5 Tools To Streamline Your Workplace
“Technology is making us less productive.”
We’ve probably heard that line or mentioned it ourselves many times in the last few years. It’s easy to feel like the bombardment of notifications and emails keeping us glued to mobile phones do little to improve focus and collaboration at work.
Nowhere is this truer than in high tech companies that take pride in living on the bleeding edge of what is new and trendy when it comes to tools and gadgets. Luckily, there is some good news too. Embracing technology in the right way can be a major boost to organisational productivity.
Cloud-based applications are available to anyone with an Internet connection and a web browser, and offer some of the smartest ways to get work done in teams. The five products described below are my favourite tools for streamlining everything from email to file sharing and accounting. They’re all easy to adopt, cheap to begin using (most have some sort of free or trial version), and more than justify their investment after just only weeks of use.
1. Slack
Slack (www.slack.com) is like a private chat tool for the entire organisation that actually works. Channels or groups can be easily started on various topics, and private messages are supported too. Slack works well as a real-time chat client, or in period doses, and integrates with a lot of other mainstream tools on the market today. The end result is an increase in effective team communication, and most importantly, a sharp decrease in email!
2. Trello
Trello (www.trello.com) is the digital equivalent of a wall with sticky cards that you can easily move around. It doesn’t try to be too smart or too fancy — it keeps to the basic principles that everyone knows how to move cards through columns on a whiteboard. Boards can be assigned to specific projects or departments, and cards can be assigned to specific people. We keep it simple by using the following four columns or lists to move cards through: Ice Box, To Do, Doing, and Done. Trello is the simplest way to manage a project or track work within a team.
3. Dropbox
Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) should be every company’s filing system. It works like a normal folder on a computer, but is synchronized via the web or network to automatically update once somebody else with access to the folder changes something. Instead of having many different versions of documents floating around the office, using an organized dropbox ensures that the latest files are accessible to team members all of the time.
4. Google Docs
Google Docs (www.google.com/docs) is the best way to collaborate on simple documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The latest versions are stored online and accessible to the entire team. While Google Docs doesn’t yet match MS Office for sheer functionality, it’s ability to handle 90% of the most common needs of teams makes it a magical solution for handling version control and edits by multiple people.
5. Xero
Xero (www.xero.com) is slowly turning the accepted accounting paradigm on its head by offering a cloud-based system that can be updated and viewed on a continuous basis. Xero enables managers to log in and track their department numbers in real-time, manage payroll, or generate expense claims. When used properly, it demystifies a lot of what actually happens in the accounting department and turns proper accounting into something the team and managers can engage with on a weekly basis; not just an afterthought at the end of the month or quarter.
Used as a group, the sum of the tools described above become nothing short of a revolution in productivity among teams. They represent the way that work will be managed long into the future.
And lastly, my advice for coping with the information overload while trying to focus on something that doesn’t require any sort of collaboration? Turn off that phone and laptop, and pull out a pen and piece of paper.
This blog was originally published on CEO Magazine and Sheraan Amod’s blog.
Follow Sheraan on Twitter: @sheraan
