Tools of the Trade: Must-Have Apps for Nomad Entrepreneurs

Shiny object alert. That’s right. If you’re a collector or tester of apps and digital tools, this episode could cause your brain to explode. I’m going to share 29 of my favorite apps that I use as a digital nomad entrepreneur, 29 free and a few paid apps that I use at least once a week. Many of them every single day. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Eric. I’m a full time digital nomad, traveling around the world with my wife and our four kids, and we are currently in Costa Rica having an amazing time gearing up to relocate to Spain. We’re going to take advantage of the new or newer ish digital nomad visa for families, and we’re in the process of applying for that and getting everything ready for that. And we’re going to be headed to Madrid, I think is where we’re going to start out from. But if you’re listening to this and it is, you know, spring 2024 before April 2024 and you’re in Costa Rica, hit me up. Eric Danny podcast dot com and we will get together if it’s after that time then maybe go ahead and give me up anyways, see where we are. If we’re in Spain, we can connect up there or wherever we might be in the world. Would love to get together, buy a cup of coffee. We can talk digital nomad. We we can talk digital business, whatever it may be. Let’s just get together and connect sometime. All right, so the 29 apps that I like and I’m going to have all of these listed, so you don’t have to try to remember them all. And I’ve got them broken into six categories. And the six categories are, number one, productivity apps. Number two, communication apps. Number three, finance in accounting for travel and navigation. Number five, remote work and safety apps. And number six, translation apps. So there you go. Those are the categories. So let’s go ahead and get into productivity apps. The first one is my go to to do list task management. This is my digital brain. I’ll even be in a team meeting with one of my team and I’ll commit to doing something. I’ll say, Oh, I’ll take care of that. And if they don’t see me, they’ll say, Are you are you going to add that to Nazmi? Because they know if it doesn’t go into Naseby, it’s not an official commitment, not be nosy, be it’s built on the getting things done system. I don’t use it quite that way. You can, but I absolutely love Naseby. In fact, I’ve got several of my team now using it. I let them use whatever to do list they want to do, but I abused Naseby for years and years and years and absolutely love it. And so check out not be nosy, be. The next app I use for productivity is called Good Notes. I’m in good notes all day long. It’s one of the very first apps I open up. I have a journaling Bible in there, and so I do my Bible study in the morning and I can take notes in there and draw with it and circle things and connect them with dots. And it’s just it’s amazing. I have a note that I keep open all the time just called Quick Notes. It’s basically a scrap piece of paper. I have another one that I keep open that has a separate page for each person on my team that I lead. You know, I’ve got people on my team that are direct reports to the people I lead, but I have a list of for just my direct reports and I keep notes throughout the week of things I want to bring up during their weekly one on one meeting. If it’s something that doesn’t have to be taken care of right away, and I use it for all kinds of things, if I if I sign up for an online course and they have a workbook, I download the workbook as a PDF. I’ll open it in good notes, take notes with it. I absolutely love this. I’m in it all day long. So I even one of the things I really like, I have a notebook for each of my kids and. My wife, and once a week I write them a note in it and I’ll look in my phone. And if I took a picture of somethin with them in it, like I’ll airdrop that from my phone to my iPad and and toss that into onto that note for them. And I’m just building up a, a long digital journal to them, down to them, just thoughts, things I’m seeing in their lives, things that I, I’m proud of and I love them. And, and one day they’ll have access to those. And so that is is another way. Way I use good notes. All right. Next up for protect productivity, Google workspace. I’ve used Google workspace. I’ve used Office 365. I love Google workspace. We are all out on Google workspace for our company. We use it for document collaboration. We, you know, obviously communication, email, things like that. We’ve got our entire standard operating procedure vault, we call it the soap vault is built out with a series of Google sheets connected to Google Docs. And I just it it is the, the core of our filing files, if you will. We use Google Workspace a great deal. The next app that I really enjoy is brain dot f m brain dot FM. This app here I have a little bit of ADHD and if you can have such thing as a little bit and it really helps me stay focused. It’s an app that is got different song tracks now. It’s all instrumental. There’s no vocal, not that I’ve ever come across, and the different soundtracks are for different task. You’re wanting to do, study or focus, create rest, you know, energy, like, you know, there’s different winds and they’re at certain beats and certain frequencies that work with your brain to really help your brain focus. And you set the background music some people would for two it is soundscapes. I put my AirPods in on noise canceling mode. I have that going very, very quietly and it just it helps me dig in and get things done. All right. So the next let’s see five, these next five all come from an apparent app, if you will, called set app. Now, this is only if you’re a mac user. If you’re a mac user, you want to check out set app. I pay $10 a month and this thing is packed full of apps that I’m not even listing here. There’s so many I use and set app. I’m constantly in there looking for new ones, but a few that that I use I really do like their calendar so I use busy cal it’s it’s better than the Google calendar and even the Google calendar app so I really like busy cal I use bartender it keeps the the top of my Mac the the that bar at the very very top of the map of the Mac with the menu bar. It keeps it all cleaned up and it lets me group things and organize them and take control of that. I really like that. I have another one called Declutter Declutter. I just go ahead and toss everything to the desktop on my Mac and declutter every ten or 15 minutes. I forget how it sat, but every so often it just scans my desktop and if there’s any new file there, it learns where I want it filed. And so you trade it over just a little bit of time, but you can have it set to wear like, you know, if something is ending in, you know, MP For you that’s obviously music. So you can have a music folder, but it just, it, it learns where you want things and it just keeps your desktop really clean, which helps optimize your Mac for performance. So I love that the next new one I use there is called typing mind. Typing mind is a chat t interface and I really it’s really cool. I really like the features of it and it’s absolutely fantastic. You, you program your assistant to have a personality and a style and you can have different person assistants, you can have a marketing assistant, you can have a business operations assistant, you can have an account, a assistant. And so these assistants are all trained by you and stuff like that and it’s just really, really cool. I really like type. Mind. So those are all parts of this of from set up now. The last app I use and I guess it’s it’s productivity it might cross over to communication now that I think about it but I’m regularly regularly using an app called my traveling mailbox. So my traveling mailbox is a service that we use in the United States and we chose where we wanted our mail to go in the United States to their to their center in Arlington, Virginia. And we went through a process of filling out some paperwork we had to send to the post office and stuff like that. And now all of our mail goes there. So all of our mail goes to traveling mailbox, personal mail, our business mail. My wife and I have a nonprofit. Our nonprofit mail goes there like all of our mail goes to that place. And then each day when we get new mail, I get a you know, I’m on the app, I go in the traveling mailbox and I can see a picture of each piece of mail. And I can either choose to have the mail opened or shred and delete. I can have it saved for pickup, I can have it forwarded, I can have it saved, and then eventually forwarded with a bunch of mail. If it’s a check, I can have it opened and deposited into our our bank. So there’s a lot that it I mean, it literally just handles all of our mail. And with that it’s great. It’s a very extremely low monthly cost and that’s what we do that works for us. Our passport country is the United States. If you’re an nomad listening in, you’re not a U.S. passport holder. I don’t know what options you have for you. But for those of us in the U.S. traveling mailbox or from the U.S., traveling mailbox is great. All right. So that is the Productivity Act. Let’s go ahead and just keep going. We’re get right into communication now. Some of these are going to take a lot of time to explain zoom and zoom meetings all day long. I have a keyboard shortcut that I use that just opens my zoom room because I use the same zoom link 99% of the time. It’s, you know, if somebody schedules a meeting with me through my calendaring, you know, the link they get is the same zoom room. It’s just and I’ve done this for, you know, couple of year, you know, three or four years, never been an issue. So I’m on Zoom all the time. WhatsApp, so we use WhatsApp a lot is which is kind of, you know, unique and a little bit for us being from the United States took us a little bit of time to get used to because very few people in the U.S. use WhatsApp. But the rest of the world we’ve been in the everybody uses WhatsApp. So we now are fully integrated as a family with WhatsApp. All of our, you know, worldwide friends are in WhatsApp. We’ve got our family back in the States, you know, finally switched over to a communicating to us in WhatsApp. And so what we did with that then is recently we set up all of us in my family that have phones. Now this is personal, this is personal. My WhatsApp is a business account. But because I like keeping my my business phone and my work phone separate for work, I use an app called Open Phone. I pay $10 a month again, one I’ve used for years and I can set office hours automation. I give my, my, my virtual assistant access to it to manage, you know, phone calls and text messages. And so it’s, it’s my work phone number. So I have a separate phone phone number for that for work. That’s that’s an open vote. But for personal and for emergency communication with my team, we use WhatsApp that’s the most reliable quick 24 seven way to get in touch with me. And so what we did is we got everybody in my family a Google voice number and we used our Google Voice numbers to change our WhatsApp numbers from our what was our cellular carrier in the States. We changed our WhatsApp numbers to our Google voice numbers. And we canceled our cellular plan in the United States and just went to local SIM cards only. And so now it’s just working. Everything is wonderful and no complaints with that. I also use loom. I mean I’m an looms that regularly sending loom videos to clients prospects my team so loom if you’re not familiar with it it’s it’s a great app that you can immediately record your screen and talk over it and point you can have your camera on and it it is loading to the internet as your recording so when you’re done it’s just there and you can immediately email the link. So I really, really like loom for that. And then the next two, I don’t use this one is much. In fact, I don’t use this one at all anymore. I started out with Calendar. I loved having a really quick way to send people a link where they could jump on my calendar conveniently. We now use a different service inside what we what we refer to as market drive. It is our go high level. You know where I a digital marketing agency and web design agency and we are all in with high level. We white label it is market drive and so we now use a 100% as a team for our calendaring and stuff like that. But if you don’t have something like that, kalumbila is great. And it it didn’t used to handle time zones for a while, but now it handles time zones for a while. And just I really like it. Now, the next one that I use for scheduling meetings and getting people together and a and, and a set time is called doodle. So D oddly, you can create a doodle. You pick a handful of times, several times, many times you want and you send a link to everybody that you’re trying to coordinate a group meeting with and they can go through and click what times they’re that work for them. And boom, when everybody submits their entry, you can look down and see what time makes the most sense for the majority of people, says a lot of back and forth of why can’t meet them. And I mean I know that now I don’t wanna do that. I use doodle now the the last app in the communication app that I use, I think I probably use it more than I should. I probably appreciate it more than I should if I had to pick one app to keep from communication and get rid of all other communication apps. If I was voting for the number one app of the year of all time, this is the app that would get my vote. And it’s called Marco Polo. Oh, I love Marco Polo. I use it with my family. Family back in the States. I use it with my team. I’ve got groups in there. I use it for I use it with my one on one coaching clients. So all of my coaching clients, we meet once a week for an hour on Zoom, one on one heads, one on one coaching. But we meet once a week for an hour to work on their business. And then in between our one on ones, they have access to me via Marco Polo. And so it’s asynchronous video chatting. It’s, it’s, it’s happening. If, if you’re both on there at the same time, you can see that you’re both on there and you can see the person as the recording. There’s like it’s almost instantaneous and then you can message back to them, but you’re just you’re able to watch them and then respond to them. And as they’re watching you, they they get just got to wait until you’re done and then they can respond. But one of the reasons they like it is. I like to pace. And so if I got to sit and write up a long email or text message, you know, no, thank you. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want any part of that. But if somebody sends me a question, I love getting questions. I marcopolo I’ll just, you know, I’ll open the app, watch the video, stand up, start walking out, you know, start pacing around. I’ll go outside and pace. I will walk around the park. You know, sometimes I’m just walking up and down the hallway of of wherever, whatever house or apartment or condo we happen to be living in. And I just I just said the Marco Polo is absolutely hands down my favorite app. App. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Third set of apps, the third category still with me. All right. Good. Glad you still here. Let’s get into this third category. You ready? All right. Again, a lot of these are going to need a lot of explanations. These are finance and accounting apps. QuickBooks can’t go wrong with it. I like it. It works well with my bookkeeper. My accountant. It’s just. It is just. It works. It just works. I love QuickBooks Stripe. I’ve tried other ways to receive payments. PayPal. I do like Stripe a lot. We use Stripe. I use it with almost all of our clients on our client websites. Absolutely. Love Stripe. And then the last app in this section is called Every Dollar. Now, I’m not going to get a lot into every dollar. My wife was actually on the podcast with me in episode four, and we got into the actual numbers that are of our budget, how much we spend to live this lifestyle as a full time traveling family of six and how we manage our finances is with every dollar. And so I encourage you to just go check out episode four and you can learn more about it there. All right. Category four. These last few haven’t got as many. We’re almost done. Me? See, I got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Only seven left. Let’s do this. Ready? All right. Number four category for travel navigation. I’m telling you what, Google Maps, universal. It’s great outside. You know, in Latin America, a lot of people use Waze. A lot of people prefer to navigate with Waze. And that’s fine. I don’t mind Waze, but it’s I still like to find local businesses on Google Maps. And so, you know, see reviews, find their hours, reach out, get in touch with them. It’s just, you know, I’d be lost without it. And then Uber, you know, I’ve tried a lot of ridesharing services and again, Uber’s just hard to beat in most places. So. I like Uber. I use Alan. All right. Number are category five. Real quickly, I want to touch on some remote work in safety apps. Now, the first one I use two different ones. And these are VPNs. And I use to, like I said, two different VPNs. We have surfshark for our entire family and it’s on all of our devices. Everybody’s got an iPad. We’ve got four phones, two computers. So it’s on all of those devices. We travel with an Amazon fire stick. It’s on our fire stick. That way we can, you know, watch shows. Some of our apps just don’t work if we don’t show that we’re in the the U.S. So we have surfshark set up on that. But there and it’s just there are times I need it to, you know, get into some accounts. I can’t get into some accounts without having the the VPN on, so I have to turn on Surfshark. But Surfshark isn’t the only one I like, and for the longest time I used clear VPN. Now clear VPN is part of set app. And so if you have a set app, you don’t have to pay for one. In fact, if if we didn’t have so many devices, I wouldn’t even have surfshark the only reason we have it is you can only have. I think it’s like. Four or maybe six devices on your clear VPN, and we have more than that. And so, you know, we just it didn’t work for the the family. So we got surfshark on my primary work machine, my MacBook. I use clear VPN. I really, really like it. Again comes with set at the next and this may be a little controversial. I know they had some issues last year, but when it comes to password management, we’re a big LastPass users. Yes, I know they had some issues last year or maybe two years ago, and a lot of people laughed and went to, you know, one password or are things like that. But I, like LastPass, makes it easy for me to share passwords with my team and clients if they have it. But what do you do for the clients that don’t have LastPass? Well, I have found that for some of our clients, it’s just a little bit too much of a barrier for them. But I can’t stand having email clients, email us usernames and passwords because if their email ever gets hacked or heaven forbid, our email ever gets hacked, also, we’ve got to do a search the word password in every email in in your archive that has the word password is going to pop up and they go down through there and start, you know, Oh, here’s a username and password for this. And a lot of times people email, here’s the link to get in and here’s my username and password. I mean, this is done, all right? And I don’t I don’t want to do that. And so what we do is if a client, if we get says the client can’t use LastPass or suite too much for them we use it’s called one time secret dot com. So this isn’t so much an app as it is a digital towards a digital website but one time secret dot com free check it out you you go to one time thegrio.com you paste in there what you want to send someone it encrypts it you send the person that link and a passphrase and as soon as that passphrase is used that then then that thing can’t get opened again. It’s done. And so we will still even send a username in one and a password in another. You’ve got to be really, really careful with client username and password. All right. Last app. Last app. But before I share the last app, I want to do this. I want to say a huge thank you to Dee Rocker 91 and for the review they left. Here’s what he said. Good show. I’m enjoying this show so far. I look forward to every new episode. Eric is a great man and he’s very informative and down to earth. God Almighty has blessed him well. Thank you. Dirocco had a super height of you. I really appreciate that. That made my day reading that. And if you’re listening to this episode, you’ve been at these 26 or so minutes and and listening to me just you know shotgun a bunch of apps to you that that that I use. Would you do me a favor would you leave a rating and review it mean a lot to me and it’s how more people is going to find this podcast. You’re my marketing plan. You leaving ratings, reviews, subscribing, sharing, do all the nice things, do all the nice things. I would really, really appreciate that so stinkin much. Okay, so the last app I’m going to share real quick, not going to probably be a surprise to everybody. And then I want to share this week’s leadership tip of the week. All right. So the last app from this list in Category six, I’m telling you right now, it’s just Google Translate. All right. I use Google Translate all the time. Everywhere I go, you might be thinking, yeah, but even as a digital nomad entrepreneur, how to use it in business? Yes. I had a meeting today with someone that speaks Spanish and runs an organization here in Costa Rica, and they’re going to become a customer of ours. We we’re starting to get customers and clients all the different places I travel to. And so having Google Translate is a been a game changer for us personally, but even in business. All right. Those are my 29 favorite apps. And now I want to wrap things up by sharing this week’s leadership tip of the week. So why do I why am I doing this? If you’re new to the podcast, leadership is the the greatest limiting capacity of you and your business. If you’re struggling in an area of your business, it’s it’s almost always going to be a leadership. Issue. And to be honest, I would have started a leadership podcast if there already weren’t so many. But I also just love talking digital nomad and, and, and wanting to inspire, equip and empower people to know that they can live this lifestyle with location, independence, traveling the world. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got kids, don’t have kids like this is totally doable and such an amazing experience. But it happens because you choose to make it happen and you work for it. And, and and leadership is going to be at the core of all of this. So at the end of every episode, I like to share a leadership tip. So today’s leadership tip is do less with more. Do less with more. So many times you’ll hear people talking about their boss or their company or their organization or whatever. It’s just they expect us to do more with less. They must do more, work less, pay more, work less, help more. Blah, blah, blah. And leadership. One of my favorite leadership axioms is we’re going to do less with more. And a kind of connects to this other idea that discipline equals freedom. Okay? If you do less things and those fewer things you do, you do them with more excellence. If you have the discipline to say no to the things you don’t do well, you’re going to have more freedom. You’re going to have financial freedom. You’re going to have greater time freedom. You’re not going to have regrets. You’re not going to go, Oh, why do I agree to do this? How do I get us into this mess right now? It’s because you don’t have the discipline to say no to things that you should have said no to. And you’re trying to do all of these things. And every time you add one more thing to do, you’ve got less time to put towards everything. So you’re doing more with less quality, more with less intention, more with less return as that great leadership, great leaders do less with more. They say, No, no, no, no, we’re missing an Arleen. And the things that are lame that we do, we’re going to do them better than anybody else. We’re going to do these things with excellent. We’re going to give these things more of our time. We’re going to give these things more of our resources. What are maybe these few things? More of our our attention and energy and focus. And these are the things we do. And so this week’s leadership tip of the week, do less with more. All right. Well, my friend, I thank you so much for making it to the end of the pod cast with me. And I’m telling you something, I’m looking forward to reading your review in an upcoming podcast episode, just like I got to do today with Dee Rocker, 91. Thank you. Whoever you are. Greatly appreciate it. All right. Well, until next time, chase the big dream lead with courage and safe travels.