I’ve been thinking about how much you can actually accomplish in a day.
Quite a lot, as it happens.
Especially now that we have so many wonderful tools at our fingertips.
You could finally finish that project you’ve had sitting on your hard drive for months. Create something entirely new. Give an old idea a fresh lease of life. Or try out a completely different way of earning money.
And you don’t need to spend the day glued to your computer, either.
Sometimes a couple of focused hours are enough to get something worthwhile off the ground.
So this week I’ve been looking for some free resources that might help you do exactly that.
I’ve deliberately chosen a few that you may not have come across before as well as some I use all the time.
8 FREE RESOURCES WORTH EXPLORING
1. Pinterest Trends
I’ve always found it fascinating to see what people are interested in, particularly when tastes change with the seasons. Pinterest Trends lets you explore popular searches and spot emerging interests. It’s a lovely place to find inspiration for printables, gifts, craft products and all sorts of other ideas.
2. Exploding Topics
https://explodingtopics.com/topic
If you enjoy discovering things before everyone else starts talking about them, have a look at this. It tracks emerging trends across different markets and can lead you down some interesting rabbit holes. The free browsing features are useful for getting started.
3. Tally
This is a clever alternative to traditional forms. You could use it to take orders for personalised products, collect requests for a new service or find out what your audience would love you to create next. There’s a generous free plan, including the ability to connect Stripe for payments.
4. Ko-fi Shop
You may know Ko-fi as a way for creators to accept tips, but it also has a shop where you can sell digital downloads, physical products and commissions. There’s no monthly subscription or listing fee, so it’s worth exploring if you’ve got something low ticket you’d like to put up for sale. Transaction fees apply.
5. Napkin AI
I rather like this one. Give it some text and it helps turn your ideas into diagrams and illustrations. Useful for guides, courses, presentations and anything that could benefit from a visual explanation. There’s a free plan, although exports carry branding.
6. Gamma
If you’ve ever spent an entire afternoon trying to make a presentation look respectable, this could be worth a look. Gamma uses AI to help turn ideas and notes into presentations, documents and simple websites. You can experiment with the free credits.
7. Photopea
This is surprisingly sophisticated for a free browser-based image editor. It can even open Photoshop files. Very handy if you want to edit a product cover, improve a graphic or work with design templates without paying for another subscription.
8. Adobe Express
A useful alternative to Canva, with tools for creating graphics, short videos, promotional materials and more. There’s plenty to play with on the free plan.
THIS WEEK’S TED TALK
Keep Your Goals to Yourself by Derek Sivers
This is only about three minutes long but it raises a fascinating question…
Could telling everyone about your wonderful plans actually make you less likely to carry them out?
Sivers explores the surprising psychology behind announcing our goals and why sometimes it’s better to get on with things before telling the world.
I thought it was a rather good companion to this week’s theme.
A LITTLE SUNDAY EXPERIMENT
Here’s an idea.
Choose one thing you’ve been meaning to do for ages and give yourself a day to see how far you can get.
It might be creating a small product, putting something up for sale, experimenting with a new tool or finally finishing a project that’s been hanging around for months.
No enormous expectations or grand declarations required.
You might surprise yourself with what you manage to accomplish.
And if you discover something particularly useful along the way, I’d love to hear about it.