When you are an entrepreneur we know how important it is to leave the office and meet customers and potential business partners face-to-face. But, on the other hand, a society that demands real-time content also requires managers to maintain their business constantly updated and to be informed at all times.
For this reason, we have gathered some tools that will allow you to manage your business when you’re away from the office and keep abreast of developments:
Delicious
This is a service of social bookmarks management that allows you to add any website as “favorite”, simulating the typical bookmarks that are stored in browsers. With this tool you can have all your most visited websites stored in just one place and categorize them by keywords or tags (which will allow you to easily find them). In addition, you can share them with other users, use the “favorites” of others and know, for example, how many people have saved the same link. It's a quick way to follow topics of interest when you're traveling or going to a meeting.
Overall, it’s an easy to use tool. Perhaps the most difficult feature is its tagging system, but here you can see some tips to start using this service successfully.
Feedly
Following the closure of Google Reader, Feedly has become one of the most popular RSS readers in the market. It offers you the ability to have filtered quality information on your mobile device, making it a very productive tool for your day-to-day tasks while away from the office.
To enable the RSS feed you have to select a set of online sources that you consider reliable and interesting for your business, such as websites and/or blogs of entrepreneurs, news sites related to your industry… Overall, anything that can provide you useful content; but try to stick to a limited number of sources, because otherwise you would get back into the vastness of the Internet and your selection would not be productive. The great advantage of Feedly is that you can see all the sources of information in a single screen, without having to visit various blogs or websites.
Evernote
Doing business away from the office involves being exquisitely organized, so you can operate appropriately. This is why, under the slogan “Remember everything”, Evernote allows you to organize all your information in one single application. Available for both web and mobile devices, with this tool you can record, modify and manage all your work-related ideas from anywhere, thanks to its system of notes (in text and voice format, as well as images, files etc.). This way you can store your notes over a project’s requirements, spreadsheets with budgets, quotes and proposals of suppliers, partners and customers, all together in one place. In addition, the Evernote Business version allows you to share your notebooks, so that your whole team can contribute to it.
And if you have a long trip or if you often go from one side to another, you can also take your work with you thanks to the application’s offline Notebooks feature, which allows you to access and edit your notes without an Internet connection. All your changes will be synced to your account when you connect again to the Internet.
Hootsuite
This is perhaps the most complete application that exists right now. With web and mobile versions, Hootsuite is able to manage multiple profiles in social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare, as well as corporate pages using Google+ and WordPress, among others.
One of its most interesting features is that different members of a team can access the same account and work together thanks to its Hootsuite Teams function. The latest version also includes a chat, which allows team members to hold conversations online within the platform itself.
The visualization through tabs and columns of each of the social profiles you want to manage facilitates its use. The only thing to keep in mind when using this application is that the maximum number of accounts you can manage with its free version is five. If you want to manage more accounts or access Hootsuite Teams and other advanced features, you have to subscribe to the Pro version.
Google Calendar
Any professional worth its salt, and especially those who spend most of their time away from the office, should at least consider having a digital agenda. Google Calendar, offered by the technology giant Google, is one of the most productive digital agendas that can be found nowadays.
It allows you to manage multiple agendas, for example. This means that you can maintain a personal agenda and others for work and leisure, and enable and disable them as needed. With this feature you can avoid the coincidence of events. It also offers several views (day, week, month, etc.), with the option to print each one of them. It includes a notification service for each event, and you can receive an alert via email, with a pop-up window or via SMS on your smartphone. It integrates as well a very useful search system that, for example, can help you find information about a meeting that you can’t remember when it was held.