10 Ways to use your phone to manage your business and life

Smartphones have become an integral part of our day-to-day life and we use it for a lot of basic activities. But, did you know that smart phones, if used effectively, can help increase your productivity at work and expand your business to new horizons.

Thus, all business owners and professionals should have a smartphone which will help them to maximize their efficiency and improve their business. One such smartphone is the Nokia Lumia 930 which runs on the Windows operating system and is optimized for business and professional purposes. You can learn more about the phone and its features here:

Now, we will discuss a few ways in which smartphones can be used to help manage your business.

Use automated software to manage your tasks

A variety of apps and services are available which can be fine tuned to your needs to help complete tasks based on certain parameters which you can specify. Toodledo and Automatelt are two of the best softwares available using which you can manage services, networks, files, account information, packages, templates and a lot of other things.

The Toodledo Pro which is available to iOS users also lets the user divide their tasks into many sub-tasks which help you to stay organized and also to share information with others. It also secures the internet connection that you are using so that sensitive information may not be leaked.

On the other hand Automatelt’s system management is very fast but at the same time is quite efficient on an android platform, which helps the user beat the competition and deliver better services.

Getting quick precise directions on the go

Most smartphones nowadays are touchscreen ones and thus are great for navigating. You can use your smartphone to get directions while you are walking as well as driving.

You can also get shortcuts and calculate the amount of time needed to reach a place. To make things easier for your smartphone you can keep a shortcuts data folder in your phone to navigate better and help reach places faster.

Quick calls and messaging

You can customize your smartphone to make a quick call or send a quick sms to any contact. This is very useful as this will save you a lot of time because you will not have to go through your contacts list to find the person whom you want to call or text. You can keep your most used contacts on the home screen so that you can easily find them when required.

Scan and save various documents

Forget jotting down the contact details of a business card or the order no. in receipts on a piece of paper. There are various softwares out there which can scan the documents using their optical character recognition software and then save all the details printed on both sides of a business card or receipt in the application’s address book which you can later transfer to you computer or server.  

ScanBizCards and JotNot Scanner are two apps which help you to do all of this easily and quickly. JotNot Scanner is only for iOS users while ScanBizCards can run on Windows, iOS and Android platforms.

Use speech text 

Most smartphones have the speech-to-text option which allows the user to send a text simply by talking to the phone. All you have to do is turn on the speech text option and speak to your phone and you smartphone will turn whatever you say into text.

This is very helpful as speaking is much faster than typing and  you can also use this option to send texts while doing something else and thus save time and be more efficient.

Make fast notes and save them

Have you ever had the frustrating experience of scribbling something important down on a piece of paper only to lose it after sometime? If you have then here is something which will prevent this from happening again – the note maker.

Whenever you have something important to note just type it down in your phone and save it, in this way the note will be preserved until you delete it yourself and you will never lose important information ever again.

Organize and monitor your financial matters

In a business, monetary transactions are of great importance and you can use your smartphone to keep track of all the financial aspects of your business ranging from the amount of income and expenditure to the individual breakdown of your expenditures.

An app which can help you achieve all of this and much more is the Mint app which is powered by various analytical tools to help you to monitor your financial activity, organize your income and expenditure into various categories and help setup your budget based on informational and interactive pie charts. 

Filter your emails that you receive

There are various apps available which can help you to organize and clear out your email inbox. This is very helpful as you can find important emails easily and fast.

You can flag important mails and ones which are not required will automatically be sent to the trash folder of your email. This helps you to better organize and manage your work and be more efficient in what you do.

Use conference calls to conduct business meetings

You can use your smartphone to conduct business meetings with prospective clients, partners or employees by using the conference call feature anywhere and at any time. However, to make a conference call your smartphone must be equipped with a front facing camera and an application using which you can make a conference call such as Skype.

Use apps to organize your tasks

Task organizers generally come pre-installed with your smartphone and thus help you to be on time for your meetings and other tasks throughout the day. Also, whenever one task is complete you can uncheck that task in the organizer and add a new one instead.

Thus, it can be said that in today’s world investing in a good smartphone is a must if one wishes to expand and maintain one’s business and excel in their work.

This post is sponsored by Microsoft.