Tools to make working from home easier
We’ve put together a list of online tools to make your working from home experience more organised and efficient.
Millions of people are suddenly faced with working remotely. This is a big change for some and it’s not the easiest thing to do under normal circumstances, let alone the current situation.
If you work in a data-sensitive job, you need to personally ensure that you’re meeting the required security measures so before using these tools, make sure you do your due diligence.
Communication
Slack is a popular communication hub that allows you to pass on the right information to the right people. It helps people get their work done, but it’s also a fun tool.
You can use it to replace email with something more accessible and responsive. It will allow you to share documents, @ specific colleagues, give announcements, start a video conference, create a poll and generally create a fun community vibe. (This will be important as you adjust to not physically seeing your colleagues every day).
Mattermost is a chat client. It’s a flexible, open-source messaging platform that enables secure team collaboration. You can notify one person or a whole room, or just the people currently online. You can share links, files and images. Plus, you can install a bot that acts as a virtual assistant.
Jitsi is a self-hosted video conferencing platform like Mattermost but for video!
We wrote about the importance of communication and how you can encourage creativity in a remote environment, which you might find useful. You can read that article here.
Documents
WeTransfer is a straightforward way of sending large files. You can send up to 2GB for free.
Nextcloud is an on-premise solution that acts as a hub. It encourages you to share and collaborate on documents with colleagues as well as giving you email, video conferencing and a calendar. The best bit is this is all very secure and compliant.
Google Drive is a safe place to store your files. They’ll give you 15GB of storage for free. The simplest way to explain what you get from Google Drive is everything you get from a Microsoft or Apple computer, in the cloud. Plus you can benefit from the various video conferencing options like Hangouts or Classroom.
Organisation
Tomato Timer. A quick lesson: The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method where you use a timer to break your tasks down into small intervals. Each interval is called a ‘Pomodoro’ which is Italian for ‘tomato’ and the term is used as a nod to the tomato-shaped kitchen timers. You can use this site to allocate yourself a time to get something done. It helps people to focus their day.
Trello is a visual tool that will help you to organise your work. Trello is, essentially, an online pinboard. You use it to organise “cards” into lists. Your cards can be tasks, notes, projects, shared files, or anything else that helps your or your team work together.
Zenkit organises tasks, clients, features, bugs, invoices, documents and other business data. It reduces the reliance on separate spreadsheets and tools and connects them all together.
PlanITpoker is great for developers and project managers. It works in an agile style to estimate tasks accurately. It’s nifty for sprint planning.
Todoist helps you to capture and organise tasks the moment they pop into your head. If you think of it, you can store it in your list. You can use it on your smartphone so you never miss something important.
If you use Gmail, Google Tasks and Google Calendar are great. This is similar to Todoist and if you’re thinking of using Drive, you can utilise these features too. There’s an app and it appears in the slide-out panel in your Gmail window, which is really handy because you can switch between Calendar and Tasks.
Tools for teams
LettuceMeet is the easiest way to schedule group meetings. 100% free, no account is required. It also integrates with Google and Outlook calendar for additional organisation.
Google Hangouts brings your conversations to life. You can share photos, emoji and even group video calls for free. You can have multiple people in your meetings.
Open Project is a web-based open-source project management software to support teams along the entire project management life-cycle. This is a nifty tool for those wondering how to manage a project when you’re no longer in the same physical location. For more advice on this, we wrote a blog about it, here.
Security
LastPass is a free, open-source password manager that stores encrypted passwords online. You can securely share passwords with colleagues (and they don’t even need to see what that password is) as well as securely storing your own vital passwords in a vault.
Bitwarden is another free and open-source password management service that stores sensitive information such as website credentials in an encrypted vault.
Mental Wellbeing
Living Life to the Full offers free online courses covering low mood, stress and resiliency.
Our current situation Is going to affect people mentally. It’s hard enough adjusting to working from home when you haven’t before, let alone during an intense time of global magnitude. LLTTF can help you figure out why you feel as you do, how to tackle those problems, build confidence, get going again, feel happier, stay calm, tackle upsetting thinking and more. They offer free courses to help people in their daily lives.
We were talking to the Drum recently about the importance of mental wellbeing in remote companies, you can see what our marketing manager, Maygen and designer, Aaron, had to say, here.
Final thoughts
We hope you find something useful in these suggestions. There are quite literally thousands of apps and online tools available to help you get on with your work. Remote working is new to a lot of people, but it’s not a new concept. There is support for anyone who needs it.
We can help if people are interested in the self-hosted tools we’ve mentioned, (Mattermost, Nextcloud, Jitsi, or any others you might be interested in). We’re happy to advise on how to make your company more remote, including setting up a virtual private network for those working with sensitive data of any kind.
We’ll post more on VPNs soon, but otherwise, you can contact us here.
If you’ve got everything you need but you’re still struggling to get into a routine, we’ve written some tips which you can read here.
