Top 7 Apps to make your work-from-home successful

As much as I enjoy my home office environment with all the welcome distractions like kids, pets, music, and round-the-clock snacking, there are things I miss not being in the office. The water cooler talks, ad hoc project meetings, on-demand helpdesk, impromptu discussions, and more.

But, I have learned to adapt to this new work style. With the right set of tools in your workstation, you can boost your productivity at home.

Here is a list of 7 must-have productivity applications that I highly recommend for you:

1. Zoom — Video Conferencing App

Are you using Zoom yet?

Chances are if you are one of the tens of millions of people working from home, due to COVID, you must have quickly become familiar with this teleconferencing software.

Whatever the case may be, Zoom is suddenly everywhere!

Zoom is an online video and audio conferencing app that lets you hold online meetings, training, and webinars, either 1-on-1, or in groups.

Zoom is available for computers, smartphones, and on the web.

Zoom has it’s own App Marketplace that allows you to integrates with popular applications to create a better ecosystem for your meetings.

2. Marsview Notes — Meeting Assistant

While Zoom gives the best meeting experience there are still gaps in the meeting process and that’s where Marsview Notes come in.

Marsview Notes is your note-taker and more.

Marsview Notes integrates with Zoom to capture meeting notes, summaries, keywords, transcripts, and interactive meeting highlights. At the end of the call, the meeting host receives an email with auto-generated minutes and summary. The host can edit the meeting summary and share it with other participants.

With Zoom + Marsview you can:

• Automatically take accurate and comprehensive meeting notes

• Capture the key slides presented in the meeting with screen grabs

• Find critical information in recorded meetings with contextual search

• Quickly review the topics, key points, actions and highlights

• Improve meeting outcomes with actionable insights

Marsview Notes is available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, mobile devices, and on Zoom App Marketplace.

3. Calendly — Meeting Scheduling

Scheduling meeting was never this easy!

Calendly is an online calendar app meant to help you keep track of your deadlines, as well as organize your tasks, meetings, and other activities and define auto-reminders.

With Calendly, you can pre-determine the length of meetings, automatically adjust for time zones, and block off time slots that conflict with existing appointments. You can also require a certain amount of advance notice before someone can schedule something on your calendar, making it harder to get interrupted with a last-minute meeting.

Calendly is available for: Web, iOS, and Android.

Calendly also integrates with a lot of popular apps. You can check them here.

4. Slack — Team Collaboration

Streamlining team communication gains even more importance when the team is working remotely, and Slack can help you minimize response time.

Apart from sending instant messages, you’ll also be able to set a work status (to help your teammates understand whether you are currently on a lunch break, or running an errand, etc.), share attachments, as well as to conduct video calls with individuals and groups.

This way Slack acts as a classic communication app that lets you handle all your team communication in direct messages (either sent to individuals or groups), and specialized public and private channels.

Slack is available for: Web, iOS, and Android.

5. Clockify — Tracking App

When working from home, the employers will want proof that the employees performed their work as expected. And, the employees will want a straightforward way to demonstrate to their employers the amount of hard work they’ve invested in their work assignments while telecommuting. With Clockify, you can simply and easily do just that.

Clockify is a time tracking app that lets your team track their work hours, either by:

· Tracking time while working, by starting and stopping a timer.

· Adding time manually, after you’re done working.

· Adding time in a timesheet view.

Clockify is available for: Web, macOS, and Andriod.

6. Dropbox — File Sharing app

Collaborative work is a challenging task while we work from home. To share the documents, files, or images which are required to complete a task is definitely troublesome.

Dropbox syncs your files with everything. Drag a file into Dropbox on your computer, and you can access it from the web, mobile device, or any other computer linked to your account. This is Dropbox’s USP, and no one does it better.

Dropbox helps you to:

• Stay focused
• Be organized
• Get in sync

Dropbox is available for teams and individuals.

7. Asana — Project Management app

The project Management task is the most difficult task in remote work. Though we have an armory of tools for project management, the one that top the charts is Asana.

Asana is a project management software that allows your team to manage their assigned tasks in list-based boards and then track the progress they are making with the said tasks in Kanban-based boards.

The List-based boards are structured as a simple to-do list, while the Kanban-based boards consist of cards (tasks) the team can move across columns to signify their progress status.

Asana is available for: Web, iOS, and Android.

The Bottom Line

We encourage you to evaluate each of them and implement what works in your environment. Some of these have free trials that you may explore.

A well-organized person is never late to meetings, writes everything down, and seldom complains. In today’s scenario, you have every possible tool available at your disposal to be efficient and productive.

The future of work is here. Let’s make it happen.

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