Annie Croner [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the Whole Assistant Podcast where assistants come to embrace their badassery and discover how to show up more strategically for their careers, their executives, and most importantly, themselves. I'm your coach, Annie Croner. Join us as we dive into the skills, strategies and mindset that will help you unleash your full potential. Let's go. Welcome back to the Whole Assistant Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking all about the top three tools that I use on repeats this month. I'm going to be sharing tips, tools, strategies to help you level up your productivity and to really kick butt in your role. I'm kind of going back to the basics here.
Annie Croner [00:00:43]:
I know I talk a lot about mindset and self concepts that way, but sometimes it's just good to know the tools and to understand what they can do for you. So today I'm going to share my three favorite tools that I use all the time in my business. I constantly recommending these tools to executive assistants as well to streamline your workflows and so let's dive in. Okay. The first tool that I love to use is called Text Blaze and you go to Blaze. Today I'm going to link to all these links in the show notes. By the way, I don't get a cut of anything I'm linking to. This is purely for your knowledge and your understanding because these are the things that I believe in, these are the things that I use and I want to share them with you.
Annie Croner [00:01:31]:
So Text Blaze is a great tool for templatizing. So it is a Google Chrome extension and it is also a native Mac app. So if you're in a Mac environment like I am, and you also operate out of Google like I do, this is going to be the tool for you. And even if you do not operate on a Mac, you can still utilize this tool as a Google Chrome extension. So what I love about this is that it creates keyboard shortcuts to insert pre written templates that in the tool is known as snippets into emails and documents. And I used to really advocate for people creating a trello board all around templates to use. But this is a much more streamlined way of doing it. So for example, when I'm preparing a proposal for a training client, a corporate training client, I have a template email and I can shorthand it dash and training and that email will auto populate.
Annie Croner [00:02:32]:
I can go in and make modifications as necessary but it saves me so so much time. It's a great way to store emails that you send on a regular basis. Or even not a regular basis, but that you know you will send again. I had a client once tell me that she used it for an email that she only sent once a year so that she didn't have to scroll back through her emails and find the former email that she sent the previous year. So it's just a really great way to streamline all that you manage and to really templatize and make sure that you are leveraging your templates in the most efficient way. It also is really cool because you can create dynamic templates, so you can create templates that allow you to insert and customize fields such as date and time. Just a really cool tool. And it is free when you start out, so I think it's free up till 20 snippets or 20 templates and then the paid version is like $3 a month that you pay annually.
Annie Croner [00:03:27]:
So like what? What is that? $36 a year? You get this really cool tool at your disposal. And you guys, this saves me hours of time every single week. And even if I have to go back and look at the shorthand, it still saves me time in actually penning the email and notes. So I also am really active on LinkedIn and in my DMs and I create templates for all my DMs because there are certain responses that I just found myself writing over and over again. This. That's a really cool tool for that as well. So check out Text Blaze there again. I'm going to link to Text Blaze in the show notes below.
Annie Croner [00:04:04]:
The second tool that I would have you look into is Cabinet and you can go to joincabnet.com to learn more about this tool. But Cabinet has a special place in my heart because Cabinet was started by a good friend of mine, Julia Leibovitz. Julia started Cabinet back in the day right as I was starting my brand and she reached out to me and touched base. She wasn't sure what she was going to create in our space yet, but she is also a former executive assistant who just wanted to help executive assistants streamline their workflows. And as she was learning more about our work and what our pain points are, she came up with the idea of Cabinet. Her and her team are all great to work with. I've had the privilege of speaking on their stage. They had a live event last year in 2025.
Annie Croner [00:04:53]:
Just all around good people. So this particular tool has a special place in my heart and it's a calendaring app and you can use it in a Microsoft environment. So it works in Outlook. It also works in Google environments. I love the features of cabinets. So it's scheduling automation, kind of like calendly. So you can set up like calendly link where you just send out a link and people can book their own time. But it can be much more nuanced than that.
Annie Croner [00:05:20]:
What I like about Cabinet and how it differentiates itself is that you can highlight available times on your executive's calendar and that will auto populate to an email and you can either send live links for people to click on the time and it will automatically book the time and then release those shadow holds. So that's another cool thing that Cabinet does is it puts shadow holds on your executive's calendar. It'll release those shadow holds once the time is booked. What I love about it too is that if you're really high touch like I was back in the day working in a VC and I would never just send a calendly link because that wasn't the vibe for our office and it wasn't the culture that we were in or I was in. But it will create a list of available times and then what's really cool about that list is that it will automatically convert and display in multiple time zones. So if I was sending that email out to three or four people to get their availability for a call, a joint call, it would literally send that in a different time zone for each person if they were in different time zones. So it automatically updates the time zone in the email as you're sending it out. It's a really cool, slick feature of Cabinet.
Annie Croner [00:06:37]:
I think perhaps the best part of Cabinet though is that you can set up Cabinet to collect data points to have a calendar audit with your executive. So you can actually see how much time is being spent every week in one on ones in leadership meetings, that sort of thing. You get a full scope of your executive's calendar and so if your executive is spending a lot of time in step down meetings, then you will be aware of that because of how you set up Cabinet. So it's just a really cool, slick tool. It is built for the executive support professional, which I love. I think Julia and her team has literally spent hundreds and hundreds of hours fielding executive assistance pain points and going in and modifying their products to be made for us as support professionals. So check out joincabinet.com there. Again, I'm going to link to that in the show Notes now.
Annie Croner [00:07:32]:
We're going to take a brief break and when we come back, I'm going to share the last and final tool that I would have us all look at. Hey there, quick pause. Do you want to grow in your career but don't have a ton of extra time, money or let's be honest, energy to commit to leveling up? If this is you, I have got you. Empower Seat is my intentionally affordable membership for busy executive assistants and support professionals who are done white knuckling their careers in isolation. Inside Empowered Seat you get support that's actually built around you. You're going to get access to me inside of our VIP online community. You're going to get two monthly calls with me as well a monthly training session you can watch or listen to on the go. It's pre recorded so you can either listen through our private podcast podcast or in the vaults.
Annie Croner [00:08:23]:
It's affordable, practical, sustainable growth built by someone who gets it. If this sounds like what you've been looking for, you can learn more and join empowered seat@wholeassistant.com empowered seat or just click the link in the show notes below. Now back to the episode. All right, so the last and final tool that I use on repeat is Chat GPT. Now I know I'm probably sounding like a broken record in our space because a lot of us are utilizing Chat GPT, but I've just found it to be a really, really helpful tool, especially as I've trained it to speak from my brand voice and I fed it a lot of information around me and what I stand for and what my company stands for. ChatGPT is very helpful. It helps me draft emails, especially if I'm feeling a little bit split spicy. I will put the email through Chat GPT and ask it to tone down the email a bit.
Annie Croner [00:09:21]:
It also helps me see holes and processes so if I'm experiencing a pain point I will I can articulate that pain point to ChatGPT and ask it for its advice because I've There Again, I've trained ChatGPT on my business so well. It also helps me be as inclusive as possible because I genuinely want to help the highest number of of administrative support professionals this year. There again I've created the membership to make it much more affordable to work with me and have access to me. I still have a small contingency of one on one clients as well, but I really am moving to a one to many model and ChatGPT is kind of my sidekick in that quest. There again, I want to support more administrative professionals. I want to go in and do live trainings of corporate environments and have facetime with you all. And ChatGPT is helping me see the holes in my processes in order to enact what needs to be enacted in order to reach the highest number of support professionals. I will say that there are certain guidelines that I would have us all implement when it comes to a tool like ChatGPT.
Annie Croner [00:10:28]:
And there again, you can use any tool like this. You can use Claude, you can use Copilot. Copilot's a good tool if you're in a Microsoft environment because it's a closed AI tool for your organization. So yeah, I'm a big fan of utilizing and leveraging these tools to help you summarize meeting notes, that sort of thing. But some guidelines if you're going to use ChatGPT or Claude specifically OpenAI is that you need to know your company's policy on AI, and you need to follow your company's policy on AI and do not put any personalized info into ChatGPT or a tool like Claude, because that just captures that information and then is holding that information. And we definitely want to be aware of sensitive information. We definitely want to be aware of our company's policy with regard to AI platforms and tools. But AI can be a powerful tool, and what I like about it is that it's kind of like an equalizer.
Annie Croner [00:11:23]:
If you are pressed for time and you need ideas about something fast, you can turn to ChatGPT. I actually use ChatGPT in my personal life to help me come up with recipes so that I am meeting my protein intake goals. Because I have this goal of building muscle this year and in order to build muscle I need to make sure that I am ingesting a certain amount of protein every single day. So it's really helpful across the board in life as well. So those are the tools that I would have you check out and I use on repeat. I'm going to link to all of these tools in the show notes below. This is a really short and sweet episode. Next week I'm going to be sharing about other hacks, productivity hacks, so please come back for that.
Annie Croner [00:12:11]:
But in the meantime, have a great week. I hope you found this episode helpful. And that is all for now. If today's episode gave you language clarity or just a quiet oh, it's not just me. I am so thrilled you're here. If this podcast has been helpful for you, the easiest way you can support the show is by taking 30 seconds to rate and review it on Apple Podcast or Spotify. This helps more assistants find this work and if you're ready for ongoing support, guidance, community and growth that actually fits into your life. Empowered Seat is where we continue this work together.
Annie Croner [00:12:46]:
It's affordable, flexible and designed for assistants who are done white knuckling their careers in isolation. You can learn more and join@wholeassistant.com empowered seat or click the link in the show notes below and until next time, go embrace your bedassery.
