It’s a crazy time for the world. Everything has changed. We are having to adapt, innovate and reach out of our comfort zone (in the comfort of our own homes).
Many companies are ordering their workforce to work from home, and for some people this is very challenging. We are having to change our routine, our habits and our work culture. Luckily, there are multiple digital tools to help control the chaos and structure our workflow. Let me share with you some amazing tools that will enable you to work more efficiently and effectively wherever you have set up your office:
Skip Boring Phone Calls
Since everyone’s working from home, meetings have been cancelled until further notice. But they don’t have to be. Zoom is a no-fuss reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing. It’s a lot more intuitive and collaborative than Skype or just plain phone calls, with individual meeting URLs, breakout sessions and call customizability.
Stop Wasting Time Setting Up
If you work with bookings, or you’re just looking for a straightforward meeting scheduling tool to plan out your online appointments, look no further than Calendly. You can set your own meeting parameters, easily share a single link for people to book a slot with you and synchronise all meetings with your digital calendar of choice.
Clear Up The Fuss
I work on projects all the time. I delegate some tasks to my co-workers, do some my own, reach out to other professionals etc, but sometimes I just need a solid overview of who does what. That’s where Trello comes in. If you’ve never heard of Kanban scheduling, you should really delve into it by using Trello. It’s a super efficient way to manage projects and planning with a remote team.
Start Collaborating SMARTER
If you’re not using a professional communication platform for your business yet, Slack is the software to go for. It’s not only an all-in-one messaging platform, it also supports a huge amount of third party integrations to, for example, easily post files straight from your Dropbox account right into your Slack chatroom. By the way, if you’re not yet using Dropbox, you’re missing out on the best tool to save and backup your files to the cloud. I can also recommend Google Drive and its Google Docs functionality. These are tools that are great if you also want to collaborate on documents in addition to cloud storage.
Become The Architect Of Ease
A little more on the technical side but still fairly easy to use is Zapier. This tool enables you to integrate and automate your platforms so that you don’t have to do all the work. Let’s say for example that each time you get an email with an attachment, you want the file to go straight to your Dropbox. This all happens with a single zap you program. It’s a ridiculously handy tool for busy people that just want to focus on the important work. Lastly, consider Franz. This software is amazing in the sense that it allows you to set up all your social media, email accounts and more into one overview, so you don’t have to check them all individually.
I hope these tips help you out during this crazy time of staying locked inside. We don’t have to compromise on qualitative work, we just have to use the right equipment.
