Top 10 Easy-to-Use Creative Work Tools to Be More Productive

Explore the top 10 easy-to-use creative tools that will enhance your productivity. Uncover the secret to a more efficient creative workflow.

Reaching a creative goal, whether a personal or professional one, comes with inevitable challenges.

Creative leadership coach, Jeff Fajans, has helped clients across a multitude of industries around the globe reach their creative goals with confidence and momentum. Below is a list of the Top 10 Creative Work Tools, as recommended by Jeff to help you learn how to create a momentum system to help you stay motivated by prioritizing your goals and overcoming creative blocks with confidence.

These tools are easy-to-use, flexible, and customizable - characteristics critical to facilitating creative work.

1. Trello

Trello is Jeff’s personal go-to system for mapping out and making consistent progress on my creative projects. Great for both high-level strategy and day-to-day execution. Trello is an easy, free, flexible, and visual way to manage your projects and organize anything.

2. Toggl

Toggl is my favorite tool that helps you understand where your time & attention are going - and whether or not this is aligned with your priorities. The quality of our creativity, productivity, and our life comes down to how we spend our time & attention. Toggl is a simple, customizable tool that will help you become more mindful & deliberate about how you use your time, attention, and energy.

3. An Analog (Paper) Journal

There is something about using an analog (handwritten) journal that requires us to slow down, to process things differently, and to open up our creativity in different ways compared to solely using digital tools. Blank pages allow one the freedom to make priority lists, map out ideas, and draw diagrams & models however one wishes without constraint. Check out the analog journal Jeff is currently using.

4. Notion

More and more of my clients are using Notion lately - and I can see why. Notion is a new tool that blends your everyday work apps (databases, kanban boards, notes, wikis, calendars, and reminders, etc.) into one.

5. Voice Memos

If you have any type of smartphone, you have a voice memo app - but you may be under-utilizing it. Because creativity is so unpredictable, we need to be ready to capture our a-ha moments, insights, and ideas as they come to us. Whether you are out walking your dog, driving to work, or enjoying a relaxing day at the beach, recording the ideas that come to us (and reviewing them later) is a key aspect of an effective creative process. Current voice memos on iOS

6. Google Calendar

While many creatives & entrepreneurs feel resistance towards scheduling things into a calendar, an effective calendar tool is critical towards designing the life you want to live and ensuring your most important work gets done consistently. Google calendar is a web-based time-management & scheduling tool that allows one to create events, set reminders, manage tasks, and build effective habits.

7. 750words.com

750words.com was created to help people develop a daily writing habit, but it is so much more. Inspired by the creative morning pages practice - which proposes that writing down anything that comes into your head (without censorship) will help inspire new ideas, reduce overwhelm & anxiety, and overcome creative blocks & become unstuck - 750words.com is a private, online writing platform that is simple, fun, informative, and great for supercharging one’s creativity. Additionally, this platform provides tools to analyze how fast you write, how much you get distracted, and even the feelings, themes, and tonality of what you are writing.

8. Coach.me

A home for ambitious, creative people. Coach.me offers habit tracking, personal coaching, and community learning programs that can support you in creating & sustaining a creative lifestyle. Whether you are looking to boost your productivity, begin a mindfulness meditation practice, or develop a healthy eating or exercise habit, Coach.me helps you build better habits and stay accountable to them.

9. 4-Color-In-One Pen

Jeff claims it might sound silly, but he feels much more creative and productive when using a 4-color-in-one pen with his handwritten analog journal. Rather than being constrained to one color and creating symbols or numbers to identify priorities and different types of written input why not use something even more visually striking? Create your own color system and see what you experience with this simple tool!

10. Things

Things is an award-winning personal task manager that helps you achieve your goals and get things done more easily. A delightful design, seamless user-experience, and powerful features (planning & organizing, scheduling, reminders, search, etc.) make this a favorite taskmanagement tool for creatives. Currently for Mac and iOs only.

Do you want to continue to discover strategies to tap into and amplify your creativity, and build productive habits. Are you ready to bring your creative ideas to life?

In his course Personal Productivity: How to Achieve Your Creative Goals, Jeff teaches you how to overcome the roadblocks that lead to feeling stuck, distracted, or overwhelmed.