These stress-saving apps and websites can help every PA manage their workload and save time.
All PAs are used to multi-tasking, juggling priorities and completing a raft of administrative duties that always seem to take longer than they should. When it comes to the day-to-day life of a PA, these 10 useful tools can be life-changing in the workplace.
1. Remembering Everything: WeDo
One of the top issues you're bound to deal with is being expected to remember absolutely everything. Whether it’s arranging dry cleaning services or planning large meetings, you have a million things to remember to do on a daily basis. WeDo is an app where you can keep a to-do list of all tasks, which can be divided into different categories of your choosing. Estimate how long each task will take, set reminders and review stats of how you spend your time to improve long-term efficiency.
2. Reminding Everybody: monday.com
Not only do you need to remember things that you need to do, you’re also expected to remind others to do things too. monday.com is a piece of software that not only helps you keep track of specific tasks for multiple projects and areas of work, it also allows you to assign tasks to others. Users can update their progress on tasks too, allowing you to have an overview of progress in one central place.
3. Organising dates: Doodle
Co-ordinating dates for meetings within an organisation is usually do-able with company-wide access to employees’ digital calendars. However, when people from other companies need to be included too, diary planning can become tricky and time-consuming. Doodle is an online platform that allows you to create a poll listing several suitable times for a meeting. Simply email the link out to everyone who needs to be involved and they can add their name and tick the dates when they’re available. It’s an extremely efficient way to find a date and time everyone can make.
4. Business card admin: CamCard
Entering the details of new contacts from business cards isn’t a difficult task, but when you have a pile of them, it can take a considerable amount of time. CamCard is an app specifically for managing business cards, which can be scanned, managed, synced and even exchanged digitally. It takes a fraction of the time compared to manual data entry.
5. Note-taking: Evernote
Being asked to take notes, either in meetings or informally as and when managers have ideas, is part of PA's day-to-day existence. Equally common is being asked to recall what was discussed on a previous occasion when others can’t remember. Evernote is an online platform – that can also be accessed offline and be synced later – ideal for capturing notes in one place. It’s easy to organise the notes into different work areas or themes, create a new note with just one click, and search through previous notes quickly.
6. Managing meeting participation: sli.do
When it comes to large meetings and conferences, you are often drafted in to pick up the administrative tasks. Collecting questions and comments from attendees is one task that can be difficult to manage. sli.do is a website that all attendees can access with a hashtag to digitally add their comments and questions. You can then manage all of this in one central place and take the most popular questions to the meeting or conference chair.
7. Global meetings: Time Zone Ninja
Things can quickly get confusing when virtual meetings and telephone conferences need to be organised for a group of people in different time zones. Simply finding a time that is vaguely within everyone’s working hours can also be a time-consuming process. Time Zone Ninja is a piece of software where you can add in the locations of multiple attendees, and it will come up with a time that is suitable for everyone.
8. Meeting highlights: Cogi
Minute-taking is a necessary part of formal meetings, but for the multitude of informal meetings that take place in the workplace, it's common you'll be asked to capture the meeting highlights. Finding an efficient way of doing this that doesn’t take too much time can be tough. Cogi is an app that offers a good middle ground. The app can record the audio from a meeting, but a ‘highlights’ button allows you to capture the last few minutes of particularly important points. When it comes to reviewing the audio, it means you can skip the unnecessary parts of the meeting and just pull out the most crucial elements.
9. Meeting logistics: Citymapper
Booking a meeting is usually just the start of the administrative legwork and all the additional details can take even more time. Advising meeting attendees about joining instructions, transport and public transport options is easy when it’s on-location at your office, but as soon as a meeting is being hosted elsewhere, this becomes a more time-consuming task. Citymapper is a handy app that finds the best transport options between any given points in numerous international cities, which can be easily shared with others.
10. A helping hand: Google Assistant
Most PAs feel like they need their own assistants at some point in time. Google Assistant can be added to your phone, watch and laptop. One of the most useful features is to ask Google to find out the answer to a question while you’re multi-tasking. You can also manage tasks, create a daily brief and pull together traffic and flight information.
Become more efficient, save time and reduce stress by making the most of these tools.
