49: Three of My Favorite Things: Tools That Help Me Everyday

In this episode, I share three of my favorite tools that I use daily to enhance my productivity and organization. I discuss the Full Focus Planner, a game-changing tool from Michael Hyatt for managing time and setting goals; the Remarkable, an electronic note-taking device that helps keep my notes organized and easily accessible; and the Sidetrack, a portable monitor extender for my laptop that significantly boosts my efficiency, especially when I'm on the go. Tune in to learn how these tools can help you streamline your workflow and build a business you love.

Full Focus Planner: https://fullfocusstore.com/pages/planner
Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt: https://fullfocusstore.com/products/free-to-focus
Remarkable: https://remarkable.com/
SideTrak: https://www.amazon.com/stores/SideTrak/page/BB06159F-1F7B-43CE-B6E1-CB901C43BE38?is_byline_deeplink=true&deeplink=76F8035F-842E-43E1-BDA9-2CD1908F9721&redirect_store_id=BB06159F-1F7B-43CE-B6E1-CB901C43BE38&lp_asin=B092W7Y8XT&ref_=cm_sw_r_ud_ast_store_MA1KYSE44RJS95QAPB9T

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Beth Whitworth
• 0:31 Welcome to Accounting with Confidence
• 2:15 Favorite Thing #1: Full Focus Planner
• 9:10 Favorite Thing #2: Remarkable Note-Taking Device
• 18:51 Favorite Thing #3: SideTrack Monitor Extender
• 25:41 Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

 I am Beth Whitworth race car driving quilt making CPA firm owning wife, mom, and boss. I'm here to help you build a business you love by sharing all of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the excellent sides of working in this industry. It's not always easy, but after many years, I can finally say it's worth it.

Let me guide you on your journey to accounting with confidence.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. I'm your host, Beth Whitworth, and today I'm here to just talk about a few of my favorite things. Actually just three of them. And these are things that I use almost on a daily basis and have been using them for years. And I will start out by saying I am absolutely not an affiliate for any of these products, but I will see what links I can put in the show notes to help you get to the people that make these tools.

So. I'm finding it hard to believe, but it is. We're at episode 49, so I'm almost at episode 50 and I realize that this podcast has, it started in late 2022 and it had a couple of hiatuses, but we are currently on a roll. So what I'm gonna ask you right now is if you haven't yet subscribed. On YouTube or followed me on LinkedIn or followed me in where, wherever you're listening to this, if you can, you know, give me a subscription that would help get, uh, more eyes on my podcast or ears I should say too, because for me, I'm still an avid podcast listener.

I don't really, uh, listen to podcasts or watch podcasts on YouTube. So, but I do provide both formats, so I would love it if you would get in there and take that action and just subscribe, like, comment, anything, just to kind of help as I'm starting to get some, some traction here by having episodes every week.

So I would love that. Okay. But now we're gonna start with my favorite things and we're probably, we're gonna start in the order that I started using them. So the first one is called a Full Focus Planner, and you can see I am a, I'm a color pen junkie, but what this planner is, it's from Full Focus and it was produced by Michael Hyatt, who is, he's a writer and a, a kind of an expert in te kind of teaching people how to get better with their time and their time management and be good leaders.

And I, there was a book that he has that. It's called Free to Focus, and it kind of goes through some ways to really help you achieve more by not working more, but by, by doing less and kind of organizing and, and those types of things. So I was. Kind of pulled into this planner by Amy Porterfield back in 2019.

And so she was teaching a digital course academy and that, and she is a well-known person in the industry for teaching digital courses, and she said she and her team used this full focus planner. And what it is is, so it's quarterly and I will say it is, it's not cheap. It's not the cheapest planner you're going to get, but I have actually been using this quarterly, since 2019.

So for a year and every quarter it has, you could kind of go through and recap your goals, your annual goals. There's place to put your goal details. But for me, it's the meat of the week that they have in here. And my favorite part is the weekly preview. And so you can kind of see, I've got it written on all over that.

If you're listening, just know that it's, it's, the one I choose is a book format in it's fairly small. And, but not tiny 'cause I do like to write and my handwriting is not very small. But in this weekly preview, it gives you a chance to review your weekly wins. Your, how'd you do on getting big three Done.

So that big three are the three. Things during the week that you wanna get done that will help you achieve your goals. It has a place to track how you felt about your self-care, um, how your streak tracker. So for me, the streak tracker is tracking my sleep. Did I get at least eight hours? It's tracking my exercise.

How many days a week did I get exercise in? It will be, I will track whether or not I made a meal plan. 'cause sometimes I get off track with that. And I do much better if I know what I'm gonna have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And so I, there's a place in this particular planner that each day you can put your meal plan in there.

I also track things like. Reading. So I started earlier this year a habit of starting my day with some reading and I know a lot of people do that and they do it probably with some nonfiction, some professional development, maybe some, you know, reading of, of Bible passages. For me, I take that time in the morning and read fiction and that is just kind of sets a tone for me and.

I notice on the days that I don't start my day doing that, where I've kind of relaxed and kind of gotten out of that feeling of, okay, all the, the, the mind going on, what do I need to get done today? Which sometimes when I'm reading a professional development book, I can kind of stray. When I'm in a good fiction book, I'm able to just focus on that, and so that's what I do.

But this weekly preview gives a chance for you to recap and think about what can I do better next week? What am I gonna focus on next week? It's got some, some basic calendar stuff and, but then on the day to day, and I still, I do keep a digital calendar. But I also write my week in here. And so these calendars are undated.

They just have the day of the week, so then you can put the date in and it has a place to track your joy level for the day, your stress level for the day. Did you get movement in? Did you, did you drink water? So it's a combination of keeping on track for business and also your. Wellness and this planner, they came out with the wellness version of this planner last year and I really like it 'cause I was kind of keeping track of things in a separate habit tracker, you know, where I was tracking my water or my exercise and now I can kind of all.

Do it all in one, but this is the planner that I use on Sunday nights is when I do my weekly review and kind of a weekly preview into next week of what am I gonna get done. That's when I fill in my dates and my calendar and see if there's any places where I need to think about blocking some additional time in my electronic calendar so people can't jump in there if I'm trying to focus on something and then it really.

It's a tool that I use. I go back, I had, there's a place to write in how many hours of sleep you got. So if you're tracking it in some form, I just track it through my Apple Watch. There's. Every day a place to put what you're grateful for and what the best thing for the day was. And sometimes those really, really are things.

When you go back and look at the week, you're like, wow, I really did have some big wins this week, or I really made some great. Connections or had some whatever it is. And I use this for both kind of business and personal stuff. So, uh, my world is very mixed. I don't keep a separate business and personal calendar.

So this is full focus wellness planner, they come in different sizes. They come in different, like you can get a coil version. They, you could get more of a full-size version. You could get a mini version. And it's at full focus.com. I do believe they have subscriptions. So what I do is I'm on an annual subscription that they ship me for every August.

And for me, I am not someone who has to start it. On the first day of a calendar quarter, I just start it wherever I am and usually it ends in a, at the, around the end of a month, and so I'm starting at the beginning of a month, but it's not always on the quarter. So really great. I use it pretty much every single day.

I will say, don't use it a whole lot when I'm on vacation or on trips, but, and then to repeat, free to focus, that is the Michael Hyatt book. So that is tool number one that I love and I use all the time. Tool number two is a remarkable, and if you've heard of that, it is a note taking device that is an electronic note taking device that has its own stylus.

And so one of my love languages with my husband is he gives me electronics. And so my first remarkable was, I believe, an anniversary present maybe. For our 25th wedding anniversary, maybe, I don't know, might've been a little earlier than that. I've been using it since 2021. And this is my second one because af they came out with a new one, uh, a year or so ago that has the ability to use color.

And as you saw with my full focus planner, I have a, a bunch of colors that I use and it kind of depends on my mood. They don't always stay the same, but. In this, it is really amazing and what I was looking for when I started it was to get rid of the post-it notes and notepads that had accumulated on my desk and.

I would, I mean, I would take a note, I would have a notepad and be taking notes when I'm talking to a client or a team member, and I'd take, okay, these are things that need to happen. And what I always struggled with after that was getting those notes to a place where other people on the team could see them.

Or getting them onto an action item list so that I could do follow ups. There was a whole lot of problems with that, and I used to have folders full of, you know, I would just kind of sweep 'em off my desk and put 'em into a folder, and it was like the notes I had to go through and get that information into the client record.

Not a great system, and as we were starting to go more and more paperless, this became an issue because we weren't putting things in an actual paper file. We were putting them, you know, into some sort of cloud. Storage and an electronic version of these notes. So scanning a post-it note, if you've ever tried it, it's not fun and it actually makes your usually sticks somewhere and or you gotta tape it down.

And so, uh, I needed to do something so. Again, this was recommended from the same course with Amy Porterfield. She had talked about a remarkable, and I went and investigated and I was like, Ooh, this looks like a tool that I could use. So I have been using this since 2021, and what it allows you to do is to take notes.

You can see, here's my, I've got a, a list here of different templates, different I've highlighted things. What. So it takes to my handwriting and for me when I'm writing something versus typing it, when I'm taking notes, I tend to retain it. I'm, I'm a writer. I, I need the actual physical action of using a pen and paper.

And this has replaced it. The other great tool with this. So, so once you've taken these notes, you have an app that you can upload the notes. So you take it, turns it into a PDF or you can turn it into text. You can take that PDF and you can save it to your client records, as you know, whatever it is, notes from meeting on such and such a day or brainstorming list of, you know, whatever it is, you can save it into a digital format.

What I've also used this tool force. Transferring it into typed text. And it's not perfect on that because it really has to, you know, figure out your own, your handwriting. But once you've done that, you can then take that text and put it into one of your tools that uses AI to organize it or turn it into an outline or pull out the key items of, of what the action items are.

So there's all all of those great things. So the initial. Use for this for me was to replace all of the little pieces of paper and pads of paper. I used to have in all sizes from full size, you know, whole p piece of paper to, you know, small pads of paper, to spiral steno notebooks. I had 'em everywhere and so this has eliminated that I have to dig to find a post-it note now, which is probably good.

The thing I discovered with it. More recently, I would say in the last, um, couple years is a huge winner for me, and that is you can upload PDFs yourself, and this comes into play in two different ways for me. One is that. When, if I have a template, so I have a discovery call template, when I'm talking to a potential new client, I have a checklist and I, it had always been in Excel and you know, and we'd print it out and it was on paper and then it ended up having to get scanned or, so now I've taken that Excel checklist and I've printed it to A PDF and uploaded it blank, except for as a template into my remarkable and so.

It gives me the template, but it also still gives me the ability to write. Like I said, that's how I retain. That is where I'm more comfortable. That's where I can stay more engaged when I'm on a call than if I'm trying to type and I'm a fast typer, but I just, it's, it's just a thing for me. So. Using, you know, you can create any type of template you want and bring it in as a PDF, and then when you go to use it, you just duplicate it inside your remarkable name it, you know John Doe meeting on whatever date, and then you can upload it through the app and you've got it essentially attached to that client file or that prospect prospect file.

The other key thing with the uploading of PDFs I have found as. Conferences have changed from essentially passing out paper and workbooks and different things when you're at a conference. Instead, they have those as PDFs in an app that you're using for, you know, to sign up for what session you're going to, or to see the copies of the slides that the presenters are preparing.

And so what you can do is you can take those workbooks that are in a PDF format. You can pull them into your remarkable, and you can fill them in there. So instead of having to worry about ahead of a conference, printing out a bunch of stuff, carrying it around, and then finally having to scan it when you get home or go through it, you can.

Do those in here, in this remarkable, and so where I have, you can't see it under my desk. I have a rolling bin of three ring notebooks from different courses that I've taken over time where I printed out all of the lessons and filled in the worksheets by hand and three hold, punched everything and put 'em into different, uh, three ring binders.

What this allows you to do is organize your information inside. This remarkable you can organize in folders. I took the time recently because I'd been in it so long and went in and added some years, so where I had prospects as a folder, I went in and organized it by year, and so put those prospect notes by year and I can clean 'em out.

Now that I've uploaded those to our. Software for maintaining our, our client files, but I haven't and I haven't run out of space. So cons for this probably are. You gotta keep it charged. It does have a very long battery life. The stylus itself on the color version, it charges when it's magnetically attached to the side of the tablet itself.

It only. Does note taking. You are not gonna access the internet. It's not an iPad. And for me, that's fine. I need to be very focused. And so I use it for all kinds of things. On this color version, I used it to design a tattoo. I, I mean, I've done all kinds of stuff. I can design quilt patterns or color quilt patterns, or, you know, do all kinds of things.

They, they comes. Loaded with templates and then it also has a whole bunch of other templates that you can go and download and use. So I have a, a meeting minutes one that is, is nice and structured. It's got some project management type tools that you can, IM import. Love it. I use it almost. Every single day.

So remarkable. It's re M-A-R-K-A-B-L-E and I believe this is a, the remarkable 2.0 maybe, and it's a little bigger than the first version. And like I said, it has color, the ability to highlight, the ability to write and color. It has a few more, um, options as far as. Thickness of the pen, high style of writing, those types of things.

The, I will say this too, it, it has a stylist tip and this is like the only consumable of this, and so it, I've, I think I've had this one for getting close to a year, and I've only changed the tip once. I use it all the time. So it probably depends on how much pressure you use, but just saying, okay, so that is favorite thing.

Number two, favorite thing Number three was a game changer for me, and I've had this now for several years. I wanna say probably three years and what it is, and I'm, for those who are listening. Sorry, I'm gonna do a little demonstration here, but it is a monitor extender for my laptop, and it's called, mine is called a sidetrack.

And how this attaches to the laptop is magnetically. So you place a magnetic plate on the back of your laptop and then you are able to attach this, but you attach it and it's very secure. When it attaches, it clicks really loud, and then I am able to open my laptop and have two screens. So, like I said, with this, it was a game changer when we went paperless.

I still always had a laptop. I have a desktop. I mean, I sit here. This workstation that I sit at when I'm recording has three giant monitors, but I'm on my laptop a lot, and a lot of times I like to work with a change of scenery, and so I will sit on the couch or go to the dining room table, or when I'm traveling, this is where it kicked in.

It was very difficult. I used to travel with taking an extra. Full-size monitor to plug into my laptop in the hotel room. And that only works if you're driving to your location, if you're flying, not so much. So I started looking at these. I'd seen someone that had something similar at an event and I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool.

So I started researching them. I got this one on Amazon for about, I would say around $300 about three years ago. And it come, came with two magnetic plates. So if you switch laptops, you have that extra one so that you don't have to unstick it and try to resick it to the new laptop. And I have done that since I've, since I've had this, it allows me to.

Do everything you do when you have dual monitors. So when I'm traveling, I actually can kick this out and sit. We're in the truck a lot. We're driving to races. I'm the passenger. It's compact enough that, and it's attached firmly to the laptop that I can actually work and review tax returns because everything's paperless.

And so we have work papers and we have the tax return. I need those on two different screens. There's so much. That I was limited in doing and or, or I could do it, but it would take a lot longer. So, got this sidetrack. I have, I forgot to read all the instructions and so it was a little bit into it before I realized that based on the power of your laptop, you might have to use two cables, A-A-U-S-B and A-H-D-M-I.

At the same time I thought it was an either or, and I struggled a little bit with it. Staying connected. And then I went back and troubleshooted and it said, well plug in both. And since I did that, perfect. So it is small enough and that it fits in a, I would say like a tablet. Type of, I think I have it, it's a tablet one.

This is actually one I got from zero that it fits securely, perfectly good size, and then I can put it in the same bag with my laptop and I can travel with it by plane as well. And it is phenomenal. So it is powered by plugging. Cords into the laptop. There is no extra power source. They come in a couple of different varieties.

I got the one that attaches directly because I knew I would be using it inside of a vehicle a lot. If you're just looking for, you know, you're typically have a laptop and, and you maybe are limited in space. I know I got one for Sarah that is not attached to the laptop that sits next to it, but still a very, a small size, not something that's gonna take up a whole lot of space.

And I love this thing and like I said, I got it on Amazon since then. So it's been, like I said, probably three, probably getting close to four years that I've been having this. I've seen vendors like at scaling new heights that are, have booths for selling these types of accessories. So very cool. If you struggle with needing to constantly find extra, you know, laptop space, you know this is a very convenient tool and I love it.

I love it. So we will, I'll see if I can find an Amazon link that we can put in the show notes so that you can check them out. And like I said, it was a game changer. So all three of these tools. My planner, this planner, I was a planner hopper, so I tried everything. I felt like I tried everything. I had stuff from just different people who were putting planners out and I tried 'em and this, like I said, I've been in it since 20 19, 20 20, and.

That's the longest I've ever stuck with a planner. So this year I actually shared the planner with the rest of my team, and some I, you know, some it, it resonated with them and some like their own system. I don't have a problem with that. This one worked for me. The remarkable, like I said, if you were in a paperless environment and you miss the, let me write this down on paper.

That's something that is very satisfying to have that remarkable and also have the ability to get that information into someplace that others can get to it. There's also with the remarkable, I didn't mention, it's there's an app for the phone so you can like when I'm at those conferences and need to download or upload those PDFs into the Remarkable, I can do it right there on my phone.

It's amazing. Then the sidetrack. So the sidetrack is a monitor extender essentially for my laptop and love it. So I never leave home without it, except when I know I'm going straight to my brick and mortar office. I still have an office there and I have a docking station there that I can just plug in A USB and it connects to, uh, my two monitors and my camera, and my scanner, and my printers and all of those things.

And so I don't need it there. 'cause I just plug the laptop straight into a docking station, but everywhere else. So when I go to Starbucks and work for a while, or you know, go anywhere, I can take it outside and I love it. So those are my current favorite things and I hope. You will try something, you know, whether it's one of these, or even if this sparks an idea that, hey, this is something that I think I need in my life.

Yeah, do it. Do it and send me a message. So where you're listening to this, there's a link that says Connect with Beth and that will send me a text and let me know if you tried it, if you didn't try it, or even just what, what you think of, you know. My show. I don't anything and remember to like and subscribe Wherever you're listening or watching, send me a comment, send me a dm, anything.

I would love to interact with you and I would really like to continue to see us grow as we're approaching this milestone. Episode of episode 50, and so I think that's a, a, a great milestone and I'm very excited about it. So, okay, everybody, as you know, I want to empower you to build a business that you love.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. My hope is that my experiences can help you navigate the realities of owning and operating your business. Please subscribe or follow the podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform so that you never miss an episode. Feel free to leave me a text by using the, send us a text message link in the show description and let me know how I'm doing.