If you’ve been in my world for a while, you will probably have seen me talking about productivity at some point. I’m always testing new things to see what works for different areas of life and business and last week I had a catch up with one of my clients and I told her about all of the things I have tested out recently and realised that I have a lot of new stuff to share…

So, I am sharing my experience hoping it might inspire you to sort out your Project Management app or pull your stuff together in a clearer, more productive way or improve how you work with clients or your team with some insights into what I’ve been testing and learning recently…

Motion

I tested out Motion and thought it was OK but with the way I need to manage my workload, I thought that using 2 different apps for project management and collaborating with clients just wasn’t going to work. I tried moving some client tasks into it and it wasn’t great – I think that might have something to do with the fact that I thought the user interface was so overwhelming.

Something I have noticed with a lot of project management apps is that I can see things that I don’t need to be seeing at that point in time and it can switch my focus to them when I’m meant to be focusing on the tasks I have to do right now.

If they implement a better offering for working with clients and add in other workspace views that cut out that overwhelming sense of task doom, I might have another look at it.

Sunsama

I also tested out Sunsama which I think has huge potential because it pulls tasks from other project management apps so it could be so handy when you are working with clients who want to be using their own project management apps, meaning you need to use lots of different ones. So, this could be such a time saver and overwhelm remover.

I thought this one was the one, but then Appsumo threw me a curveball… and I fell in love with…

BeforeSunset

BeforeSunset has a very clean user interface which makes my brain happy and I feel less stress about my workload. I’m just getting through it all and procrastination has dropped a lot and I feel like I am way more on top of things. It’s working!

Using this app, made way for some changes to the way I manage my workload too and I’m so grateful for that little jolt to make some good changes…

You might already know that I use Nifty to manage my client workload as I have talked about it a fair bit. I love using it for client work but for my own stuff, (I’ve recently realised) it has become more of a brain dumping space – and that is totally OK! We don’t always have to use these apps as they are intended.

So, I made some changes to how I am going to work with my VA using the app. We have one space and everything we are currently working on lives inside there then I will periodically review things and move them into our project from my ‘brain dumping project spaces’ and turn them into tasks for us to tackle.

The difference that made to my head has been huge. Like there was a shift from cruising along with my ideas to bossing them and knowing what the deal is/what’s up next.

I’ve been using it for about 3 weeks for client work and my own business stuff. To be able to work between Nifty and BeforeSunset has been pretty easy too. – I moved most of my recurring tasks to this app and use Nifty to chat with clients about one-off projects and have been scheduling them into BeforeSunset as and when needed.

It reminds me when I have a meeting or appointments coming up too so I can plan my tasks around them (The AI feature will also plan my day for me too) You can split tasks into ‘Work’ and ‘Personal’ lists so I use Work for client stuff and have my own business tasks in the ‘Personal section’. Tasks can also have tags so I’ve been using them for client names so I know who’s stuff I’m working on and my task title doesn’t need to include that detail.

I’m mostly not using the AI feature unless my day is jam packed and I feel like I might not pull them all off if I manage the order of my tasks by myself.

The roadmap for it looks great and I’m excited to see how it will integrate with other apps in the future.

If you enjoyed these insights into some of the things I’ve been testing, check out Tech Stack Insights. You can bag it for only $9 here.