Useful tools you might be missing from your work-life

From email to an iPhone, PR and content marketing pros have dozens of tools they can’t live without. If you’re like me, you regularly survey the landscape of tools you use and consider whether it may be time to retire or replace something. In that vein, here are three tools I currently can’t live without.

Trello — Organize basically anything

Yes, I’m the person in the office always pushing some new collaborative task application of some sort, but since we adopted Trello a couple years ago I’ve become convinced we couldn’t possibly produce our blog without it. It lets us organize topics, assign tasks, collect supporting materials such as images and coordinate our publishing schedule. It can be a bit overwhelming to get started, mostly because it’s such a flexible tool. But even so, I recommend taking some time to dive in and see what it can do for you. The best part is that you probably only need the tier they offer for free.

PDFPen for iOS — quickly and easily edit PDF documents on iPhone and iPad

You are perhaps looking at me a bit sideways for recommending a $20 iOS app, but this is an insanely useful tool, especially if you don’t already have Adobe’s even-higher-priced PDF editing tools. Even if you do subscribe to Adobe’s $50/month Creative Cloud, you may find PDFPen’s suite of tools useful. PDFPen for iOS lets you mark up a PDF with changes (like proofing edits or design tweaks), fill-in and sign forms and even edit PDFs. If you ever have to sign and fax or scan documents or provide feedback on files from a designer, you will get more than your money’s worth from this tool.

Ringr — remotely record podcast guests with higher quality than Skype

This was a new one for 2018 for me, introduced to me by my boss Jon Newman (who has started a Rutgers sports podcast, if you haven’t heard). There are lots of tools to help with podcast production, but so few of them adequately solve the issue of recording remote guests. A lot of podcasts you hear will have great audio quality for the hosts but fall down when it comes to guest-audio quality—often resorting to a recording a Skype signal. With Ringr, each guest can “call in” on her computer or mobile device, and the service takes care of creating a local recording and uploading it to the server.

What tools are crucial for you to get your work done?