Your time is precious, so let tools do some heavy lifting where possible. Hack #2: leverage productivity and content creation tools to save time and improve output.
Here are some categories and examples: - Project & Task Management Apps: Use Notion, Trello, Asana, or even a bullet journal to keep track of all your content ideas, to-do lists, and deadlines. This gets things out of your head and into a system, so you don’t waste mental energy remembering tasks. For example, create a “Content Calendar” board in Trello with columns: Ideas, In Progress, Filming, Editing, Published. Drag cards as you move through stages. It provides clarity at a glance and satisfaction as you move items to “Published”. Tools like Notion can combine calendar, docs, and wikis – you might have your video ideas, script drafts, and sponsor info all in one organized workspace. - Note-taking/Quick Capture: Use apps like Evernote or just your phone’s notes app to jot ideas the moment they occur. Alternatively, carry a small notebook. Capturing ideas in the moment prevents them from evaporating and saves you time brainstorming later. Also, you can build on those initial ideas later when you sit down to plan content. - Template and Snippet Tools: Create templates for repetitive stuff. If you send a lot of similar emails (to brands, to collab inquiries), keep a template so you’re not writing from scratch each time. A tool like TextExpander or even canned responses in Gmail can let you insert pre-written blocks of text with a shortcut. For social media captions, perhaps have a basic template and just tweak each time. For video editing, have a template project with your common assets (intro, outro, music tracks) already in place. - AI and Automation: In 2025, creators are increasingly aided by AI. For example, use AI transcription services to get your podcast or video transcribed in minutes (saving you or an assistant hours of typing). Tools like Descript can auto-generate captions and even allow editing video by editing text (huge time saver). Consider using AI like ChatGPT (hey!) to brainstorm title ideas or outlines (“Give me 5 video title ideas about X”). For social posts, AI can draft captions or find relevant hashtags quickly (always review for your voice, but it gives a starting point). Automation tools: If This Then That (IFTTT) or Zapier can do things like automatically share your new YouTube video to Twitter and Facebook when published, or save your IG posts to Dropbox. These little automated flows add up to significant time saved. Even setting up your lights and camera and leaving them in position can be considered a “tool hack” – fewer minutes wasted each session on setup. - Focus and Time Apps: If you struggle with staying on task, use apps to help. Forest app plants a virtual tree that dies if you exit the app (i.e., if you pick up your phone, you kill the tree – surprisingly motivating to not check notifications!). Or Pomodoro timers that gamify 25-minute work sprints. There are also site blockers like Freedom or StayFocusd to keep you from drifting into endless scrolling.
A key hack here: Don’t try to implement too many tools at once. Identify pain points in your workflow (“I spend too much time doing X manually”) and find a tool for that. The right tool can cut what took hours down to minutes. For instance, scheduling posts for the week with Buffer in one go (1 hour) vs manually posting daily (15 minutes a day, which is 1.75 hours a week) – you save 45 minutes and also mental energy each day.
Another example: Graphy’s hack #5 talks about a work shutdown ritual – which is less a tool, more a habit aided by tools. At day’s end, you might use your task app to list tomorrow’s top tasks and then literally shut your computer. That mental clarity is a hack that keeps you focused and prevents overworking.
In summary, identify where a tool can eliminate drudgery or streamline a process, get comfortable with it, and you’ll buy back time (and reduce errors – humans are error-prone, automations aren’t, as long as they’re set right). Just avoid tool overload – each tool should clearly solve a problem or it’s not worth the complexity.