We all know it. Sometimes work get’s above our heads. Too much to do, too little time. These tools help you to keep track, get things done, efficiently.
Great you made your way here. That’s the first step to become more productive, efficient and simply clear your to do lists. We’re excited to being able to present you some pretty cool tools to immediately get your %*§! together in your workspace. Let’s kick it!
ASANA
Asana is a teamwork communication manager that enables you to do highly efficient teamwork without having to send eMails and work with complicated task management tools. The cool thing is its simplicity and ease of use although it supports such a wide range of features. You can create workspaces, projects, tasks and even tags, notes and comments as well as assign people to them. They even added integration into popular tools like dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote and Jira!
STREAK
If you ever looked for a slim CRM system that doesn’t cost a fortune and comes easily as a SaaS-solution, you’re looking for Streak. When you are using Gmail as your mail service you can install the Streak-plugin and have a fully functional CRM-system within your Gmail-Account! Most of the communication comes in via mail anyways and this is where Streak already groups mails that can also be shared with others in order to keep confusion about approaching customers through different people at a minimum. You can track whether mails were read by the recipient and schedule eMails to be sent later. With the spreadsheet view built in, you can easily keep track of the people you’ve approached and what their status in your sales pipeline is. Oh and by the way…it’s free!! Great, right!? We think so too. And you, Felix (qlearning) and Holger (Blinkist)?
SLACK
Efficient team communication is crucial, you know that. And luckily there is something that takes care of that and even goes a little further. Slack is a powerful yet simple communication tool. You can easily integrate a twitter-like communication in different topic related channels in which you can also integrate services like Dropbox. GoogleDrive, Asana or GitHub plus Slack provides an API so you can make your own integrations. Furthermore it supports a deep search with all communication and files in the channels. It’s available for literally every device on the market either as Apps or Desktop Integration for Windows and even Linux! Within 10 minutes you’re all set and ready to go.
EVERNOTE
Most likely you’ve heard about Evernote, don’t you? It’s this pretty fancy yet astonishingly easy software to take notes, create to-do lists, save webpages so you don’t have to have dozens of open tabs but can check the pages later and even scan documents directly to Evernote to never forget about anything again. As it’s collaborative you can share the documents, appointments, todo’s with your friends and colleagues. Evernote syncs automatically amongst all your devices – no matter if it’s iOS, Android or Windows Phone and yes, even Apps for Windows are available.
Evernote is completely free and offers some premium features as well, especially offline functionalities. We highly recommend you to just try it out, definitely worth. Ollie and the other guys from stylemarks seem like they pretty much love the service: We use it as an idea backlog for our product development. We have shared a notebook where all employees from customer service to design can input their ideas or request. Through simple tagging it is possible to easily group features. – Ollie, stylemarks
JIRA
If you are a developer you might have heard about Jira. If not, it’s probably unlikely. Jira is a powerful project planning and tracking tool from Atlassian. It let’s you create so called Issues you can then funnel through your working process, prioritize properly and track whether bugs, malfunctions or new features are being resolved. Jira is perfect for Scrum-like working and development. If you are following standard workflows, you can put them into Jira and make your colleagues follow these steps in order to resolve issues. Furthermore you can integrate other software like Bitbucket or Bamboo. With the customizable search and filter function it’s super easy to find exactly the issue you are looking for without having to create the filters again. You should just try it out as the options to customize Jira are almost endless. The Software is web-based and therefore available everywhere where there’s internet…sweet!
If you want to try it out, you can test it for free with all it’s functions for 30 days – after that you can choose from payment plans perfectly tailored to the size of your team.
So that’s it for today…let us know which tools you use and why they are so cool! Moreover stay tuned and stoked for our next episode „5 Teamwork-tweaks that help you work efficiently“.
