The 9 Best Social Media Management Apps in 2019

Social media is a powerful tool for growing your business, driving traffic to your website, and keeping your followers in the loop. And because a lot of businesses are doing social media well, effective social media management is crucial: You can't just log into Twitter or Facebook and post a few updates if you want to make the most of the social web.

The updates you schedule need to be consistent and on-brand across all of the networks you're targeting. Plus, you need to understand the content and campaigns that work best for your audience so you can duplicate that success in the future.

Social media management tools allow you to manage your entire social media presence from a single interface. These services simplify every aspect of managing social media, from scheduling updates to generating reports and engaging with your audience. You can even isolate the most influential members of your community or industry and keep tabs on competitors.

We put 30 of the best social media management software solutions to the test, and here we'll present the nine best.

What Makes a Great Social Media Management Tool?

Most of the apps we selected cater to a broad range of social networks, particularly the big four: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Some packages include support for a huge number of niche networks, which is a unique feature in itself. Others focus specifically on one or two networks, particularly when it comes to visual networks like Instagram and Pinterest.

One of the main reasons people turn to social media manager apps is for queuing and scheduling updates. This lets you coordinate autonomous campaigns that run according to a schedule of your choice. All of the apps included in this roundup are able to schedule posts in advance. Some tools can help you recycle your best-performing updates. Others analyze your patterns of engagement in order to tell you the best time to post.

Being able to schedule and post across all of your chosen networks at once can be a big time-saver. Some networks take it to the next level by allowing you to customize each update to suit the platform you're targeting. That means you can do things like tag locations for Facebook and add relevant hashtags on Instagram.

With the right tool, you can set up keyword searches, monitor mentions, and follow hashtags to better engage with your audience, pass honest feedback to your team, or identify issues that need addressing. If your business connects with customers via Twitter direct messages or Facebook Messenger, having all of your correspondence in a single "social inbox" makes it easier to follow up on leads.

While many of these products offer the same features in different clothing, each one offers something unique that sets it apart from the rest of the pack—everything from built-in support for lead generation to media search engines for royalty-free images and GIFs.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that while many of these services offer a limited free plan, the features discussed in the descriptions below largely relate to paid subscriptions. If a service doesn't have a free tier, a free trial is available so you can try before you buy.

The Best Social Media Management Tools

• Buffer for straightforward social media scheduling
• Hootsuite for all-in-one social media scheduling, monitoring, and analytics
• Sprout Social for team-based social media management
• Iconosquare for managing Instagram business accounts
• Sendible for lead generation
• Tailwind for managing Pinterest accounts
• Post Planner for curating content
• MeetEdgar for automating your posts
• MavSocial for adding images to social media posts

Buffer (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Safari)

Best social media management tool for straightforward social media scheduling

Buffer is one of the longest-running social media tools aimed primarily at scheduling posts. The service supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and Pro users can schedule Pinterest updates too. Free users can connect up to three social accounts, including Facebook pages and groups.

When you first connect a social account, Buffer will create a schedule for you. By default, Buffer creates four slots per day: in the morning, around noon, mid-afternoon, and late at night for the time zone you've selected. Head to Settings > Posting Schedule to tweak this at any time, delete or add time slots, or disable an entire day. The more slots you have, the more updates you will need to schedule, but scheduling updates is easy with Buffer's intuitive dashboard, mobile apps, and browser extensions.

For scheduling content from the web, Buffer offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Click the Buffer icon in your toolbar (or use a keyboard shortcut), compose your update, and click Add to Queue to schedule. There are also mobile apps available for both iOS and Android, so you can schedule on the go. We tested the iOS app and found it easy to add updates using the Buffer Extension, which lets you "share" content directly to Buffer from virtually any other app. Your queue, sent posts, and posting schedule are all accessible from the app, and composing an update is a matter of tapping the big plus button at the bottom of the screen.

Buffer includes limited insights into post performance. You can see the number of impressions your post achieved, the number of clicks on any links you included, comments, shares, and overall reach. Since Buffer is primarily aimed at scheduling updates, this is a small part of the package. Buffer is in the process of launching Buffer Analyze, a product that promises to deliver more insights into social performance (for an additional fee).

Buffer can be collaborative—but only if you're willing to cough up for a more expensive plan that removes the need to hand out credentials and allows you to approve new posts before they're added to the queue.

Buffer Price: Free plan includes one user, three accounts, and 10 queued posts per profile; from $15/month for the Pro plan that includes one user, eight accounts, and 100 queued posts per profile.

Automate Buffer with Zapier's Buffer integrations.

Hootsuite (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome)

Best social media management tool for all-in-one scheduling, monitoring, and analytics

If you're looking for a complete solution to all of your social media management needs, Hootsuite will cover all your bases. The app is compatible with over 35 social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. More network connections are available through the Hootsuite App Directory, a user-maintained database of extensions (which can be hit or miss).

Hootsuite includes a full scheduler for queuing posts at times of your choosing. You can create your own schedule or use the AutoSchedule function to schedule your updates at optimal engagement times. By uploading a CSV file with pre-prepared updates, you can fill your queue for days, weeks, months, or the duration of an entire social campaign. Once you've filled up your queue, it's easy to view your outgoing posts from the Content Calendar and re-order your update schedule with a simple drag and drop.

One of Hootsuite's strongest areas is analytics. The tool helps you understand social results by drawing on more than 200 metrics to measure performance. Once you've generated reports, you can export them as Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and CSV files for use within your organization. You can run similar reports to measure team or individual performance.

Hootsuite can also help you monitor the social web with custom social streams. These customizable feeds let you watch the social web for mentions, new followers, search terms, hashtags, engagement, and more. You can construct precise streams that include or exclude specific keywords, post types, locations, and languages. As an example, if you're in the business of selling custom portraits, you could target the search term portrait :( filter:images to find negative posts that mention the word "portrait" with an attached image. You could then target these users with your own business.

Assign access to various team members to avoid handing out passwords, with custom permission levels on a per-user basis. Your team members can use Hootsuite's included Content Library to compose updates with on-brand assets of your choosing. Hootsuite includes free stock photos and GIFs courtesy of Giphy, or you can connect Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive to draw on your own resources. You can even assign tasks to your team members (like responding to comments or incoming messages), then approve the outgoing responses before they're sent.

The Hootlet extension for Chrome lets you schedule updates while browsing the web, and it works with the aforementioned AutoSchedule feature too. Mobile apps for iOS let you schedule, edit, approve, and manage updates from anywhere. It's a complete package, but you'll need to dig deep to unlock the full bounty of features.

Hootsuite Price: Free plan includes one user, three social profiles, and 30 scheduled updates; from $29/month (billed annually) for the Professional plan that includes one user, 10 social profiles, and unlimited scheduling; team plans start at $129/month (billed annually).

Automate Hootsuite with Zapier's Hootsuite integrations.

Sprout Social (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome)

Best social media management tool for team-based social media management

Sprout Social is a complete social media management tool for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It includes the full gamut of scheduling tools, including the ability to post to multiple networks at once. You can stick to your own schedule or have Sprout Queue automatically schedule posts at the best time for you.

One notable publishing feature is the ability to tag updates so that you can easily recall them later for analytics purposes. This allows you to tag and track entire campaigns, post types, subject matters, and any other content you may be trialing. For example, you might want to tag your summer campaign as summer2019 so that you can compare it to last year's campaign tagged as summer2018. An Asset Library is also included to store, edit, and publish visual content alongside your updates, and it can contain your own images, video content, evergreen posts, response templates, and more.

Sprout Social handles team interaction very well. You see when other team members are viewing or replying to messages in real-time, thanks to a small on-screen indicator. You can also turn items into tasks and assign them to other team members. Several team members can collaborate on drafts before they hit the queue, and you can divvy up permissions or request approval to ensure everything remains on-brand and to your liking.

A large number of metrics can be tracked to generate reports, from measuring Facebook page impressions and fan growth to finding your best Twitter content, measuring Instagram trends, and more. These reports can be exported to PDF and CSV, branded with your company's logo, then shared with clients and team members.

Finally, Sprout also includes impressive listening tools for building complex (or simple) queries for keywords, hashtags, mentions, and more. You can monitor your social channels for content you can re-use, issues you need to address, or feedback to pass along to the rest of your team. Use the Smart Inbox to bring your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram inboxes together in one interface. A Chrome extension makes it possible to schedule with a click from the web, and mobile apps for iOS and Android let you see your Smart Inbox, post to and edit your schedule, and monitor your feeds on the go.

The only drawback to this feature-rich tool is that Sprout Social is one of the most expensive social media manager apps of its kind, with no free plan available.

Sprout Social Price: From $99/user/month for the Standard plan, which includes five social profiles.

Iconosquare (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome)

Best social media management tool for managing Instagram business accounts

Few services offer such deep management of Instagram accounts as Iconosquare. Aimed entirely at those with Instagram business accounts and Facebook Pages, Iconosquare helps you monitor, publish, and analyze visual content on the social web. The service uses a modern, responsive dashboard that feels like it has been designed with the Instagram generation in mind. Navigation is simple using the pop-out menu to the left of the screen, with clean white backgrounds, bold typography, and sparing use of eye-catching colors.

Iconosquare is able to schedule content in advance for both Instagram and Facebook. This includes single image and video posts for Facebook, plus Instagram carousels and Story updates too. Once you've filled up your queue, you can preview what your Instagram feed will look like using the Feed Preview feature. This is particularly handy for social media professionals who want to ensure the feed remains on-brand or adheres to a particular aesthetic.

The included Media Library can pull images from Dropbox and OneDrive to create a repository of content that's ready to schedule. Navigate to Publishing > Media Library to choose between Dropbox and Google Drive, then select the images that you want to import. You can add labels and sort your library by source, so it's easy to isolate images that came from your own cloud accounts. Anything you've used in a past update will be tagged as such, so you don't make the mistake of creating duplicate posts.

While Facebook integration is present, it's the Instagram features that set Iconosquare apart from other less-specialized tools. The app provides insights into your Instagram account that few other tools can match. Head to Analytics > Follower Growth to see follower count plotted on a chart that updates every hour. Or click Analytics > Reach to understand how many people your updates are reaching, when these people are online, and which posts work best. Track competitors (provided they have Instagram Business accounts) to unearth their strategy and compare your own post times, hashtag use, and post popularity. And the Conversations area tracks each and every unread comment you have received over the last six months, in one place.

Under Listening > My Feeds, you can construct your own custom social feeds to monitor up to 50 Instagram users or Facebook pages in a single feed. This allows you to create topics that you can monitor to stay abreast of trends or rivals. You may want to create a "Rivals" feed and add your competitors' social media accounts, then check it periodically to ensure your own content is just as engaging.

The Analytics area of Iconosquare's dashboard is full of ready-to-go graphs that show you the most important statistics and trends pertaining to your social accounts. You can easily change the date range for displayed data in the top-right corner. There are several different pages of these graphs to browse, including Engagement, Reach, Community, and Competitors. Download any of these in CSV or PNG format by hovering over the download button and making a selection. Some of the more useful charts include "Most engaging media" on the Engagement tab, "Age and Gender of your audience" under Community, and detailed video statistics under Videos.

Iconosquare Price: From $39/month for the Pro plan that includes two team members, three social profiles, and limited features; from $79/month for three team members, five social profiles, and a full set of features.

Sendible (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome)

Best social media management tool for lead generation

Sendible is another complete social media management package, with a few features that make it stand out from the crowd. It's compatible with about 20 social networks and blog services, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and WordPress. Sendible can also connect to Google My Business, Tumblr, Medium, Facebook Pages, Blogger, and others.

As you've likely come to expect, a full set of scheduling tools is included. You can queue up posts for all connected social networks, blogs, and mailing lists. Smart Queues make it easy to maximize engagement by adjusting publication times for you, with the option of setting your best-performing evergreen content to be automatically recycled in the future.

These scheduling tools are among some of the best in the business. A shared calendar displays all of your pending updates across any networks you have connected, with the option of connecting RSS feeds to curate and automatically schedule future content. While composing your updates, you can use Flickr and Google Image search to find suitable royalty-free images, or design your own images using Sendible's Canva integration.

Generating leads with Sendible is a matter of setting up an appropriate keyword alert under Monitor > Keywords > New Monitor. This tool lets you pick which keywords you want to target, optional inclusions and words you want to exclude, and where the posts were made. You can then browse the list of relevant keyword results from your dashboard or have them automatically emailed to you on a daily or weekly basis. You can even choose to just receive the positive or negative alerts.

No service would be complete without a full set of analytics tools, including a Google Analytics integration to help measure the effect that social campaigns have on website traffic. The app comes with nine ready-to-run reports, or you can craft your own, set them to run at regular intervals, and have the results emailed to yourself, your team, or clients.

Finally, there is a full suite of collaboration tools, including a shared media library, the ability to delegate tasks to teams or individuals, and per-user or per-team permissions.

Sendible Price: From $29/month for the Micro plan that includes one user, 12 services, and unlimited scheduling.

Tailwind (Web, iOS, Chrome, Firefox, Safari)

Best social media management tool for managing Pinterest accounts

Pinterest is a special kind of social network. While Facebook is primarily used for interacting with others, and Twitter is a great way to follow news and trends, Pinterest is a far more introverted network. People who use Pinterest are focusing largely on themselves, discovering visual content they like and categorizing this content into easily retrievable collections.

Tailwind excels at Pinterest management like no other social media tool, and it also works with Instagram to provide total management of a brand on the visual side of the social web.

Tailwind provides a full set of tools for scheduling posts and monitoring the performance of your brand on Pinterest and Instagram. You can bulk upload by dragging and dropping images from your desktop or by syncing with a Dropbox folder and importing images that way. Click on the SmartLoop tab in your dashboard to set up a collection of Pins that will be automatically scheduled time and time again.

Just like other social media manager software, Tailwind includes a smart scheduler to help decide when to best post your updates and maximize engagement. You can regenerate your schedule for maximum engagement at any time under Publisher > Your Schedule > Recreate Schedule—tell Tailwind how many times per day you want to publish, and it will take care of the rest. Clone Pins across as many boards as you like, or save groups of boards as a list and pin to all of them at once. Tailwind will even suggest trending content to you, with recommendations from relevant sources (alternatively, you can import your own RSS feeds to schedule Pins from sources of your choosing).

Tailwind includes a set of monitoring tools designed specifically for Pinterest. This includes pixel-matching technology and image recognition to see which images are most popular. Analytics reports let you measure your followers, engagement trends, and Pin virality. Performance indicators like repins and likes can be isolated to gauge how successful campaigns or content types are. While perusing Pin performance, it's easy to re-use that content by clicking Add to SmartLoop or Re-Schedule this Pin.

An iOS app lets you draft and edit posts, queue content, and re-order your schedule on the move. Better still, browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari let you schedule Pins (or multiple Pins) at once while browsing the web.

Tailwind Price: From $15/month for the Plus plan that includes one account, unlimited scheduling, smart scheduling, analytics, and a 30-day history.

Post Planner (Web)

Best social media management tool for curating content

Post Planner is a simple tool designed to help you find and share content on your social media accounts. While many other apps on this list provide a similar feature, Post Planner takes the feature and breaks it out of the expensive all-encompassing social media management suite. The result is an effective post planning tool at a far more attainable price point.

The app works with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Add Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts, hashtags and search terms you want to follow, RSS feeds, and more to build a pool of relevant content. Post Planner's recommendation engine then constantly looks for the most successful content across the web, based on what you follow, with a five-star rating system to predict the popularity of your content before you've even posted it.

With a pool of curated content ready to go, you can build a schedule with times of your choosing and start adding content to it. To do this, simply highlight an article, status, or post of your choice and click Share. A compose window will appear for you to edit the description, add any hashtags, or tag locations (for Facebook). Click Add to Plan to add the post to your schedule. You can also click the arrow and choose to share now, share next (this will replace whatever else is next in your queue), or schedule the post for a time and date of your choosing.

Finally, sit back and monitor your results. See all of your past and present posts in one place, and re-order your schedule with a drag and drop. You can sort posts by likes, comments, shares, and clicks, which is about as fancy as Post Planner gets in terms of analytics. There are collaborative features that allow you to build a team and decide who can post where, but you'll need to shell out for a pricier tier that includes collaboration features in order to make use of them.

Post Planner Price: From $3/month (billed annually) for the Starter package that includes three accounts, 30 posts per day, 300 planned posts, and no collaboration.

MeetEdgar (Web, iOS, Chrome)

Best social media management tool for automating your posts

MeetEdgar is like an autopilot for your social media accounts. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and is compatible with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This isn't an analytics tool—just a scheduling one. It includes the usual post scheduling features you'd expect to see in such a package, including the bulk importing of a series of cross-network updates.

What makes MeetEdgar so different is its automation. The app can find quote-worthy text from links, and then compose updates to go along with them. Simply click on Add New Content in the top-right corner of your dashboard, select an account and category, then paste your link into the text box. When you click Auto-Generate Variations, MeetEdgar will create four possible updates based on the contents of your link. You can edit them, delete them, or add your own manual variations, and then click Save to Library. This is the only tool we came across while researching that actually creates your content for you. Better still, it can generate variations on past updates that have performed well, making it easy to recycle updates without duplicating content.

Another standout feature is the ability to categorize your updates. Add different types of content to different categories, so you can better space out content types over the course of your schedule. You may want to create one category for blog posts, another for how-to posts, and another for promotional material. Color-coded categories make it easy to ensure your schedule contains a good range of content that will appeal to different users.

There's little in the way of analytics tools in MeetEdgar, but the app does implement A/B testing to isolate best practices; plus, you can use the built-in ed.gr link shortener to track clicks. You can schedule content via the web, via the Chrome extension, or using a bookmarklet for Safari and Firefox.

MeetEdgar Price: $49/month for 25 social media accounts, unlimited media library, unlimited categories, and unlimited support.

Automate MeetEdgar with Zapier's MeetEdgar integrations.

MavSocial (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome)

Best social media management tool for adding images to social media posts

MavSocial is another complete social media management tool that aims to do it all: publishing, monitoring, engaging, and measuring success. The service connects to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr. You've got the usual smorgasbord of features, including a scheduler and calendar for viewing pending updates across your networks.

The app's most unique feature is the impressive library of stock images that are ready to go. There are over 20 million royalty-free assets that you can use to add visual elements to your posts. Click the Stock Images button while composing an update to search the database. You can refine by media type and library to find GIFs, videos, and more. MavSocial will query Giphy, ImageAfter, Pixabay, Pexels, and Mav Library Images, and can filter by horizontal, vertical, and square images.

It's possible to add effects, stickers, and filters to your images right within MavSocial by clicking on the wand icon that appears on your chosen image. If the free selection isn't good enough, there are also premium stock images that can be licensed right within MavSocial. Anything you choose to use will be added to your Digital Library automatically.

The app also includes a full set of tools for tracking campaigns, trending topics, mentions, keywords, hashtags, and more. You can filter these queries by including or excluding criteria such as post type, media, and language. And you can interact with any of these custom feeds right within the dashboard, to reply, retweet, and like.

There's more to MavSocial than immediately meets the eye, and if visual content is relevant to your campaigns, but you lack the resources to create or commission your own images, then it's a solid choice that stands out from the pack.

MavSocial Price: From $19/month for the Advanced plan that includes one user, 10 social profiles, and some advanced features.

Which Social Media Management Tool Is Best for You?

Your own business needs will dictate which of these services is best for you.

Hootsuite, Sprout Social, MavSocial, and Sendible all offer complete social media management options at various price points. Hootsuite is the masterful all-arounder, with an ever-expanding list of compatible networks. Sprout Social has the best collaborative features of the bunch at a premium price point. Sendible can be configured to find and reach out to potential leads for you, which will suit some businesses better than others. MavSocial comes with 20 million royalty-free images, ready to go.

For no-frills social media management, Buffer is easy to use and well priced. Post Planner and MeetEdgar each provide more budget-friendly options for curating and composing updates, at the expense of analytics and engagement tools. And for the visual networks, you have Iconosquare and Tailwind.

One final recommendation as you begin diving deep into social media management is a tool called KnowEm. KnowEm lets you register brand names across a huge number of social media websites, from Facebook to LiveJournal, Tumblr to Strava, and SoundCloud to ModDB. It can save agency professionals hours every week by automating much of the sign-up process, though it offers nothing in the way of traditional social media management tools.

This piece was originally published on September 14, 2017, by Andrew Kunesh and has since been updated with new tools and up-to-date app descriptions.

source https://zapier.com/blog/best-social-media-management-tools/

12 Morning and Evening Routines That Will Set Up Each Day for Success

You wake up an hour before work and rush to get ready. You shower at lightning speed and grab an energy bar and coffee before running out the door. Still, work leaves you feeling discombobulated and overwhelmed. Long before the week is over, you’re burned out and know you won't hit this week's goals.

How do you get out of this miserable rut? One word: Routines.

Morning and evening routines prime you for success. They help you achieve more, think clearly, and do work that actually matters. They keep you from stumbling through your day and make sure you get the most important things done.

All it takes is a bit of discipline, along with routines that will set you up for success. Here are the what and why of routines, along with 12 morning and evening routines you can implement to create more perfect days.

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• The Science of Habits and Creating Routines
• Morning Routines To Help You Start the Day Off Right
• Evening Routines That Set the Tone for the Next Day

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The Science of Habits and Creating Routines

First, let’s define what routine means: A routine is a sequence of actions that you do repeatedly.

Brushing your teeth nightly and getting ready for bed is a routine. Waking up at 6:00 AM and exercising every morning is a routine. Purchasing a bagel and reading the news before you head to work every morning is a routine. Even eating chips while watching Netflix is a routine. They’re all actions that happen again and again, a rhythm in your daily life.

That doesn't make them all good routines—they're simply routines by virtue of being done regularly. Helpful or not, every routine is powerful.

Routines Create High Achievers

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."- Aristotle

In his book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey writes about the habits, routines, and rituals of hundreds of artists, including Frederic Chopin, Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, and Ernest Hemingway. Even though their routines varied wildly, each individual had steps they followed to put them in an optimal state of mind.

After studying the great artists, Currey came to this conclusion:

In the right hands, [a routine] can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.

Productivity guru and experimenter extraordinaire Tim Ferris has five morning rituals to get him into a productive state of mind: making his bed, meditating, exercise, drinking tea, and journaling. Performance coach Tony Robbins also uses a morning routine, which includes a cold shower, breathing exercises, and meditation to prepare him for each day.

High achievers tend to find routines that work for them and then stick to them—it's typically something they credit as a core to their success.

Habits vs. Routines vs. Rituals: Wondering what the difference is between habits, routines, and rituals? Habits are things that we do automatically–things like checking your email first thing in the morning or putting your keys in a specific spot when you get home. Routines are usually a collection of habits or actions you do on a regular basis to bring order to your day—checking your email, then writing your day's to-do list, then checking your team's project management tool as a way of getting the day started. Rituals are like routines. The main difference is the attitude behind the actions: Taking a walk everyday at lunch could be considered a routine if you think of it as something you need to do for your productivity. Or it could be a ritual if you think of it as a way to break out of the mundane and enjoy nature. While we're focusing on habits and routines here, most routines could be turned into rituals with a change of perspective.

Routines Put Our Brains on Autopilot

But what makes the routines of high achievers so powerful? As it turns out, we're creatures of habit and can use that to accomplish whatever we want. In The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business, Charles Duhigg details how habits put our brains into an automatic state where little or no willpower is required.

It works like this:

• Step 1: Something happens that serves as a cue to your brain, putting it into "automatic" mode. A simple example is waking up. When I wake up, my brain immediately knows that it’s time to turn on the coffee machine. This habit has been ingrained in my brain over years.
• Step 2: Execute the routine. This is where I actually turn on the coffee machine, wait for it to brew, pour it into my favorite mug, sit in a chair by the kitchen window, and finally drink the coffee.
• Step #3: Reap the rewards of the routine. The delicious flavor and high-octane caffeine reinforce the routine so that the next morning I repeat it again.

Making coffee is just one small routine, but the daily consistency of it helps keep me going. Imagine if other, more powerful tasks that can empower you to accomplish big things came as easy as making coffee?

This is the power of routines. The small repeated actions can have an exponential effect. By implementing routines in the morning and evening, you can prime yourself for maximum productivity each day.

Morning Routines to Help You Start the Day Off Right

If you win the morning, you win the day

Ferris's and Robbins's morning routines both include meditation, while the routines of many others include starting the day off with a fresh cup of coffee. Regardless of your morning schedule, here are some of the best ways to start your day and prepare for success.

Rise Early

There are exceptions, such as Winston Churchill who liked to say in bed until 11:00 AM, but many high achievers rise early in order to prepare for the day. In those early hours, they can execute their routines while the rest of the world is asleep.

Consider these examples:

• Square CEO Jack Dorsey rises at 5:30 so that he can go for a six-mile jog.
• Virgin Group founder Richard Branson wakes at 5:45 to exercise and eat a proper breakfast.
• GM CEO Dan Akerson rises between 4:30 and 5:00 so he can talk to GE Asia.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook gets up at 4:30 so he can send emails and be at the gym by 5:00.

Even if they aren't naturally morning larks–the opposite of night owls–they've trained themselves to wake up early for the many benefits an early rise can bring. Those include increased productivity with fewer distractions in the early morning, greater creativity because you can work when your mind is fresh, and less stress if you use that extra time for meditation or quiet contemplation.
It could make you happier, too: Researchers in one study found that morning-type individuals reported higher levels of positivity and well-being.

Tip: Even if you're a night owl, you can train yourself to become a morning person by waking up 20 minutes earlier every day and soaking in some sunlight as soon as you wake.

Make Your Bed

If there's one habit you should adopt to improve your life, it's making your bed every day. That, at least, is the advice from Navy Seal Admiral William H. McCraven:

If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.

Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made — that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.

It's all about the small things.

Recite Affirmations

Affirmations are positive statements you can use to reframe how you think about yourself and the day to come. They are a way of visualizing the good things that will come to you that day and overcoming negative self-talk.

In his book The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM), Hal Elrod says:

When you actively design and write out your affirmations to be in alignment with what you want to accomplish and who you need to be to accomplish it—and commit to repeating them daily (ideally out loud)—they immediately make an impression on your subconscious mind. Your affirmations go to work to transform the way you think and feel so you can overcome your limiting beliefs and behaviors and replace them with those you need to succeed.

Some simple affirmations you could use are:

• I will do great things today
• I will make $XXX this year
• I am a highly respected [insert occupation]
• I am achieving [big goal]

Your aim is to affirm and visualize the things you want to happen. As you focus on these things, you begin to believe that you can and will achieve them, which then enables you to take action on them.

Although it might sound New-Age-y to some, affirmations are proven methods of self-improvement. As clinical psychologist Dr. Carmen Harra says. "Much like exercise, they raise the level of feel-good hormones and push our brains to form new clusters of 'positive thought' neurons."

Get some exercise

There are few things more transformative than exercise. Exercising in the morning increases blood flow, releases endorphins, and strengthens your body. It prepares you for the coming day, increases your overall energy levels, and helps you remain in optimal health. Numerous studies have shown that exercise is key in fighting depression and anxiety, and a Finnish study suggested that exercise is even correlated with increased wealth.

Implementing a daily routine of exercise will prepare you for maximum success through the day. And it doesn't even have to be a full gym workout to reap the benefits: A brisk walk in your neighborhood, a 7-minute workout, or a quick yoga session could get you going.

Need more motivation to get moving? Try tracking your activity automatically with Zapier, an app automation tool. With logs of your runs or workouts, you can see your progress and challenge yourself to keep at it.

Eat a proper breakfast

The fuel you consume in the morning has a significant effect on your ongoing performance—and thus, it should be the best fuel possible.

Dietician Lisa De Fazio recommends staying away from high-sugar, high-fat breakfasts and instead suggests a healthier choice, perhaps:

• Oatmeal
• Low-fat breakfast sandwich
• Smoothie
• Fruit and yogurt parfait

Think good carbs and fiber plus some protein. Those foods will give you energy and satisfy your food cravings while setting the stage for good decisions all day.

Take a cold shower

This one may seem a little extreme, but many people swear by taking cold showers each morning. It's similar to athletes who take ice baths, although slightly less frigid.

Why a cold shower? Because it can increase blood flow, burn away unhealthy fat, and release dopamine into the body. Like exercise, it kick starts your body.

This is why Tony Robbins plunges into 57 degree water every morning. He’s convinced that it is essential for maximum productivity.

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These might seem like minor things–waking up early, making your bed, saying your affirmations, exercising, eating a good breakfast, and taking a cold shower–but taken together into one consistent routine you do every day, you're well prepped to face anything that happens after. A morning routine takes the stress out of the start of the day and puts you on the best footing from the get-go.

Of course, customize your morning routine for your own preferences. The SAVERS graphic above from James Altucher's article and podcast with Hal Elrod can help you remember a few other things you can add to your morning routine: silence, visualization, reading, and scribbling. For more inspiration, My Morning Routine offers 200+ examples of morning routines you can adapt and adopt for yourself.

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Evening Routines That Set the Tone for the Next Day

The close of each day is just as important as the start. By implementing evening routines, you ready yourself for the next morning, recharge with a restful night, and minimize the resistance you encounter in getting things done.

Prepare goals for the next day

Determining your objectives for the coming day does two things. First, it allows you to identify your most important tasks in advance—before all the pressures of the day arrive on your doorstep. Ideally, the first few hours of each day should be spent conquering your most challenging task. This idea has been given various names, such as "eating the frog" and “slaying the dragon.”

Second, it allows your brain to begin thinking about those tasks as you fall asleep. In their book Organize Tomorrow Today: 8 Ways to Retrain Your Mind to Optimize Performance at Work and in Life, authors Jason Selk, Tom Bartow, and Rudy Matthew say:

Identifying daily priorities might seem like an obvious or insignificant step to take, but writing your most important tasks down the previous night turns your subconscious mind loose while you sleep and frees you from worrying about being unprepared. You’ll probably find that you wake up with great ideas related to the tasks or conversations that you hadn’t even considered!

Reflect on the day's achievements

It can be easy to lose sight of victories after a long day. Taking just a few moments at the end of the day to reflect on and celebrate your wins puts things into the proper perspective and gives you encouragement for the coming day. It helps you overcome the discouragement that often comes with setbacks.

In addition to asking at the start of his day "What good shall I do this day?", Benjamin Franklin asked every evening "What good have I done today?".

Benjamin Franklin's daily routine

Zen Habits author Leo Babauta puts it this way:

If you reflect on the things you did right, on your successes, that allows you to celebrate every little success. It allows you to realize how much you’ve done right, the good things you’ve done in your life.

You can do this in a variety of ways, including jotting things down in a blank Moleskine notebook, a gratitude journal, or an app on your phone. You can automatically track your productivity with RescueTime and Zapier as well:

Clear your head

It’s easy to take your work to bed, making it difficult to fall asleep as you mull over job-related problems. Clearing your head before sleep allows you to put aside the challenges of the day and ready your mind to shut down. There are numerous ways to do this, including:

• Meditation
• Light reading
• Playing Tetris (for productivity!)
• Watching a peaceful television show (The Walking Dead probably isn’t your best bet)
• Doing a "brain dump" of all the thoughts in your head in a journal before you go to bed

Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne describes his disengagement this way:

For me, this is going for a 20-minute walk every evening at 9:30 p.m. This is a wind-down period, and allows me to evaluate the day’s work, think about the greater challenges, gradually stop thinking about work and reach a state of tiredness.

Your goal is to engage your mind in something completely non-work related.

Prepare for the next morning

In order to minimize the amount of thinking you need to do in the morning, take time to prepare things. Pick out the clothes you’ll wear, prepare the food you’ll eat, prep the coffeemaker, and organize any work related materials you need to bring. If you’ll be going to the gym, lay out your workout clothes and water.

The less time and mental energy you expend on inconsequential things, the more you’ll have for the things that matter.

Tidy up

Waking up to a messy home isn't the most motivating way to start your day. Without regular sessions cleaning up and putting things away, you'll find your place quickly in disarray.

Thankfully, spending just 10 to 20 minutes a night tidying up will help reduce stress in the mornings and help you avoid marathon cleaning sessions on the weekends. If there's only one thing you do,clean and shine your sink. Like making your bed in the morning, this one task will give you a sense of accomplishment. Housekeeping guru FlyLady says:

This is your first household chore. Many of you can’t understand why I want you to empty your sink of your dirty dishes and clean and shine it when there is so much more to do. It is so simple; I want you to have a sense of accomplishment! […] When you get up the next morning, your sink will greet you, and a smile will come across your lovely face. I can’t be there to give you a big hug, but I know how good it feels to see yourself in your kitchen sink. […]

Go shine your sink!

Also, if you have children, you know the importance of setting up solid routines with them. They can help out too!

Practice proper sleep hygiene

Very few people practice proper sleep hygiene and their sleep suffers as a result. Generally speaking, you should:

• Stick to the same sleep and wake schedule.
• Minimize blue light from screens (this can be done using F.lux on your computer and "Night Mode" on your mobile device).
• Set the temperature in your room to between 60-65°F (15-18°C).
• Make your room as dark as possible.

It can be easy to minimize the importance of sleep, but it’s absolutely essential for optimum performance. In fact, sleep is so crucial that Arianna Huffington devoted an entire Ted Talk to it.

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It can be really tough to build routines into your life. It takes intention and discipline. Sometimes it feels simpler to just get the day started and then after a long workday crash into bed.

But the good thing about routines and habits is that the more you do them, the easier they become. They become ingrained in your day to the point where you find it harder to not do them.

So stick with it. You may find it tedious at first, but you’ll find your days will flow much more smoothly when you've bookended them with quality morning and evening routines.

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To create your morning and evening routines, you can write up a checklist that you can walk through every day until it becomes ingrained in you or set up a schedule, a la Ben Franklin. For example:

6 am: wake, make the bed, get coffee started
6:15: drink coffee and read the news
6:30: exercise
7: eat breakfast
7:15: shower
8-5: work
6: dinner
7:30: tidy up
8: time with family, TV, or other form of relaxation and entertainment
9:30: journaling or meditation
10: bedtime

What's your daily routine like?

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Keep reading:

• Keystone Habits: How to Improve All Areas of Your Life with One Small Habit
• How Your Mood in the Morning Affects Your Productivity All Day
• 20+ Fitness Tools that Track Your Exercise, Meals, Sleep, and More

This post was originally published in February 2017 and updated in April 2019

Day and night graphic designed by Freepik. Morning SAVERS graphic from James Altucher. Running image by Chanan Greenblatt. Book photo by CC) Public Domain.

source https://zapier.com/blog/daily-routines/

How a Data & Analytics Manager at Pearson Uses a Simple Zap for Meeting Reminders

"With Zapier, I have a better work-life balance."Dina Yankelewitz, Manager, Data and Analytics at Pearson

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Sometimes, the smallest changes can yield the biggest results. Think about the butterfly that flaps its wings in Peking and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine. For your work life, that can take the form of a simple reminder about upcoming meetings—one that cuts through even if you're not glued to a computer. Tasks add up throughout the day and projects pop up that need input, so it's not a surprise that a meeting could fall through the cracks.

But Dina Yankelewitz, a manager of data and analytics at Pearson, found a way to always get a meeting reminder, whether she's at her desk, on the road, or anywhere in between.

Her secret is Zapier, the app automation tool that makes connecting different applications a breeze. Dina created a Zap, Zapier's word for an automated workflow, that texts her phone one hour before each meeting. That means Dina gives herself plenty of time to prepare for the meeting and ensure her current availability.

About Pearson

Pearson was founded in the mid-1800s—1844, to be exact—in Yorkshire, England as a construction company. In the 1920s, the company's priority shifted to publishing, and it became one of the big names in the industry. Now, it's known as a leader in education, publishing everything from high school test prep materials to custom curriculum for professional training.

With over 35,000 employees across 70 countries, Pearson's education initiatives and supplies reach millions of people every year.

As a data and analytics manager at Pearson, Dina spends a lot of her time building dashboards that visualize the impact of key products on student performance. In this vein, she's interested in how effective Pearson's products are in improving both teacher and student performance at school; her research and analysis here has helped improve programs and learner outcomes.

The Tools Dina Uses at Pearson

Icon:	App:	Used For:
	Google Calendar	Calendar app
	SMS by Zapier	Zapier's built-in SMS app

Automatically Send an SMS Before Google Calendar Meetings

Missing a meeting can mean anything from wasting your coworkers' time to losing a huge sale. It's essential to have an airtight reminder system, so you're always there when you need to be. There are plenty of ways to accomplish this, from Slack reminders to Google Calendar's desktop notifications. But these notifications can pile up and pretty soon, they become background noise. And what happens if you snooze notifications or aren't always at your computer? These notifications can wind up missed, which defeats the whole point of a reminder.

Dina doesn't live at her desk. The data she compiles and the dashboards she creates are often customer and external facing. That means meeting customers and presenting the information she's researched. Because of that, she turned to the device that's always with her: her phone.

No matter where Dina is, an hour ahead of any meeting she has scheduled during the work week, Zapier sends her a text message reminding her of the start time, topic, other attendees, and if she needs to notify anyone else before it starts. This kind of personal notification cuts through the constant pings of a chat app or browser alert.

Her Zap is straightforward, connecting Google Calendar to SMS by Zapier:

The Workflow

You can customize this workflow however it works best for you. For example, you might want to have the text arrive 30 minutes before. Or maybe you use these reminders as a notification to start preparing for your meeting, and you prefer your reminders and entire day in advance. Whatever timing works for you, Zapier allows you to set the interval to meet your preferences.

Then, when the specified amount of time before a meeting arrives, the Zap triggers, sending an SMS to the number you enter with a message you write.

And that message is completely customizable too. If your phone is set to show preview of a text on the locked screen, you could simply have the meeting name and time it starts, like "Discuss data w/ Jon @ 2:00pm CT". If your smartphone is connected to a smartwatch, that concise message will get you all the information you need without having to unlock your phone.

If you think getting a text message every time you have a meeting might just add to your notification noise, you can trim down by filtering to only receive the messages when the meeting meets certain criteria. With a filter, you can specify that only meetings from particular hosts or participants get through, like your manager or biggest client.

This Zap is great if you often find yourself heads down on a project, ignoring pop-up notifications in Slack or from your browser, away from your computer often, or just like to have a little warning before a meeting starts.

Whether the company you work for has 35,000 employees, like Pearson, or just 35, an app like Zapier can help you spend time focusing on the job tasks that only you can do—while leaving the little things, like meeting reminders, to the machines.

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Want to find your own simple, game-changing workflow? Give Zapier a try for free.

Our stories explore how Zapier's users solve common problems. From marketers to CEOs, educators to real estate agents, millions use Zapier to automate their most tedious tasks. If you haven't yet, try Zapier for free to see what we're all about.

What's your story? Tell us how you use Zapier to do more. You can also read even more customer stories and find new ways to improve your workflow and productivity.

All images courtesy of Pearson.

source https://zapier.com/blog/pearson/

Survey Maker Showdown: Google Forms vs. Survey Monkey

Survey software helps you create surveys to collect data and gather feedback from a broad audience. You can ask questions in a variety of formats, solicit responses through multiple channels, and chart your data to get a big-picture view of all responses. Survey apps are often used for collecting customer or employee feedback, conducting data-based research studies, and even building quick polls.

Two of the most popular survey apps are Google Forms and SurveyMonkey. If you're in the market for a survey maker and are having trouble choosing between the two, this deep-dive comparison of each tool's features should make it easier to determine which one is right for your needs.

If neither tool fulfills your needs, you can find more options in our guides to the best form builder apps, best survey builder tools, and best online poll apps.

Common Features and What We Looked For

SurveyMonkey and Google Forms are both powerhouses in the survey field. And while both allow you to build surveys, forms, polls, and quizzes using a variety of question types, they cater to different needs and use cases.

To help you determine which tool is best for you, we looked at the features below. Click on any link to jump to the section that matters most to you, or skip to our feature comparison table.

• Pricing
• Design and Customization
• Collaboration Options
• Question Types, Rules, and Scoring
• Templates
• Branching and Conditional Logic
• Collecting Responses
• Analysis and Reporting

Pricing

While both apps have a free option, Google Forms' is much more robust.

Google Forms is 100% free for anyone with a Google account. You can use it to build as many surveys as you need, ask as many questions as you want, and collect responses from as many people as are willing to take your survey—all without ever paying a dime.

SurveyMonkey also has a free plan (called the Basic plan), but it's much more limited. While you can create unlimited surveys on the Basic plan, you can only ask a maximum of 10 questions per survey, and you can only see a maximum of 100 responses. To ask unlimited questions or collect unlimited responses using SurveyMonkey, you'll have to upgrade to a premium plan. SurveyMonkey's premium plans start at $32/month for individual plans and $25/user/month for team plans (with a minimum of three users).

So if price is a key consideration, and you think you'll need to ask more than 10 questions or expect to get more than 100 responses, Google Forms is the better tool for you. But if price isn't one of your top considerations, SurveyMonkey has many features you won't find in Google Forms that may make it worth paying a premium.

It's also worth mentioning that you'll have access to SurveyMonkey's premium features even if you select the free plan, but you won't be able to send a survey that uses premium features unless you upgrade. This gets confusing when you're building a survey. There's no indicator showing which features are free and which aren't, so you won't know that you've applied a premium feature until after you've made the change.

Design and Customization

Google Forms has limited customization options; SurveyMonkey is extremely customizable.

Google Forms doesn't really support customization, especially brand-specific. You have four options:

1. Pick a color template, which changes the color of the header and the margins.
2. Pick from pre-designed themes by category (e.g., workplace, food, nature), which adds a stock image to the header.
3. Upload a photo as the header image. In theory, you could upload your company logo to appear at the top of the form, but in our testing, we found that uploading an image rarely looked good on Google Forms. The dimensions have to be perfect or your image gets distorted.
4. Change the font of the survey questions. You only have four options to choose from, none of which look super professional.

Bottom line: Google Forms doesn't give you much wiggle room in terms of design customization.

SurveyMonkey's free plan is also fairly limited when it comes to customization options: You can choose among nine pre-designed themes and adjust your survey's layout. But with a premium plan, you can upload a logo, create a custom template, choose from dozens of fonts, change font colors and sizes, or add a background image.

And while Google Forms always displays its branding on your surveys, the SurveyMonkey Premier individual plan ($99/month) and Team Premier plan ($75/user/month) both give you the option to remove SurveyMonkey branding.

You can create multi-page surveys in both apps. But in Google Forms, multiple questions on a single page display in a long list you have to scroll through. In SurveyMonkey, you can turn on an option to have questions toggle: After answering a question, the next one appears automatically.

If customizing the design of your survey isn't terribly important for you, Google Forms should be sufficient. But if you need to create a branded survey or want to customize your survey's design in more detail, you'll want to invest in a premium SurveyMonkey plan.

Collaboration Options

SurveyMonkey offers more dynamic collaboration options than Google Forms.

Both Google Forms and SurveyMonkey let you create custom survey templates that you can share with your team. But beyond that, SurveyMonkey takes the cake.

SurveyMonkey users who subscribe to a team plan get a number of collaboration features. You can set granular permissions to give different users the ability to view, edit, or comment on surveys. Team members can leave comments on both survey previews and results, and you can send notifications to team members to let them know you made a change or left a comment.

Collaboration in Google Forms is less flexible. You can add collaborators, but the only permission you can set is Edit. There's no view-only option, and it doesn't support comments. It also doesn't send notifications when changes are made, and unlike some of Google's other tools like Docs and Sheets, Google Forms doesn't keep a history of changes that you can review.

If you're collaborating with a small team, Google Forms' collaboration tools are probably all you need. But if you're collaborating with a large team or external partners—or if you have complex review and approval workflows—SurveyMonkey's team plan is a better choice.

Question Types, Rules, and Scoring

Google Forms has more rules available and offers more robust automated scoring.

SurveyMonkey offers more options than Google Forms when it comes to question types. In addition to the basic question types you'll find in both tools—multiple choice, short answer, dropdowns, and checkboxes—SurveyMonkey offers sliders, payment-acceptance fields (via Stripe), and dropdown matrices.

Of course, most of SurveyMonkey's more advanced question types, including file uploads—which are available for free in Google Forms—are only available with a premium plan.

Both tools also have options for randomizing the order in which respondents see questions, which is helpful when using the tools to build quizzes. But Google Forms only offers an overall randomization option. SurveyMonkey provides more granular randomization options, letting you randomize only a specific page or certain questions. Again, this feature is only available with premium plans.

Google Forms lets you set up more specific validation rules for answers (i.e., requiring users to answer in a specific way) based on number, text, length, or regular expression. Answers that do not meet your rules will display customizable error messages. This is useful for things like validating that an inputted email address is actually formatted like an email address, ensuring cleaner data.

SurveyMonkey's validation rules don't allow for regular expressions, so you're limited to checking for date formatting, accurate email address formatting, and number formatting (e.g., allowing or disallowing the use of decimals). This is more accessible if you don't know how to write regular expressions, but it limits the types of responses you can validate.

If you're using the app to create a quiz and want to provide immediate feedback, both apps offer automated scoring. However, Google Forms' scoring is more robust because it can be used for more than just multiple choice questions and dropdowns. Short-answer questions can also be auto-graded by setting a number range (e.g., answer should be between 1 and 10) or setting text rules (e.g., answer must contain the word "oxygen").

If you need to collect payments through your form, SurveyMonkey offers a direct integration with Stripe that lets survey-takers make a payment. Google Forms doesn't offer this feature, though you can include a link to a PayPal or another payment processing tool.

Templates

SurveyMonkey offers pre-written questions and nearly 200 survey templates.

Google Forms only offers 16 basic templates that help you quickly build things like job applications, order forms, and assessments.

SurveyMonkey, on the other hand, offers nearly 200 survey templates—organized by industry and purpose—for everything from market research surveys to employee exit interviews. These templates each contain questions that are vetted by SurveyMonkey's experts, and the questions are presented in an order that maximizes response quantity and quality.

Free accounts can access 40 short survey templates, while the full library is available to users at the Advantage level and above.

If you want to mix and match, SurveyMonkey offers all users access to a question bank of 1,800+ pre-written questions. These questions have been written and reviewed by SurveyMonkey's survey methodologists and are certified to be methodologically sound, meaning that the question should provide accurate results with minimal bias.

Branching and Conditional Logic

SurveyMonkey offers slightly more branching and conditional logic options.

Conditional logic in surveys boils down to if/then statements. For example, "If the user selects Highly satisfied, then the survey ends and displays a thank-you page." Or "If the user selects anything less than highly satisfied, send the user to question What could we do better?"

Google Forms allows for this kind of branching for multiple choice and dropdown questions. You can send users to another section or question based on their previous answer, or you can choose to end the survey immediately.

SurveyMonkey also offers conditional logic, but only on its premium plans. It works in the same way as Google Forms: Send a respondent to a different question, page, or the end of the survey based on how they answer a specific question. But SurveyMonkey offers conditional logic on question types that Google Forms doesn't, such as checkboxes and star ratings.

Collecting Responses

SurveyMonkey offers more ways to collect survey responses.

Both Google Forms and SurveyMonkey let you send your survey via email, grab a link to post anywhere on the web, or embed the survey onto your website.

But SurveyMonkey offers a few other features that Google Forms doesn't. You can have people take your survey in Facebook Messenger, embed your survey into a mobile app, or even collect responses offline using the SurveyMonkey Anywhere app and upload them when you're back online. And if you need some help getting responses to your surveys, SurveyMonkey also has a product called Audience, where you pay them to promote your survey so you get more responses.

Looking for a tool that lets you conduct surveys on the go? Check out our guide to the best remote data collection apps.

Analysis and Reporting

SurveyMonkey makes it easy to visualize your data.

Both Google Forms and SurveyMonkey offer a variety of features for analyzing and visualizing your data. Both show you individual responses as well as summary data in graphical format.

Google Forms displays different types of graphs based on what type of question you asked.

SurveyMonkey, on the other hand, lets you select exactly how you want your summary data to display. On the free plan, you can choose between eight graph types—including pie charts, bar graphs, and line graphs—customize the colors your graphs display in, and even change the labels shown on your graphs for the data you've collected. This makes it really easy to visualize your data, customize it, grab screenshots of your graphs, and share them in a blog post or presentation.

Of course, you can do all of these things with Google Forms too, but it's not quite as simple. You have to send your data to Google Sheets and manually create your custom charts and graphs. Still, having your data in Google Sheets also gives you the ability to create pivot tables and use the Explore function to analyze your data in greater detail. Or you could send your data to Google Data Studio for even more visualizations.

SurveyMonkey's free plan doesn't let you export your results, so for deep analysis, you have to upgrade. Its available reporting tools increase in number and capabilities at each subscription tier, giving you options to filter your responses to analyze those from a specific group, measure sentiment, and evaluate statistical significance.

If you use questions from SurveyMonkey's question bank, you can even benchmark responses on commonly-tracked metrics—like customer satisfaction—against other users' results. The data behind these benchmarks is driven by the millions of answers that SurveyMonkey collects from users, and it can give you an idea of where you stand in the pack.

SurveyMonkey can also analyze the survey itself—even before you have any responses. The Genius feature scores your survey based on factors including survey length, question types, and estimated time to complete. The score provides an overall assessment, an estimate of completion rates, and suggested areas of improvement.

Google Forms vs. SurveyMonkey: Which App Should You Use?

If price is a concern, you're better off going with Google Forms. While SurveyMonkey has a free plan, it's extremely limited, and unless you're making very basic surveys and don't anticipate many responses, it won't get you far. Google Forms can also be a better option for testing the waters since its more limited range of options makes it easier to set up and distribute a survey without diving into advanced logic and analysis.

If design is a key consideration, SurveyMonkey is your better bet. Its surveys are much more customizable, and frankly, they look more professional than those created in Google Forms. SurveyMonkey is also a stronger option for advanced users who need quantitative analysis for large amounts of data—or for users who feel that they can leverage options like templates and industry benchmarks.

If you're not sure where to start, give Google Forms or SurveyMonkey's free plan a try and see which one sticks.

Finally, here's an at-a-glance feature comparison.

	Google Forms	SurveyMonkey
Pricing	100% free	Free plan available; feature availability increases with each premium tier
Design and Customization	Extremely limited	Robust options with premium plans
Collaboration Options	Limited to multiple editors	Viewing, editing, and commenting available
Question Types, Rules, and Scoring	More specific answer validation options and scoring options	More advanced question types
Templates	16 templates available	~200 templates and ~1,800 pre-written questions
Branching and Conditional Logic	Available for multiple choice and dropdown questions	Available for more question types
Collecting Responses	Email, link, or embed	Email, link, embed, Facebook Messenger, mobile embed, offline data collection
Analysis and Reporting	Limited, unless you use it in tandem with Google Sheets or Google Data Studio	Extensive options for data visualization

Automating SurveyMonkey and Google Forms

After you select your new survey tool and start collecting responses, you can do even more with the data you collect using these Zaps (automated workflows by Zapier).

• Send automatic follow-up emails to everyone who fills out your survey.

• Automatically add survey respondents to your email marketing tool.

• Automatically create tasks in your project management app to act on new survey responses.

source https://zapier.com/blog/google-forms-vs-surveymonkey/

If the Pomodoro Technique Doesn't Work for You, Try Flowtime

Finding the perfect productivity system is like finding the perfect recipe. Sometimes, a recipe with a really high rating tastes terrible. Sometimes, you find a comment that suggests adjustments, and those adjustments take it from mediocre to outstanding. And sometimes, you only use the recipe as a guide, modifying it to cater to your unique preferences and tastes.

The best productivity technique, like the best food, is personalized.

Productivity techniques can be adjusted, mined for their best parts, and mixed with parts of others until you've found a perfect blend. And that's exactly what Zoë Read-Bivens did to create the Flowtime Technique—an alternative to the Pomodoro Technique for people who dislike Pomodoro's consistent alarms.

The Flowtime Technique Is a Twist on Pomodoro

Flowtime is modified Pomodoro, so to understand the Flowtime Technique, it's helpful to first revisit the framework of the Pomodoro Technique.

While in college, Francesco Cirillo—the creator of the Pomodoro Technique—figured out that it was easier to stay focused when he 1) put a time limit on how long he planned to focus on a single task and 2) rewarded himself for staying focused by taking frequent breaks.

From that discovery, the Pomodoro Technique was born. Cirillo recommends doing focused work in 25-minute increments throughout the day. After each pomodoro (25-minute focus session), take a five-minute break from your work. And after completing four consecutive pomodoros, take a longer break, usually between 20 and 30 minutes.

Cirillo used a kitchen timer designed to look like a tomato to time his focus periods and breaks, which is how the Pomodoro Technique got its name—"pomodoro" means tomato in Italian. But today, there are dozens of Pomodoro timer apps you can use to automatically time and track each of your pomodoros and breaks.

The Problem with Working in Pomodoros

Before introducing the Flowtime Technique, Read-Bivens wrote about some of her struggles while working in pomodoros:

The first problem with the Pomodoro Technique is that the timer is a tyrant. The indivisibility of a pomodoro is supposed to prevent interruptions. Instead, it often forces an exhausted me to work longer than I'm comfortable with, or it interrupts me when I'm engaged and working well.

As Read-Bivens describes, one of the big problems with Pomodoro is that the timer is a consistent interruption that inhibits your ability to get into a flow state. Flow state describes a period of time in which you're fully engaged and immersed in a task. While in a flow state, you're highly focused and productive, and your ability to stay focused and productive is effortless.

So let's say you've achieved flow state, you're highly focused and productive, and then a timer goes off signaling that it's time for you to take a break. If the distraction of the alarm alone doesn't take you out of flow state, the break most certainly will.

Pomodoro is a great approach to tackling tasks that you don't want to do (like studying for an exam) or tasks that require little thought (like copying and pasting data from a document into a spreadsheet). The short duration of pomodoros and promise of a break as a reward can encourage you to stay focused and do what you need to do.

But other tasks like writing, coding, or creating art—tasks that require creativity, innovation, and/or problem-solving—may not be ideal to break into pomodoros. Limiting how much time you dedicate to those tasks may prevent you from getting into flow state and enjoying the benefits of its resulting boost to your productivity and focus.

The Flowtime Technique Solves Pomodoro's Big Problems

Flowtime Technique is Read-Bivens's solution to Pomodoro's problems. Here's how it works:

You start by writing down what one task you plan to work on during a focus session. Picking one task—what Read-Bivens calls "unitasking"—is the "one hard and fast rule of the Flowtime Technique."

Once you've picked your task, write down the time you start working on it, and then work until you feel like you need a break. You're not working for any specific amount of time, and there's no timer that signals when it's time for a break. Instead, you just have to monitor your focus and thoughts. When you start feeling tired or distracted, write down the end time, and take a break.

The length of your break is also up to you, though Read-Bivens offers a few suggestions:

• For 25 minutes of work or less, take a five-minute break.
• For 25-50 minutes of work, take an eight-minute break.
• For 50-90 minutes of work, take a 10-minute break.
• For more than 90 minutes of work, take a 15-minute break.

However, she notes that "the break times I suggest aren't rules. If you need a 10-minute break after working for 40 minutes, that's fine. Refreshed work is orders of magnitude better than fatigued work." So take a break for however long you need to feel refreshed. And if you're struggling to determine when you need a break, she recommends picking smaller tasks to focus on until you get a better sense of when you're feeling fatigued.

With the Flowtime Technique, you're essentially still breaking your day into pieces and rewarding yourself with breaks when you need them just like in Pomodoro. But because you're not tied to a timer, you're more likely to find yourself in a flow state from time to time. Plus, you don't have to suffer through staring at your work when you're distracted and waiting for an alarm to signal that it's time to take a break.

The Benefits of the Flowtime Technique

We've already discussed how Flowtime enables flow state, which is one of its primary benefits. But there are many other benefits to the approach.

First, because you're documenting start times and end times for each task, you can actually use your Flowtime data for time-tracking to see how much time you're dedicating to different types of tasks. Knowing how much time specific tasks usually take you can help you create better estimates for how long future tasks will take and discover what activities you need to eliminate to make time for new goals.

Second, Read-Bivens also recommends adding a column to track interruptions—things like calls, texts, emails, or desk drop-bys that pull your attention away from the task you're working on. Tracking this data could help you discover your biggest sources of distraction so you can take steps to eliminate those distractions.

With Flowtime, you can track the number of times you were interrupted or include notes detailing what those interruptions were.

Or if you work in different places—home, the office, a coffee shop, or a coworking space—tracking interruptions could help you find out which space is best for working when you need to stay focused.

Third, keeping track of how long you were able to focus naturally can help you identify days and times of the day when you're most focused or most easily distracted. This information can help you plan your day better, scheduling work that requires deep focus during times when you're naturally inclined to be focused.

And finally, if the more structured Pomodoro method works better for you, you could use Flowtime's approach for a couple of weeks to create your own personalized lengths for pomodoros. For example, if you find that you're usually able to focus for 60 minutes at a time in the morning and 15 minutes at a time in the afternoon, you could set your Pomodoro timers for those times to maintain the structure of Pomodoro without impacting your flow state potential. You can also keep track of the length of your breaks to determine the ideal length and frequency of your Pomodoro breaks.

Tools That Help with the Flowtime Technique

Read-Bivens recommends two options for recording your focus times and breaks for Flowtime: pen and paper or a spreadsheet.

And while both of these methods work, pen and paper isn't the most efficient way to review historical details, and long spreadsheets with tons of data can be difficult to scroll through to find what you're looking for. For these reasons, one of the following apps might be a better choice.

Toggl (Web, iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, Chrome, Firefox)

Best for people who want something that's as easy to use as pen and paper

A lot of time-tracking apps are designed for tracking billable hours to a project or client, meaning there's a ton of setup required to start tracking your time. Toggl has a much more lightweight approach. You can start tracking time for tasks by typing in the name of your task and clicking enter. That starts the timer, which then runs until you press stop.

Over the course of your day, type the name of the task you're getting ready to work on and start the timer. Toggl tracks the time you work on the task down to the second and lists your start and end times once you stop the timer. You can track your breaks in the same way: Type Break as your task and start the timer, then stop the timer when you return from your break.

Toggl saves all of your tasks, breaks, and session lengths, and you can access that data at any time from Reports. Pick a date—or a date range—in its calendar view to access your tasks and session lengths for any date in the past.

And if you want to be able to see how you're spending your time in a calendar view, create a Zap—an automated workflow by Zapier—that adds an entry in Google Calendar every time you start a timer in Toggl.

Or if you want to make sure you track the time you spend in meetings, use this Zap to start a Toggl timer when an event on your Google Calendar starts.

Toggl Price: Free for up to five users; from $10/month for the Starter plan that includes scheduled email reports and unlimited team members.

TMetric (Web, iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Edge)

Best for seeing your daily focus sessions and breaks in a timeline view

TMetric is another time-tracking app you can use for Flowtime, and its big benefit is that it shows you a timeline of how you spent your day. Focus periods appear in dark gray, and breaks appear in light gray. Hover over an entry in the timeline to see the exact amount of time you spent on it. A summary of the total time you spent on tasks/breaks also displays.

The best way to use TMetric is to create tasks at the beginning of the day for any item you're going to focus on during a focus period. Then, when it's time to start working on that task, click the play icon next to it to start recording your time. When you're finished, click stop. You can log your breaks throughout the day or add them later to gaps in your timeline.

When you need to view your performance for previous days, select the appropriate date in TMetric to see your tasks and timeline for that day. And if you already have a to-do app you like to use and don't want to have to retype everything into TMetric, you can create a Zap that sends your tasks from Todoist, Jira, Asana, Trello, or Google Tasks to TMetric automatically.

TMetric Price: Free for up to five users; from $5/month for the Professional plan for access to budgeting and invoicing features.

HourStack (Web, iOS, Android)

Best for a detailed weekly view of your focus sessions and breaks

HourStack is another great option for the Flowtime Technique, giving you a visual weekly picture of how you spent your time. It's like a calendar, but it's for things you did in the past instead of things you need to do.

To track your focus sessions and breaks in HourStack, add an entry and enter the name of the task you plan to focus on. You can also add an estimate for that task if you're curious to see if you can accurately estimate exactly how long it will take.

Once you've created the task, click on the task card and select Start to begin tracking your time. When you're finished, click on the task card again to pause the time or mark the task as complete. Then, do the same thing to track your breaks.

At the end of the week, you'll have a complete calendar view of each of the week's focus periods and breaks, alongside your estimates for how long you thought each task would take (if you added those).

And if you have your to-do's and tasks logged in another app already, you can send them to HourStack using one of its native integrations, or connect HourStack with more than 1,000 other apps using one of Zapier's HourStack integrations.

HourStack Price: From $7/month for the Personal plan that includes one user, app integrations, and unlimited entries.

Finding the Productivity Technique That's Right for You

Both the Pomodoro Technique and the Flowtime Technique were created by regular people who were simply looking for ways to stay focused and productive. And Flowtime is a great example of taking an existing technique that kind of works and putting your own spin on it, much like you would a recipe or anything else where preferences and tastes come into play.

In the end, the goal of using a productivity technique isn't to follow its rules to the letter. It's to discover new ways to stay focused, to get things done even when you don't want to, or to find better methods for prioritizing and tackling your to-do list.

Maybe neither Pomodoro or Flowtime is right for you. Maybe the best solution for you is a blend—a PomoFlowTime where you use timers when working on tasks you hate and don't when working on things that inspire you. And if that's what works for you, that's great. But if you write about it so others can use it, please don't call it PomoFlowTime.

source https://zapier.com/blog/flowtime-technique/