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When I need to have a very productive day, I tell myself it’s going to be easy.

I’ll just wake up early, grab a big cup of coffee, and then begin powering through my to-do list. Maybe I’ll break for a meal, or a stretch, or a quick conversation with a coworker. But I’ll truck on, energy unwavering until bedtime, where I’ll promptly fall asleep for eight, wonderful, uninterrupted hours of sleep. 

Cool fantasy, self. Real life rarely (if ever) is that picture-perfect. Our bodies aren’t designed to operate at a constant 100% efficiency level.

So if you want to be more productive throughout the day, you’re better off relegating certain activities to certain times, and devoting yourself to doing those activities at those times.

And to make sure you get the right things done at the right times of day, you can lean on a plethora of different free or relatively cheap apps and tools. (After all, some things are better together.)

Below, I’ve collected some of the highest-rated and often-recommended productivity apps for each part of the day. Check ’em out, and find your “and.”

12 Tools That’ll Keep You Productive Morning, Noon & Night

Morning

1) Headspace

Price: Free, with subscriptions available on iPhone, Android, Web

Starting your day off with a quick meditation session can be a great way to gear up for the day — even scientists say so. According to a 2012 study, people who mediated “stayed on tasks longer and made fewer task switches, as well as reporting less negative feedback after task performance.” 

Sold … but not sure how to get started? I’d highly recommend downloading Headspace. It gives you 10 free guided meditation sessions, and if you end up getting hooked, you can sign up for a monthly subscription.

2) Prompts or Writing Challenge

Price: Prompts is $2.99 on iPhone; Writing Challenge is $1.89 on Android

You may have heard about the benefits of writing something — anything — in the morning. But actually making morning freewriting a reality can be a challenge. How do you actually find something to write about when you’ve barely had time to make your coffee?

Why, by downloading a writing prompts app, of course. Prompts and Writing Challenge are both great options. They give you a jumping-off point for a piece, and then let you dive right into writing. Prompts is especially cool for folks who like to track their habits to stay motivated because it offers some basic analytics for you to analyze your writing habit progress.

3) Todoist

Price: Free, with premium subscriptions available on iPhone, Android, Web

You don’t have to actually write your to-do lists in the morning, but you should definitely take a look at them before you dive into your work. And if your to-do list is cluttered and confusing, you’ll end up losing precious time to reorganizing and reprioritizing it. 

To prevent that from happening, I’d highly suggest a tool like Todoist. My teammate Lindsay Kolowich recently introduced me to it, and it’s completely transformed the way I keep track of what I need to accomplish. It allows you to add deadlines and labels to each list item, and then automatically sorts your whole to-do list by what you have to accomplish that day. This helps you keep you on top of what you need to accomplish in a given day, and prevents you from getting sidetracked by down-the-road projects.

4) Jell

Price: Free, with premium subscriptions available on iPhone, Android, Web

After you set your own to-do list, chances are, you’ll need to check in with your teammates about what’s on their plate for the day. One super easy way to do this — especially when you have a remote team — is by using an app called Jell. 

Instead of calling a 30-minute meeting to debrief on what everyone’s doing, you simply fill out a form in Jell and it gets sent to the rest of your team. (If you’re using Slack, it has a handy integration to have these messages posted in there, too.)

This way, you can quickly get on the same page with your team, and then move on to the most important work of your day.

Afternoon

5) Do

Price: $10/month on iPhone and Web; Android coming soon

Fast-forward a few hours, and chances are, you’ll have a block of meetings on your plate. (That is, after all, the best time of day to have them.) But if you’re going to take time out of your day for meetings, they’d better be productive. There’s nothing worse than wasting a bunch of people’s time on something that could be handled over email.

Yep, a tool can help you with that too. Do can help you keep yours more organized and actionable — that way, no one’s wasting time sitting in unnecessary meetings. If you’re looking for a free option, Solid (available on Web only) is a great choice.

6) Stormboard

Price: Free, with premium subscriptions available on Web

When your attention starts to wane, it can be hard to get things done. For many people, that tends to happen in the afternoon.

Turns out, this can be a good thing: When you’re less focused, you have more room to be creative. So the afternoon is a great time for brainstorming, collaboration, and breaking through cognitive barriers. 

If you and your team are feeling particularly creative one afternoon, a great tool to consider using is Stormboard. It allows everyone to easily brainstorm and collaborate — even if they aren’t in the same room. Then, you can prioritize the best ideas to be put in action at a later date.

7) Unstuck

Price: Free on iPhone, Android, Web

But what if you’re not focused or feeling creative? You’ve got to get work done, but you’re feeling … stuck. 

Unstuck can help. It’s an app that acts like an in-the-moment personal coach. It’ll ask you a series of questions to unearth what exactly is blocking you, and then give you steps to get through that block. Having this “outside” perspective can be a game-changer to breaking through some seriously inhibiting time-sucks. 

8) Quartz or Inside

Price: Quartz is free on iPhone; Inside is free on iPhone, Android, Web

When you’ve been in the weeds all day getting important projects done, it can be tempting to take some time to catch up on what you missed in the news. 

The trouble is, those reading breaks can sometimes get unruly. That 15 minutes you thought would be enough turns into 45 minutes of reading, and you’re suddenly late for your train home. 

To feel in-the-know about the day without breaking your productivity streak, try catching up via your favorite news summary app. Mine is from Quartz: It’s a chat-themed news summary app that’s quickly become a staple of my phone’s home screen. A few quick clicks, and I’m on my way to catching a ride home.

Night

9) 7 Minute Workout

Price: Free on iPhone, Android

Everyone has their favorite time of day to work out, but science says that your lung function peaks around 5 p.m. So if you want to squeeze in a quick workout sometime in your day, right before dinner might be the trick.

If you don’t have a regular routine or are just trying to do something fast, I’d recommend checking out J&J’s 7 Minute Workout app. You can pick from their programs or design one of your own, and all can be done in less than 30 minutes. 

10) Podcasts or Stitcher

Price: Podcasts is free on iPhone; Sticher is free on iPhone, Android, Web

Chances are, you’ll have spent most of your day looking at things. Reading on the computer. Watching slides on the projector. Scanning news on your phone. So when you leave work, you should strengthen one of your other senses, such as your listening comprehension. It’s an underdeveloped skill — especially in adults — but it can have huge a huge on our professional and personal lives. 

If you want to strengthen your listening skills, try playing a few podcast episodes on your phone on your commute home. If you have an iPhone, you have a Podcasts app already built in. Otherwise, you can access them through Stitcher. 

Want some show recommendations? Read this blog post for a few of our favorite business-related podcasts to listen to.

11) Grid Diary or Journey

Price: Free with premium options on iPhone; Journey is Free on Android, Chrome App

Many might think that journaling is just a teenage pastime … but it has many benefits for people of any age.

If you don’t love the idea of actually penning your ideas and experiences to paper, you can use Grid Diary or Journey. Both allow you to not only capture written recaps of your day, but also add photos to your entries. Plus, they both have built-in prompts — so even on the most hectic of days, you can distill some insights for your future self. 

12) Sleep Genius

Price: $4.99 on iPhone; Free with in-app purchases on Android

Finally. You’ve made it through the day and kept yourself productive all the way through. You take a moment to celebrate … but then realize that tomorrow’s to-do list is already jam-packed. You need a good night’s sleep, and you need it now. 

Sleep Genius might be the cure. The app has built-in relaxation techniques and gentle alarms to wake you up at a natural moment in your sleep cycle, helping make sure you feel rested come morning.

After all, if you’re feeling sluggish the next day, even the best apps might not be effective. (But that cup of coffee might do the trick.)

What are your favorite productivity tools for different times of day? Share with us in the comments.

Last week, Facebook officially rolled out a new feature called “Reactions” to Facebook users worldwide.

The new feature serves as an extension of the Like button. Now, instead of only being able to Like a post, Facebook users can choose from six different emotive reactions: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry.

Why the change? As Facebook’s product design director Geoff Teehan wrote in a post on Medium, not everything that’s shared is meant to be liked. The death of your friend’s dog or an article about an unsavory politician won’t just elicit a single emotion in users – -so why limit them to “liking” it?

The same is true for the posts brands publish to their Facebook accounts, which is why these new reactions are opening new doors for marketers.

Now that we’ve had some time to react to this new feature, we’ve done some thinking about the impact these new reactions buttons might have on both marketing and user behavior. In this post, I’ll first touch on how the reactions buttons work. Then, I’ll walk through a few implications for marketers going forward.

How the New ‘Reactions’ Feature Works

The new reaction buttons are already available to everyone — no need to enable their functionality. They’re also simple to use.

To react to a Facebook post the web, hover your cursor over the traditional Like button on any Facebook post to reveal one of six new emotive icons: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry.

To react to a Facebook post on the mobile app, hold your finger on the Like button until the six options appear. Then, choose an icon by tapping on it. 

The act of reacting may seem simple, but there are some nuances to the feature — especially regarding how to analyze it — that are relevant to marketers. Here’s what we know so far.

Reactions are counted the same as Likes. (For now.)

According to Facebook’s announcement, “if someone uses a reaction, Facebook will infer that person wants to see more of that type of post.” In other words, if you react to a post with the “angry” icon, Facebook’s algorithm will treat it as if it was Liked when deciding where to place it in a user’s News Feed. (Learn more about Facebook’s News Feed here.)

Why would Facebook’s algorithm treat an Angry reaction the same way they count a positive reaction like a Like or a Love? A study by Jonah Berger, author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On,” found that content that triggered an angry reaction in readers is 34% more likely to end upon the New York Times “Most Shared” page, while posts that make people anxious are 21% more likely to end up on that page.

In other words, people want to see the posts that’ll make them angry, just like they want to see the posts that’ll make them happy.

Keep an eye on this, though. In the future, Facebook may choose to rank posts differently based on their reactions. (In fact, some people are concerned Facebook’s already ranking posts differently and just aren’t telling us.)

Limited analytics are available on Facebook Insights.

As of right now, you can’t see the general trends of reactions on your business Page. So if you’re an administer for a business Page and you want to see the number of people who have reacted with a “sad” icon on a post, for example, then have to open the Insights page for that post directly. Also, that number is not currently broken down into organic versus paid, so you can’t see which reactions may be influenced when you boosted a post compared to which ones you garnered organically.

To access Facebook Insights on a post, simply click the reach number of any post. The reach number is located right above the reaction buttons on a post, as shown below:

You’ll be taken to a screen that breaks down the numbers of each reaction net on the post itself and on the post shared elsewhere, if applicable.These posts will still only show interactions on a per-post level. Here’s what the post details look now:

Another way to open Facebook Insights is by clicking “Insights” in your Page’s navigation bar, and then clicking directly into the post you’d like to analyze.

If you want to see which specific users have reacted to your posts and what their reactions were, then go to the post and click on each emotive icon for a list of names.

The same reactions are offered globally.

After first testing a whole myriad of emotive icons in Ireland and Spain, the folks at Facebook settled on the six reactions they believed were the most universally and easily accessible reactions for folks all over the world: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry.

They’d originally tested reactions like “yay” and “confused,” but eventually eliminated them because they proved to be too ambiguous for users. Whether Facebook ever decides to roll out any more remains to be seen, as they’re still testing — but they say there are no specific plans to roll out any other reactions as of now.

(If you want a more detailed breakdown of how the current reaction’s came to be, check out Geoff Teehan’s post on Medium.)

Only the first three reactions people take are shown.

You can click on the number of reactions to see all reactions and the number of each reaction per post, but the first three reactions are the ones that’ll show up to users first, unless they click into the reactions on the post.

You can’t remove a reaction.

Just like you can’t remove a like that another user has left on your post, you can’t remove a “sad” or an “angry” by another user, either.

Now that we have a better understanding of how the new reactions feature works, let’s talk about what it means for marketers.

What Do Facebook Reactions Mean for Marketers?

The introduction of Reactions has definitely changed the Facebook landscape for brands. Now, marketers are armed with deeper insight into how their audiences interact with their content — which opens up a world of testing and experimentation. It also could really diminish the meaning of getting a Like on Facebook, which is something marketers will have to keep an eye on.

You now have deeper insight into how your audience interacts with your content.

Facebook’s reactions feature gives marketers a brand new feedback loop from their audience. Users who may not have previously wanted to Like your content (maybe because they didn’t enjoy it, or didn’t feel it was appropriate) are now able to send more specific signals about how your content makes them feel.

Since any reaction currently counts as a Like in Facebook’s algorithm, people who weren’t previously inclined to touch a brand’s content may now react to it, ultimately increasing the signal to Facebook that the content is worth serving to other audiences. This is going to become extremely important for brands as mobile becomes a bigger deal. Users who may not have wanted to use their phones to comment can now use them to “react” much easier.

Is this more diverse loop a bad thing? No! The exciting thing about this metric is that brands can now pay closer attention to how content is resonating with their audience, and then use that information to take specific actions.

Here are a few ideas for how marketers can gain better insight into their audience with reactions:

a) Test to see whether posts with certain types of reactions perform better.

Do posts that get more “love” end up performing better with your audience? Then create more lovable content. Do posts that “anger” users get more shares? Perhaps it’s time to stir the pot a little bit. (In a respectful way, of course.)

How can you test this? First, determine whether your metric for success is clicks or reach. Then, go into your Page’s Insights panel and sort the posts by that metric, clicking on each post to see which reactions they evoked.

Since Facebook only allows us to view these metrics on a per-post level right now, you may need to use a good old fashioned Google spreadsheet to tabulate results.

Note: Since many old posts may not have additional reactions, skip the sorting for now, and instead click into your most recent posts to determine a baseline.

b) Test the power of “love.”

In his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On,” Jonah Berger writes that people are more inclined to talk about things they love. Test this theory by running a campaign and see how much “love” you can dream up from your users. (Download a step-by-step guide to lovable marketing campaigns here.)

Once you’ve run the campaign, go to the Insights page and assess clicks, views, and shares to see if people are actually reacting to and spreading that lovable content.

c) Take note of “love”-ers.

People who are reacting with “love” to a lot of your posts may make for good brand evangelists. While Facebook currently does not segment these people right now, you may want to dig in to that “love” icon manually to keep an eye out for the names that are showing up over and over again. If you’re starting to notice certain people are “loving” posts often, consider keeping a list of these folks for opportunities so you can take the time to interact with them more on Facebook — and even send them great content later.

d) Don’t discount negative emotions.

in the past, when a Facebook post has triggered a negative emotion for a user, that user has traditionally commented on that post, according to Facebook’s research. Now that users have new emotive options, this may very well change. Keep in mind that users who experience a negative reaction to your posts can now react faster — by tapping a button, rather than typing out a comment.

We may soon discover that this has a big impact on user behavior on Facebook, for negative and positive emotions alike. The biggest implication is that marketers like us may get a higher volume of feedback that is also generally less specific. Keep an eye on how how the comment volume changes compared to typical volume. Pay attention to the types of reactions you’re getting (especially on ads), versus the types of negative comments you may have gotten previously.

At the same time, stay wary of trends in positive or negative volume on your posts as a signal of customer feedback.

The “Like” could become less important.

With all these new emotive options, are Likes going to be enough? In other words, if your posts are only getting Likes now, how do you know whether it’s resonating with your audience?

Don’t get me wrong, Likes are still important — but it’s safe to say the game has changed. Now, the act of simply Liking a post has become the path of least resistance. Yes, some people are still used to using the Like button, so this kind of affinity toward content is something to watch for over time. But as users get more accustomed to these different reactions, the bar for Facebook content quality is inevitably going to rise.

Remember: Any reaction is still better than no reaction. At the end of the day, you want your users to feel moved by your content.

This is only the beginning for Facebook reactions. As Facebook continues to make changes to ads, algorithms, and faces, it’s important for marketers like us to keep getting to know our audiences better, create great content, and appreciate our fans and followers. We will, of course, continue to share what we learn along the way.

How do you feel about Facebook’s “Reactions” buttons? Share your thoughts and questions in the comment section below.

Our Social Media Benchmark 2015 Report found that the nonprofit / education sector leads the pack in the size of their social media communities. Since everyone is on some networks already, social media is a natural platform to communicate with students and parents. It’s a real time channel with maximum reach.

So why limit that reach to your current community? Your prospects are all on social media too. They’re using it to talk about schools and learn from their peers. You need to make your institution part of that discussion. Start using social media to attract and talk with prospective students and parents.

It Always Starts with Your Personas

New social media sites seem to pop up daily. You can’t be on them all. You don’t want to be on them all. Go back to your personas – what social media sites are your prospective students using? What social media sites do they trust to find information?

With so much content to be found, people rely on their social media networks to find quality, credible information. Maybe they found good content through a social search. More likely – someone they trust has shared it with them online. You want to make sure that it’s your content people are sharing. Through social media, you’re enlisting an open-ended band of school ambassadors every time you post something on a social network.

You’ll likely find that different personas hang out on different social media platforms. If you want to leverage your current Facebook presence to reach out to prospects, that’s great. A lot of K-12 parents are discussing school options with other parents on Facebook. You can generate a lot of awareness and engagement with parents from a Facebook campaign. But when you want to reach the kids, they’re all about the chat apps.

For instance, Snapchat, a videochat app, is the current #1 app for this age group. The “My Stories” function lets them string together short videos over their day. Then the story disappears. It’s easy. It’s visual. And it goes away. How about asking prospects who take a campus tour to share their day at your school with their friends via Snapchat? That’s high-credibility content for any teen.

Start your social prospecting strategy by deciding in which social media sites you should invest resources. Pew Research conducts regular, comprehensive research on which demographic groups are using which social media platforms. It’s a great source to consult for some big picture social media usage statistics.

As always – the results of your own persona research should carry the most weight when deciding where to focus your social prospecting strategy. When you interviewed current parents and students to create your personas, hopefully you asked them about which social media platforms they use and why they prefer them. If you didn’t, now is the time to do some more research to refine your personas and their social media habits.

Align Platforms with Your Goals

Your research probably tells you that your personas operate on a number of social media platforms. That doesn’t mean you have to reach out to prospects on all of them. Narrow down your social media platform list once more by setting out your prospecting goals for social media. 

Do you want your social strategy to drive traffic to your website? Get attendees to live events? Get prospects asking questions directly to admissions or campus life officers?

Select the social media platforms that offer most potential to meet your goals. It’s OK (smart, even) to have different goals for different platforms. They all don’t play the same role. Twitter is for conversation. Maybe you start a regularly scheduled Twitter chat so prospects have a chance to talk with a live person from your school. LinkedIn is for the career-minded. Do you have a school page there so you can take advantage of LinkedIn’s Alumni tool to show alumni bios on your website? 

If the goal is to drive visitors to your admissions blog, then post regular links in the most relevant social media sites. Include the keywords and hashtags they’re using to find information about schools on your posts.

Once you’ve selected the social media sites for your strategy, take a deep dive to see what tools they offer. You’ll be surprised to find the scope of distribution, communication, and analysis tools many of them provide to help you reach your audience.

Does This Mean I Need More Content?

You already have a lot of the content. Program pages and faculty bios. Campus publications. Curriculum and social life documentation. You’ll tweak it for social media consumption. That means:

• Images, including video and gifs, optimized for that social media platform. Mixed media posts get the most engagement. Visuals and movement catch people’s eyes. They also communicate with greater impact than words alone.
• Hashtags, tagging, and keywords so it can be found prospects who’ve not yet connected with you
• Understanding the best times to post on a specific network (take a second look at our benchmark report and the Pew research as a starting point, links above)

On certain platforms, the engagement is the content. Have you heard about Ask.fm? Don’t worry. Most people over 18 years old haven’t. Young students are all over it. It’s a site that allows people to ask other users questions anonymously. Maybe your admissions office should set up an account and post the link on your website so kids can ask questions they may be to shy ask otherwise? 

Social Media Metrics that Matter

Starting with your personas is a best practice. Another is to always close the loop on your marketing efforts. Define and track your metrics to validate what’s working and find out what needs work.

When it comes to social media, you have a torrent of metrics. Beware of vanity metrics. Likes and impressions are nice, but they’re not helpful in quantifying the value of your social media strategy. 

Manage metrics that matter. These are the metrics that connect back to your goals. Let’s go back to our driving traffic goal. Tracking URLs tell you what content piece of content brought a visitor to your site and the social media site where she found your link. 

Let’s say you post regular links to new blog articles to three different social media sites. Using a tracking URL lets you drop an identifying token in the link used on each social media site. Looking at your traffic, you see that 60% of your traffic back is coming from just one of the social media sites. That’s valuable intelligence.

In general, the most actionable social media metrics will be those that indicate engagement – clicking through, sharing, commenting and/or responding, growth in your community size, growth in the percentage of community engaging with your content. Each social media platform has its own batch of metrics and they can change.

Distribution is a Pillar of Inbound Marketing

For your inbound marketing strategy to yield results, your content needs to get in front of the right people at the right time. That means the distribution of your content is as critical to inbound success as the content itself.

Social media is primary distribution channel. Don’t overlook its power to connect your school to new prospective students and parents.

Transparency isn’t convenient. You can’t just openly share the good news — you’ve got to share the bad news, too. 

At least, that’s how Patagonia views it. “Transparency is telling the good and the bad,” says Rick Ridgeway, Patagonia’s VP of Environmental Affairs, on this episode of The Growth Show. “It’s having the moxie to openly tell our customers and other external stakeholders about the harm that we are doing.”

In this episode, Rick doesn’t just explain what corporate transparency is; he also shares real examples of sticky situations that have cropped up at Patagonia — and how they actually dealt with them.

Not only that, but he also shared with us some refreshing and eye-opening advice about life. Recently, he was in an accident with his longtime friend, Doug Tompkins (the Founder of The North Face), and on this episode, Rick shares some of the life lessons he’s learned in the aftermath.

To listen to the episode, click “play” in the player below, or download the episode on iTunes.

Check out the latest recaps of The Growth Show episodes by clicking here.