Being a manager, I sought out for tools and finding the best ones does take some time. I am bombarded with emails from all the free trials I sign-up for. There are a lot of everyday tasks we need help with. Here are some basic tasks, that are handled with tools.
- Scheduling your tasks
- Tracking work - to see what’s in for that day
- Time management
- Documentation
- Create/Maintain logs
- Tools for collaboration
- Communication and Focus
Google Apps
We all know the variety of applications that Google provides. They come in handy in a lot of scenarios. Google Docs are hugely used for all the documentation work. Any official document can be created in Docs and on the positive side it comes with easy collaboration. Google Sheets also helps in maintaining a log of work being done or to be done. Using sheets to put up timelines are really effective especially with the color codes to help in identifying the complexity of the feature.
Communication
Connecting to customers or clients over the internet is a crucial part. There can be a lot of issues while conversing over a faulty medium. Information maybe miscommunicated or lost or in the worst case ends up irritating your client and you ultimately lose the deal.
Skype has made it easier to connect with people miles away and applications like GoToMeeting are being used by a lot of professionals as well. Slack is another notable mention but Slack is more of a text communication tool than a conference tool.
Email Tools
There are ton of email tools, and by default people use Gmail. But applications like Newton email provides the option to check if your email has been opened or not. It also allows you to unsend an email in a span of 30 seconds from the time sent. Though the application comes with a price, it is worth the money you invest. The interface and usability of the application is easy and not complicated which many applications these days fail to capture.
Task Management Tool
Asana, Trello seems to be the task management tool that tops the list. But when having our own product called the Allt , I haven’t got the chance to try the others.
Allt has everything a task management tool will need. To manage tasks, you need a task list and should be able to comment, mark it done, set the priority level for the task or even assign it to a team member. All of this is provided by Allt and that is not it, all the task lists are tied to workspaces, which can be projects or you can even term it to teams. Every workspace has their own list of boards - which allows you to publish announcements, Files - where you can collect all the files related to that particular workspace and the task lists. In addition to this there are a ton of other features that are really helpful.
You will agree with me if you try it.
Notes
Everyone is familiar with the concept of drafting notes and there are more than countable number of notes applications. Out of all the applications, Bear captures the essence of note taking. From the application’s UI to the features it provides, Bear takes a step above all. Sharing the notes are now easier as Bear allows the notes to be converted into other file formats.
Calendar
Google Calendar does a pretty good job at creating events and sending invites to the event attendees. But it fails in narrowing down the view of the calendar. The cellular view of the calendar fails to focus on daily events. There are other notable calendars like Calendly which allows you to share your calendar allowing others to block events on your free time. On failing to find an app that shows only that day’s events and nothing else, we built Steve . Steve is minimal, focused and simple. With just two colors and one day in your view, you can never miss an event. On the positive side, it allows creation of event and to sync your calendar(s). Steve allows you to tune down and view only one or all of your calendars.
Check out Steve here .
Capturing workflows
MindNode still is the best at this. The mind maps created using mind nodes have a clarity that other apps have failed to capture. From the flow of the map, to the colors used and the option to change the theme of the map, MindNode steals the show. With the new update, markdown files can easily be converted into mind nodes and the other way around as well. Sounds cool, doesn’t it?
These 7 tools seems to be enough to handle majority of the work. With the upcoming months, I will make sure to cover any other interesting tools that are worth using.