10 Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

There's a special kind of satisfaction that derives from being productive and accomplishing much with little time and effort. And there's tons of frustration when you put the time in and at the end of the day nothing much has moved forward.

In this feature, we wanted to share some of our favorite tools - these are all on our speed dial and help us keep our team lean and our quality up. You'll probably know some, but maybe not all.

1. Google Drive

Category: file storage

Why you need it: access your documents from anywhere and edit them online

Ok, so you're probably using Google Drive already. If you're not, you need to get your free Google Drive account now. You get to store your documents online (up to a massive 15 GB for free), share them easily with collaborators, access them from anywhere in the world and create all types of docs (word documents, spreadsheets, forms, image files and many many more) without having to pay a penny.

2. Canva

Category: image design

Why you need it: create professional graphics for your website and social media

Need to try your hands on a new DIY logo? Need to create a new race poster? You can do all that and a ton more with Canva. Canva gives you stunning social media, print media, banner, logo and other templates to create professional-standard graphics you can download and use for free.

3. TinyPng

Category: image optimization

Why you need it: speed up your website load speed

We use TinyPng all the time for optimizing images before we upload them to our websites. It's a very easy to use drag-and-drop online tool that drastically reduces the size of your images (often by more than 60%) without any discernible compromise in quality.

4. Google Alerts

Category: news alerts

Why you need it: monitor news stories from around the web

Another fantastic free Google tool. Have you ever had a need to monitoring the web for news and stories containing certain keywords? Maybe you want to know what's happening in your area or follow news of other events or sports? Google Alerts can do all that through a simple news digest of all the stories you care about delivered to your inbox.

5. Buffer

Category: social media scheduling

Why you need it: manage your content schedule across several social media platforms

There are other tools you can use to manage your social media content schedule. Hootsuite does that and more, but if you're looking for the best scheduling tool (only) and don't care about other features, Buffer is your app. Get a fee account to get started and easily schedule ahead posts on both Facebook and Twitter. Our favorite feature: auto-load images from links even when writing tweets.

6. Hootsuite

Category: social media management

Why you need it: manage, monitor and schedule content on social media in one place

If you don't have the time to manage several different tools and are happy to get most features under one roof, try Hootsuite. Hootsuite does content monitoring, scheduling and posting in a single window and across several social media accounts (although, like Buffer, only one account per platform under the free plan).

7. Asana

Category: project management

Why you need it: plan and manage all your event tasks in one place

When it comes to project management of any kind, from planning out your new race website to managing your entire event workflow, there's no beating Asana. Powerful, easy to use and - for most event teams - free, Asana has got everything you need to take your project management to another level.

8. MailChimp

Category: email marketing

Why you need it: manage newsletters, mailing lists and email campaigns

If you are building an audience of fans and prospective participants for your race, wish to continue engaging past participants and easily manage communications with volunteers, you need a mailing list management tool. Mailchimp is probably the best in the industry - certainly one of the harder free offerings to beat. Get 2,000 subscribers (12,000 emails per month) for free and more features than you can shake a stick at.

9. Warble Alerts

Category: Twitter alerts

Why you need it: monitoring Twitter for mentions and hashtags

If Hootsuite is not your thing and you only need a meat-and-potatoes Twitter alert service, try Warble. You receive a daily email with Twitter alerts on any keyword you choose you track. Perfect if you like browsing through your alerts over coffee.

10. Bitly

Category: URL shortening

Why you need it: track link stats; share short, memorable URLs

Shortened URLs are super popular these days, with several organizations having their own dedicated short domain. Bitly is the granddaddy of shorteners and offers a massive 10,000 short links with its free account. The service is very simple: provide a horribly long URL, receive a nice neat short URL you can track online. Use the short URLs on Twitter (obviously) or wherever you need a more convenient URL you can remember by heart.