sweet, sweet search.

Continue Reading

External Hard Drives suck. They take up space, USB ports and are far from a secure place to keep your precious photos and videos.

I used to have three external hard drives, now I have none. In this post, I’ll explain how I got rid of them and how you can too.

A while back I switched from Dropbox to Google Drive since they are now offering 1TB of data for just $10 a month. But the change had a few unexpected benefits, one of which was allowing me to get rid of my external drives.

Continue Reading

View Full Size – Image Credit

[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

Social Media is Powerful

Social Media is a powerful marketing tool for all businesses. It’s cheap, has a far reach and opens up engagement with customers. But this is nothing new, we’ve all seen the explosive growth in social media and we know its an essential part of our web strategy.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the graph below extracted from a Search Engine Journal infographic.

Continue Reading

Managing email is an important activity for all small businesses. We have written about alternatives to email a couple of times but the truth of the matter is, email is here and it’s here to stay. For many small businesses, email is still at the core and relied upon for day to day transactions plus we all use our email to login to our favorite apps and services.

In this article, we will talk about apps various clients and tools you can use to improve email productivity across your team. We will not talk about how to host your business email, something we already covered in the Google Apps vs Microsoft 365 post. The goal is for you and your team to get to Inbox Zero as Merlin Mann says in his famous 2007 talk.

Continue Reading

Subscribe to the Process Street Blog and learn about the latest software and apps to increase your productivity and boost your business. Click here to subscribe

Does your computer ever run slow due to too many tabs? It used to happen to me all the time, but not anymore.

Reduce the number of tabs you have running in your browser with One Tab. One tab is a Chrome extension that allows you to click one button and condense all your tabs into a single page which you can use to re-launch the tabs.

Check out the above video to see it in action.

Continue Reading

In this video I explain my workflow for capturing, annotating (marking up with arrows and text) and uploading screenshots to Process Street in seconds.

I can basically add a screenshot to Process Street in seconds. This workflow is so fast, taking screenshots and adding instructions becomes an absolute pleasure.

And the best part? Its using an absolutely free tool – Jing from TechSmith.

Watch the below video to see how its done.

Tools mentioned:

• Trello
• Jing
• Process Street
• Dropbox
• Google Drive

Video Highlights

0:30 – Example of workflow to create screenshot in Jing, mark up and add to Process Street in seconds
1:25 – Break down of how to configure the workflow in detail
1:30 – Create steps in Process Street
1:40 – Use Jing to take screenshot and markup
3:10 – Using the Screenshots folder in Windows 8
3:45 – Configuring Jing for fast saving
4:50 – Sorting Screenshots folder by date so most recent images are always at top

This is how I currently manage my screenshots. If you know any other methods, I’d love to hear them.