Top 5 Best Simple Project Management Software – 2021 Review

Are you needing a simple project management tool but don’t know where to start? There are tons of tools out there that promise to help you tackle your projects, whether they’re big or small. The problem is too many choices often lead to analysis paralysis. To help with your project management quest, I’ve compiled a list of some of the best project management tools you can use that’ll enable you to crush your project goals and work quickly. Buckle in, grab your coffee, and get ready to look through the ins and outs of some of the best tools on the market.

The Top 5 Best Simple Project Management Software

  1. Monday.com – Best for simple customization
  2. Trello – Best for simple workflows
  3. Smartsheet – Best for Gantt chart projects
  4. Basecamp – Best for remote project management
  5. Asana – Best for project goal setting

Now, let’s see how each of these tools measure up and what they have to offer.

#1 – Monday.com — Best For Simple Customization

  • Drag-and-drop task management
  • Intuitive, color-coded dashboard
  • Customizable templates included
  • Three plans under $20/month

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Monday.com straddles between being simple and being customizable to the needs of your team. Its intuitive color-coded dashboard lets your team easily drag and drop tasks and assignments.

Planning, tracking, and delivering each project is made easy with visual templates that make use of automations and work views to ensure you’re never missing a beat.

Project delivery becomes easy with customizable workflows and project trackers. That’s not all. Monday.com also equips you with templates you can customize to the uniqueness of your project, whether…

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Is Anyone Listening? Does Anybody Care?

I really don’t like to raise hell about bad customer service online. If you’ve read any of my social media rants, you probably find that hard to believe. I’ve made a commitment to let very few things upset me except the health and well-being of loved ones. I reserve most of my emotional energy for that. Other minor problems and inconveniences I ignore.

But I make an exception for really bad service. I believe you should never pay someone to make your life less pleasant.

So why do I make a post like this?

I do it to break through indifference and get attention. Too many customer service reps or agents are empowered to do little more than apologize. And while that is nice, it isn’t always enough.

Recently I’d been having much too regular problems with DoorDash. If I couldn’t get an explanation or resolution online, I’d call and usually get a satisfactory response (although who wants to waste time and effort getting what they paid for?).

In the transactions with restaurants, drivers and DoorDash, I noticed lots of blaming: drivers blaming restaurant blaming DoorDash blaming…you get the picture. Ultimately a company is responsible for its employees, even if they are independent contractors.

In my last encounter (spoiler alert) before closing my account, I asked to speak to someone in escalations or a supervisor. I was told someone would contact me in 24-48 hours. My late and lukewarm meal would have been long digested by then. I said that was unacceptable and requested a callback within 10 minutes or I would close my account. It wasn’t a threat so much as a clarification of consequences.

In the interest of fairness, I did get a call back that didn’t ring through on my phone. Missed the call. My bad. But there was no message. I called the missed number.  It went to another rep who said they couldn’t connect me with whomever called.

Ok, so I’ll wait another 5 minutes for a callback (I waited 10 to be reasonable and it never came). I posted on Facebook and got a healthy response from others who had been frustrated by DoorDash.

Using LinkedIn, I tried to connect with two DoorDash executives. To date I’ve received no response. If there is something we all hate, it is indifference. It says “you don’t count enough to respond to.” When a leader doesn’t seem to care, how can you expect a driver or customer service rep to care?

So I quit. I closed my account and decided in the future to deal with the restaurant’s delivery or pick up orders myself. This helps the restaurant also as they no longer have to give up approximately 20% of the receipts to DoorDash for “service” which may ultimately and unfairly make the restaurant look bad, because what was delicious food when it left the restaurant became inedible as a result of poor handling during the delivery process.

DoorDash will neither fail without me nor…

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2 Weight Loss Drugs Are Highly Effective Together

An effective drug treatment for weight loss if you can tolerate the side-effects.

A combination of phentermine and topiramate extended release treatment could help overweight or obese adults to lose at least 5 percent of their weight.

The extended-release phentermine plus topiramate is an FDA approved drug for treating obesity.

Past studies have been shown that 7.5 mg phentermine and 46 mg topiramate daily dosage over one year led to a minimum of 5 percent weight loss.

A study found that when the phentermine and topiramate dosage increased, the weight loss was 10 percent or greater in obese and overweight patients.

Topiramate is an approved anti-convulsant drug which is used for treating seizures and preventing migraine.

Phentermine is an appetite suppressant medication used for treating obesity in conjunction with diet and exercise.

A 12-week trial by Guerdjikova et al., 2018, suggests that the combination of phentermine and topiramate extended-release (brand name Qsymia) together with a low-calorie diet and higher physical activity would effectively lower weight and body mass index (BMI).

They found that the combined phentermine–topiramate medication reduces binge-eating symptoms in patients with binge-eating disorder.

Dr Caroline Kramer and colleagues found that a 28-week daily dosage of 96 to 200 milligrams topiramate on its own resulted in 10 percent or greater weight loss.

The review investigated 10 trials on 3,300 overweight or obese patients who took topiramate over four months and lost 11.8 pounds (5.4 kg) compared with those who took “dummy” pills known as placebo.

Dr Kramer, the study’s lead author, said:

“Topiramate is not an approved drug for the treatment of obesity.

Data from individual clinical trials might not be sufficient to support physicians’ decision to prescribe it for this use, and robust evidence of its safety is lacking.”

The weight loss benefits appear to increase the higher the dosage and the longer the treatment.

However, higher doses of phentermine medication alone or with topiramate would make patients experience serious side-effects such as depression, anxiety and insomnia.

Dr Kramer said:

“Topiramate has a substantial effect on weight loss, at least comparable to the weight loss that other anti-obesity drugs induce.

We have so few pharmacological options for the treatment of obesity that I believe topiramate can be a useful tool together with diet and exercise.”

However, she emphasised that patients need to be aware of the possible side-effects.

The adverse effects include paraesthesia, a burning sensation of the skin, cognitive impairment like slower thinking, low concentration, memory loss, and movement disorders.

The studies were published in the journal Obesity Reviews (Kramer et al., 2011) and The Lancet Journal (Gadde et al., 2011). 

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The Complete Guide to Agile Project Management

Have you ever wondered how tech giants manage to develop and update numerous products in such a short time? The answer lies in Agile. Agile project management focuses on speed, frequent releases, and feedback loops. According to Vitality Chicago, Agile’s failure rate is a meager 8% compared to Waterfall’s 22%. It’s no wonder 71% of companies use Agile approaches, and the interest is stronger than ever.

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile is an iterative approach to project management that prioritizes collaboration, feedback, and response to changes during the project lifecycle. Here, the project is broken down into short developmental cycles or stages called iterations. During each iteration, team members collaborate with stakeholders to adjust and improve processes and the final deliverable.

Agile project management traces its roots back to software development in the 1990s. Software teams, in particular, found traditional project management methods (such as Waterfall) to be too rigid. Software development requires autonomy, adaptability, and flexibility as opposed to more traditional projects (such as manufacturing) with fixed processes and predictable outcomes.

The Agile methodology has since found widespread use outside of software development and can be applied to virtually any project with constantly changing objectives.

4 Tools to Improve Agile Project Management Implementation

The Agile philosophy and principles aside, there are practical tools that you need to implement this methodology successfully. The most critical tools include:

1. Project Management Software

If ever there was a cheat-sheet for implementing Agile project management, you can find it in a software suite. There are project management tools dedicated explicitly to agile software development teams. However, this software tends to target DevOps since Agile is inherently a software development approach.

Instead, we recommend Wrike, a more flexible project management tool…

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Why You Need to Make Your Best Better (and How to Do It)

Is today as good as you’ll ever be?

Will today be as good as your life ever gets?

Let’s pretend I’m an all-knowing being—which I most certainly am not—and that I visited you with an announcement: “Today is as good as you’ll ever be. You’ll never be any better than you are right now. Tomorrow won’t be terrible, but you will be a little less happy, a little less healthy, make somewhat less money, have shallower experiences and make less impact. And that will continue each day for the balance of your life.”


Would you be happy?


I am very confident that most people would say not.

At some level, we all hope and expect our lives to keep getting better…

….but what do we do each day to ensure that happens?

Ongoing improvement requires both the desire and the discipline, a passion and a plan. 

That’s why I wrote, The Potential Principle: A Proven System for Narrowing the Gap Between How Good You Are and How Good You Could Be.

I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the best companies and highest performers of our day. I noticed that many had succeeded at becoming the best in their space, but that once they did, they faced an even bigger challenge: how to become better.

When you’re at the top of your game, improvements are more incremental and harder fought. You’ve got few if any to emulate. You are now the leader, and just maintaining, much less increasing, that lead is difficult.

So Why Get Better?


If you are already among the best, or even really good, why would you even want to get better? 

First consider this: we all know how good we’ve become, but none of us know how good we could be. No person or organization I’ve ever worked with has ever claimed they were living or doing business at peak potential. Why? We simply don’t know what is possible, so we keep aiming to get better and find out just how good we could be. That makes life and business incredibly interesting.

There are four drivers for continual improvement.

The first is change: with so many changes occurring around us, we need to improve our knowledge and skills just to keep up.



The second is competition: if our competitors get better and we don’t, we lose ground.


The third is customers: they have increasing expectations. Ever noticed that the more you do for customers, the more they expect? Of course. And that’s why you need to continue to increase your value proposition.

Finally, your capabilities are above whatever level you are performing at now. As a wise client once told me, “We don’t benchmark against our competitors, we benchmark against our capabilities.”

The Keys to Better

Nobody gets better “accidentally.” Only wine improves with age without trying. You don’t accidentally improve significantly, reach the highest summits or make the greatest positive impact without intentionality.

How much do you want to get better? Teachers can teach you, coaches can coach you, and motivational speakers can pump…

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Episode 1414 Scott Adams: Find Out What Level of Awareness You Are at While Simultaneously Sipping

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Unique Selling Proposition: A Definitive Guide

Why should customers buy from you? How do you stand out and solve their problems better than anybody else? Every marketer knows these are important questions, but finding the answers can be a challenge.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to differentiate your business and attract your ideal customers by creating a unique selling proposition.

We’ll cover why a unique selling proposition is important, how to uncover what your customers are hungry for and share a framework for developing and testing a proposition that makes an impact on your business.

How a unique selling proposition (USP) attracts better customers and builds your brand (and where marketers get it wrong)

A unique selling proposition (USP) can be defined as the element (or series of elements) that communicates what makes you different from your competition. 

For many marketing leaders, answering this question usually means finding a specific feature, component, or methodology that their competitors don’t offer. This leads to brands and startups playing a game of catch up on each other’s features.

But there are other ways to stand out. Take ConvertKit, for example. On the surface, they have similar features to the likes of Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign and iContact. It’s important to note that despite face-value similarities, they are feature-poor compared to the traditional marketing automation space. Despite not competing on classic features, they’re loved by “independent creators and solopreneurs” all over the world:

Screenshot of ConvertKit's home page (value proposition example)Screenshot of ConvertKit's home page (value proposition example)

Why? Because that’s the audience they’ve dedicated to serving, which happens to be a segment of the market that nobody else was directly talking to when they first launched. They developed features with their specific audience in mind. It’s a position that’s helped them build a SaaS brand that generates over $2.3 million in monthly recurring revenue (at time of writing).

Your USP isn’t just a clever copywriting tool. It allows customers to peer in and find out if what you’re offering is for them—and if they should stick around to learn more.

ConvertKit’s strategy is geared around building email marketing tools for independent creators, allowing their customers to build and nurture their own audience. The USP that communicates this is:

“ConvertKit helps you find your audience, turn them into true fans, and earn a living as a creator with our audience building and email marketing software.”

Without a purpose, this USP wouldn’t exist. They could have written it as part of a thought experiment, but it’s an unlikely conclusion to arrive at without a driving mission.

Finding your unique selling proposition will help you attract your ideal customer. It will force you to identify what they struggle with and what they most desire, filling those gaps in a way nobody else can or chooses to.

If you’re worried that this approach will narrow your opportunity, think again. ConvertKit built a multi-million dollar brand in…

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34 Ways To Improve SEO Rankings in 2021

Where is your website traffic coming from?

If you’re relying on people to find you through a Google search, search engine optimization (SEO) needs to be at the top of your priority list.

You won’t be able to generate leads for your business if nobody can find you.

Did you know 93% of experiences on the Internet start with a search engine? What happens after someone makes a search?

The top result on Google has a 33% chance of getting clicked.

That means if you’re not number one on the page, you just missed out on a third of potential traffic.

What’s even more astonishing is that 75% people won’t even click on the second page of the search results.

The reason why other websites are ranking higher than you on Google is because they are making a conscious effort to improve their SEO.

Fortunately, it’s not too late for you to get started.

There are certain things you can do to increase your chances of getting ranked higher on Google searches.

Want More SEO Traffic?

Get help with improving your traffic, leads, and revenue.

Get Started

 

I’ve identified the top 34 ways to improve your SEO ranking. Here they are.

1. Improve your page loading speed

Your page loading time is important for a few reasons.

First of all, if your load speed is too slow, Google will recognize this, and it will harm your ranking.

But a slow website will also impact the way your website visitors engage with your pages.

As a result, those negative interactions will hurt your ranking too.

Look at how abandonment rates increase for websites with long page loading times:

image3 10

image3 10

How slow is…

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