Welcome to Today’s Spark - a series of ideas, crowdsourced tips and more from your favorite marketing consulting agency, Spark Focus.
For the first post of this series, I reached out to the brilliant women of The Jane Club for what they were thankful for in tech this year. They did not disappoint!
R: Being able to Zoom into things from my phone when I am running late
K: Community wherever I’m working. I spent this year finding ways to work smarter, not longer, and The Jane Workday has helped me first figure out my daily priorities and then use sprints powered by the Pomodoro method to knock them out in 25-minute bursts. The breaks and community definitely help me focus!
M: I love this app that reminds me to water my plants
S: I’m grateful for Smarthome things - telling Alexa to add things to my shopping list, turning on lights, etc. Makes my life easier!Z: I hate almost all of the tech I use, but I bought a really, really small white noise machine for traveling.
K: I would say all the tech developments that are happening to support people with disabilities
R: Airline checkins on my phone
S: Grateful for my AirTag for finding my perpetually lost keys.R: Laser hair removal.
K: Listening to podcasts - this year I’m enjoying The Big Dig, Wiser Than Me and local flavor Undiscarded
Z: I got a smart watch that I basically only wear to busy events so I can peek at messages without having to get my whole phone out.
W: Electric car charging stations
Z: USBC adapters for traveling! So you can actually plug your headphones into the plane (if it has a USB spot) and not have to carry so many stupid charging blocks.
R: World clock on my iPhone bc time zones are hard
K: Tech tools being worked on to prevent AI from stealing other people's work without permission.
Z: Canva.
R: GPS maps that talk to you in the car bc girl does not know how to read a map and less so while I am driving.
E: Robot vacuums
Z: WATERPROOFING. They’ve came up with new ways to waterproof things, like shoes. Easy breezy yet somehow waterproof sneakers?! Waterproof phones!? Yusss. Thank you to whomever has been quietly working away on waterproofing for years.
R: Apps that convert currency automatically
Z: Searching for things on Roku across apps
E: Scheduling tools (I use a couple at work)
K: Google Bard for getting me started when the blank page is too blank.
Any more you’d include?