Professional athletes teach us it's the small adjustments (move your foot a little this way, relax your left hand more, hold the ball on the seam) that produce big changes. The same can be said for content marketing. In a world in which content marketing metrics are so important, most content creators are overwhelmed. Any kind of work hack that improves their productivity is welcome.
Efficiently handling this situation is the premise behind the new app Input.
What is Input?
When you need to perform a task on your phone quickly, it's incredibly annoying to spend time sorting through all of your apps to open the right one. This is especially annoying when you only have a few seconds to complete whatever task it is. Whether it's sending a tweet or an email or adding an item to your Wunderlist, it's frustrating to juggle a phone filled with apps while you're trying to make a note in a meeting or pause to complete some quick but important task as you walk down the hall.
That's why Foursquare designer Matthew Healy created the new app Input. Initially, it was just a personal project, something he wanted to make for himself to streamline his phone task workflow.
As TechCrunch says about the new app, “…Input wants to solve the problem of having to dig around your phone for the app you need, by letting you interact quickly with a number of commonly used apps, including your email, calendar, note-taking apps, Twitter, Dropbox, Venmo, work apps like Slack and Asana, and more from a single interface.”
It's essentially a one-stop shop that, as Healy describes it, allows you to just “get in and out” of your phone. No need to dig around in your phone's screens for what you need. You just open Input and take care of it from there using its minimalistic, no frills, straight-forward command-style interface.
Input initially launched in a small beta run, but it is now live on the iTunes App store and free to download. You can link Input with two apps on your phone, but from that point it costs $1.99 for every three additional apps you connect.
How ‘Input' Can Help Content Creators
Input's compatibility with some of the most popular productivity apps around will help content creators streamline all the little phone-related tasks they do while working on content: researching, making notes when ideas strike, arranging a to-do list, setting up reminders, shooting quick emails or tweets, and many other tasks.
Here's a complete list of every productivity app that works with Input (and some of these other apps are hugely helpful as well for content creators, so if you haven't tried them, check out the links and descriptions for each one and consider using them):
- Asana: a work team management platform that places conversations and tasks in one easy-to-use interface
- Buffer: an app that makes it extremely easy to share on social media anything you read
- Dropbox: a popular document sharing app
- Evernote: an app that allows you to capture information and write notes in any environment
- Gmail: one of the most popular email platforms online
- Google Calendar: the ever-popular Gmail-integrated organizer/calendar
- Omnifocus: a paid app that is designed to “develop and fine-tune a system to keep life and work in balance, stay on top of projects and goals, accomplish them faster, and play a little bit more.”
- Remember The Milk: A popular to-do list that integrates with Evernote.
- Slack: an extremely popular messaging app for teams
- Todoist: an online task management site and to-list used by millions
- Twitter: Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages
- Venmo: digital wallet that allows you to make and share payments with friends
- Wunderlist: possibly the most popular to-do list management app
If you even use just one or two of these popular productivity apps, Input will help you streamline your work life.
