Productive Tools & Resources
As the world becomes an increasingly chaotic place and automation continues to take over, personal development, learning, organization, and productivity become only more key to staying competitive and relevant. Continuing to cultivate a habit of life long learning is also one of the best ways to maintain mental health.
Data Visualization
Google’s free data visualization that seamlessly integrates with their advertising suite & other products. You can also use 3rd party solutions to integrate social platforms or other data sources.
Salesforce’s data visualization tool allows for clean, clear, interactive reports & data exploration in a desktop environment alongside it’s cloud option. Note that the free version is public so avoid utilizing non-public data.
Microsoft’s solution currently hangs it’s hat heavily on AI, much like the rest of its product suite like Bing & Windows. It also takes a slightly different approach to it’s graphic design, UI, & UX which may or may not be to your liking.
Writing + Language Resources
This classic English major guide book remains one of the best and most important references for English Grammar & creating legible written communication. Use it if you can’t remember if you should use a comma, a period, or a semicolon.
A sometimes forgotten resource for good writing, leverage a thesaurus to make your communications less repetitive and to find more precise descriptors for your thoughts and emotions.
A visual dictionary & thesaurus solution for those that find it more helpful.
One of the best ways to learn a new language with gamified challenges & bite sized lessons. A little known features is that the web version has grammar lessons and explainers complete with things like conjugation tables which helps a ton in grasping the foundations of your target language.
Graphic Design + Presentations
There a large number of site’s that offer Creative Commons & Public Domain photos and illustrations, this site offers a list of the best ones.
Every site and presentation needs icons find the perfect Icon for your situation with these sites.
Google’s guide to material design for Apps and Websites, which provides a easy blueprint for making clean, legible, and effective (if a bit generic) graphic design & menus.
Google’s publication dedicated to their approach and best practices for design, very helpful for keep up to date with the latest graphic & UX design trends.
Automation + ML + AI + Data Science
A distribution of Python that comes pre-configured with all necessary packages for data science, machine learning, & AI development.
Python – Natural Language Processing
Guide to begin with natural language processing in python which allows for automated sentiment analysis and classifying information.
A primer on how to begin with AI & Machine Learning in Excel, which is a more approachable entry into the field.
Google Sheets – How scrap data with Google Sheets
A primer on how to pull live data from websites into Google sheets simply, allowing for automated analysis of things like stock prices or other public data sets.
Google Scripting – Google Scripts Library
A library of Google Ads scripts that help ease management of Google ads, principles outline here could be transferred to other Google products.
Google Scripting – Code Snippets Library
Series of code snippets for pulling & processing data from a variety of Google products with Google Scripts.
Google Scripting – Ultimate Script Library
Large list of useful pre-written scripts for Google Scripting that require limited adaption.
Looking for Marketing Tools & Publications?
Find more tools and publications for marketing & advertising below!
Excel
Visual basic is the core automation framework & language for the ms office suite, which makes it a very accessible form of automation since many day to day business tasks are already happening in ms office.
VBA – Top 100 Most Useful Macros
Another 100 useful macros to make your day to day a bit easier in the office. Often times these are more focused and faster than battling with LLM prompts.
Organization Tools
Notion is a unique note taking and project management tool that brings the power of databases to productivity. Unlike other note apps every note and project is kept in a database that can be re-organized and re-ordered at any time, making it very easy to find old notes and connect ideas, especially when your work is constantly changing.
Obsidian is based on the theory of the mind map, which focuses on mimicking how your brain works allowing you to quickly connect any notes or ideas together and see them in a visual graph. It can also help create a life wiki, that organizes your life similarly to how Wikipedia organizes information.
Design Thinking
Provides an excellent primer on what design thinking is and how to apply it to turn challenges into opportunities, along with a large backlog of blog posts and articles about its implementation.
The leading light of the design thinking movement, Standford has many lessons and articles available both on its website and its YouTube channel for how to utilize design thinking to solve problems.
A publication from within Stripe, although it ended in 2021, it still provides many insights into challenges with designing software for the modern web
The blog of the CEO of Shopify, “Too-Biased” offered sharp insights into problem solving and divergent thinking that were ahead of their time.
Programming
Gamified learning for coding and development great for learning new programming & technical skills in bite sized pieces.
Learn Web Development skills like, HTML, PHP, CSS, & Javascript, among other skills like SQL. Perfect for getting programming foundations and nail core langauge concepts.
Find answers and suggstions when you get stuck programming, with one of the internet’s largest programming forums.
Business & Leadership
One of the most respected business publications, HBR often publishes case studies, whitepapers, and POVs that help you capture both current trend and learnings of business management mistakes and wins.