Tools & apps 2022

Over the past 10 years, I've tried many tools and this is the set-up that stuck with me.

Note-taking: Notion

It's important to take notes, as you can learn from things people have said and from your own thoughts. I've been taking notes in Evernote and a psychical notepad in the past.

It's just a normal text-based note taking app. The benefit to me is in knowing if a note has been processed yet (from Getting Things Done methodology)

'Normal' meeting notes

These are your 'standard' meeting notes: writing down interesting things, tasks, decisions. After discussing with other marketers and entrepreneurs, I've realised I do a few things differently.

• Start the meeting with asking what the goal for the meeting is. Do we want to make a decision, discuss a problem or brainstorm
• Add a list of decisions & tasks that are made
• Every Friday I go over all my open meeting notes and process the tasks that are in there. This way I prevent myself from missing tasks or things I will do
• Send the meeting notes to the attendees. I don't always do this, but will do if I lead the meeting
• Write down the exact words of interesting things people say. I use these quotes as follows:
• If they're describing a problem or a need, I use it to think about new products or new ways of describing my products. 
• The second way I use these quotes is for copywriting. "How would you describe the work that we did for you?" gives interesting insights in copywriting ideas. Skip the jargon and use layman's terms to describe the product or service we (or the client I work for) are selling
• The last way I use the notes are content or article ideas. If a growth hacking trainees ask me a question "I'm stuck in creating a contentmarketing roadmap, I wish I could have more structure" is a great premisse for an article on a contentmarketing framework.

Open issues

This is a special meeting type from EOS. The Open Issues meeting discusses the issues that are causing the numbers to be low.

• Go over the scorecard - each person responsible calls out their numbers and states if it's on track yes/no
• Discuss the open issues - why is a target not reached? In the open issues we discuss the underlying problem.

Open issues example

An example of an open issue, is that one of our managers at Polaris Growth was creating job openings, but it was taking up a lot of time. The manager asked me questions about things that I had written before. I was confused, because I had created a template with the 'about us' and 'contact' paragraphs of the job opening.

In the open issues meeting, we try to find the root cause of WHY the problem occured.

• Why was the job opening not posted yet? -> Because it takes a lot of time to create a job post. "But we have templates. Didn't you know?"
• Why did Gaby not know we had templates? -> Because we changed it in the employee onboarding, but Gaby was already onboarded, so didn't read it.
• Why was the template only shared in employee onboarding and not with existing team? -> Because we don't have a rule in place to share the updates on documents.

Once we have clarity on the root cause, we can come up to fix i) this problem AND ii) similar problems happening in the future.

Tasks for this open issue

• Create a folder with all templates/resources, so it's more easily accessible
• In Asana Task Template, add a link to "Resources" folder so it's more visible to use templates
• In Recruiting funnel, add the step "Use template for job opening" in the task template
• Send an email to team with the template we currently have & ask them to share new resources via email/chat with entire team

By doing these things, you eliminate the problem from the core

Thinking Time

From the book "The Road Less Stupid", I've taken the concept of Thinking Time. Write down a question you have and think it through. Most mistakes could've been prevented if you would have spent a bit more time thinking about the problem.

Book notes

When reading books, I take notes of interesting passages. Of course, I also summarise the book, so I can go back to the notes.

Weekly Review

Every Friday I close of my week with a weekly review.

• What score would I give this week?
• Write a summary / diary of the week, both personal and work-related
• Clear my inbox to zero (Notes, e-mail & Tasks)

Every year I read the reviews and reflect on my year. This way, I get to learn from my past experiences and turn them into actions.

Blocking websites: Freedom

Checking social media (or crypto prices in my case) every hour is not productive and doesn't add anything to your life. I realised I don't do anything with the information if the price of Bitcoin is up or down. I just get a small dopamine rush, based on the variable reward. Blocking news, social media & crypto during certain times has been very helpful to my concentration and productivity. Freedom is a great app to block websites and apps and to give yourself a schedule. It's OK to check social media between 17.00 - 21.00 for example. Don't start your day with it though (at least that's my opinion).

Password management: Lastpass

Security is very important to me and I use Lastpass (and other tools) to

Screenshots & recordings: Awesome Screenshot

An image says more than a thousand words. Sending a video of screen recording or a screenshot with annotations is so much more easy than writing a paragraph when sending feedback on websites.

Goal Setting: Notion

Every quarter, I set goals for myself. This way, I focus on what's important. I use Notion to keep track of my goals.

Tasks: Notion or Asana

Website: Webflow

This website (and the agency websites I've built) have been made in Webflow.

Automation: Zapier

There are 3 large automation tools: Zapier, IFTT and Make. I prefer Zapier, because it has the most integrations.