6 Amazing Free Tools You’ll Use Everyday

If you’re like me, you have a bookmark bar full of great software programs that make life easier and let me take credit where credit is not due. 

I want to share with you some of my favourite free tools. Ones I use daily, all sitting as bookmarks on every computer I use. Whether or not you use some of them already, or you’ve never heard of any, I can guarantee you’ll find a diamond in amongst these gems.

Canva is graphic design software for non-graphic designers, which is why I love it.

You can create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. Users can choose from many professionally designed templates, and edit the designs and upload your photos through a drag and drop interface.

It’s very user friendly and a great free tool for editing and updating. As with many on this list, it offers a Pro version, which costs, but the free version is all you’ll need for most of your work. Just be sure to delete the images files you don’t want/need as you go to keep it free.

I love a useful flow chart; it gets my ops blood pumping, and Lucid Chart is the king of the flowy.

Although this comes with an advanced warning that you can lose hours dabbling in the software. Lucid Chart allows me to get my process thoughts onto ‘paper’, whether that be organisational modelling, mapping out a customer journey or email automation workflow.

I find the drag and drop feature of Lucid Chart easy to work with, allowing me to tinker with a system to develop and refine as we go.

Again delete what you don’t need, as the free version only gives you a small amount of saved space.

One of the lightbulb moments of my professional career was embracing outsourced labour. Although there are areas of business that require permanent staff, such as your customer-facing troops, there are others that do not.

Permanent staff are expensive, and although we would love to have an Apple or Nike sized team, we don’t have the $...yet. 

UpWork connects you to freelancers and outsourced professionals from around the world. Using outsourced team members means you pay by the project, no wage, super and employee expenses.

Where I find UpWork to be worth its weight in gold is in content/copywriting, graphic design, software and web development. We utilise front-end web developers from India, graphic designers from Indonesia, and a Head Chef/content writer from the USA for our sister company Chef Works.

You filter by type of freelancer, location, budget; and it usually takes a few failed attempts to find the right freelancer for the job or project, but once you find them you’ll guard them tightly and use them often.

Ever have a team or business project take off with team gusto and energy, only to see progress begin to slow down, people lose interest until you finally let it die without so much as a whimper?

We certainly have. The fact is, without project management software, it’s tough to keep track of multiple projects, an arsenal of tasks and keeping people individually accountable for each. Asana helps us with this. 

We use it for marketing calendars, website projects and simple project checklists.

In its basic form, it proofreads your work for spelling and grammar mistakes. So important emails, blogs and social media posts all go through daily.

However, where it comes into its own is on the pro version, where it offers ways to improve your writing in terms of engagement, sentence structure and readability. 

You have Grammarly to thank for helping make this piece a lot more engaging.

How do you price uniform + decoration jobs to ensure you make a healthy margin?

Well, ditch the Excel sheet, as there is an online calculator made specifically for the branded uniform industry.

When I was a uniform distributor, I used an Excel version of this calculator every day; it was such a useful tool to quickly ensure that a job was viable and how to price for profit.

By making it available online, you can now bookmark it, so it’s ready to use whenever you need it. You can even use it on mobile when out of office. 

I hope at least one of these makes a significant difference in your daily working life. Are there any other free tools you use that are not on this list? Let us know in the comments below.