Ultimate Diary Planner, Happy, Dealing with Overwhelm and Learning with Sophie Jewry of Brand Kitchen

What We Recommended:

Tools & Apps

Basecamp – “Basecamp is brilliant – the one that I like best. I’ve only actually just gone to Basecamp 3, which is the new thing, which they’ve brought the cost right down, which is brilliant. I am really enjoying it, there’s a Campfire feature, which is a bit like Skype or private messaging just between the people in the team on that particular project, so you can chat to each other in real-time, which is very cool. I love Basecamp.”

Dropbox – “what do I actually use every single day? That is Dropbox. I use it all day every day. I get clients send me files, I send clients files, my team, we all work with Dropbox and send things to each other. It is a massive, massive, massive part of my day-to-day working of business, and also I store loads of personal stuff on there, as well.”

Infusionsoft – “A big part of my business is Infusionsoft, which I guess falls under the category of CRM. A lot of my clients would never use half of what Infusionsoft is capable of. I don’t even use half of what Infusionsoft is capable of, but I do use a lot of it. I do use it every day. It helps me automate processes and systematise the business in a way that frees up more times to be able to get on with the things that need to get done outside of that process. It helps me think in a much more structured way about how I do things, and then look for solutions to do things better. It also handles all my payments for products that come through, including one-off payments and also payments over time. It also helps me do my newsletters and it helps me get sign-up things done and automation, and it just does loads.”

Blinkist – I asked if Sophie had heard of Blinkist. And explained that I came across it listening to a Podcast a good year or two ago, and it was the people who set it up that were being interviewed, and their editorial process is really robust, so the actual quality of what they do is really good. They have about five editors for every book, so it really is putting the real key points on each chapter into what they call blinks, which is like a page, so it was about ten pages per book

Sophie said, “Well, only about a week ago, my friend Ruby McGuire said, “Have you heard of this? It’s really good”. I said, “No.” She said, “Well, you might like it.” I’m going to try it. Again, one of my peculiarities, but I quite like the actual process of the whole bit, so I don’t know how I’ll feel about a mini version of it. I might feel like I’m missing out, so I’m not sure, but I’m going to give it a whirl and see if I like it, because if I like it, it will be really cool.

Other Resources

Ultimate Diary Planner – “I have my diary planner, which I know we’ve talked about before, which I designed in December the year before last, 2014. I couldn’t find a diary that worked for me, so I thought, “I’m going to design one, and then I’ll see if anybody else wants a copy,” and it’s kind of gone from there.”

Intuos pen – “Most people who aren’t in design will not probably even know what that is, but essentially you might have seen one. It’s this little pad next to my desk.