Simple apps that will help you save precious time

The life of an entrepreneur is a busy one. There are some days you wish you could curve out extra time from the 24 hours you get. The good news, as usual, is that tech has come to the rescue. There are several apps that help you do what you need to faster and better, saving you the precious resource that time has become. We’ll look at three of the better known ones.

1. Grammarly

The importance of written or typed text cannot be overstated. From the most formal of business communication, email, to the more casual but still important media like Twitter and Facebook, written text has become a major form of communication.

As you generate content, comment or reply, a lot can be deduced about your business from the construction of your sentences. The way you write can easily be considered your persona before someone even meets you face to face, which means you need to control the judgement made. Those raised in the era of ‘TTYL’ and ‘BRB’ need to be extra careful they don’t fall into the trap of bad grammar.

Grammarly can help out with this. It’s a free writing app that makes sure your text is mistake-free and effective. It does this by scanning your text for common grammatical mistakes and suggests better sentence construction. From simple mistakes like misused commas to complex ones like misplaced modifiers, Grammarly has your back.

It comes in various forms. On mobile, it comes as a keyboard alternative to your native keyboard app, while on your computer, it comes as an extension to either Chrome or Microsoft Word. 

2. Last Pass

Last Pass can be considered an answer to a problem that modern-day tech has created: the proliferation of platforms that require you to login with a username and password. It can be difficult to memorise all your passwords to avoid being locked out of critical accounts.

Last Pass offers an encrypted password management service, or a vault, that you can use to hide all your passwords. It’s offered as website that you can log in to with a master password, a web browser extension you can install and auto fill your passwords when you get to your favourite websites, or as a secure app that sits in your phone. 

3. Assistant.to

This is an easy-to-use email and calendar extension that does one simple thing: synchronise times for meetings.

We’re all familiar with the back and forth conversations that can be had when trying to set up a meeting. For some strange reason, all the times slots that come to your mind as being free are often busy slots for the other person.

The constant cycle of “How about” and subsequent “No, can we change it to” can be exhausting. This is where Assistant.to comes in. The app scours through your calendar on Gmail or Outlook to find an appropriate time slot. It then puts this information in an email and offers options that you can send to the other party to pick from.

Once they pick a slot that works for them, Assistant.to blocks that time automatically on your calendar.