Work Productivity – some apps to help, maybe?

If you ask my friends about productivity apps they all know, I love them. I don’t really know why, I think it’s the thought that they make my life more productive, making me a better person, a person who doesn’t procrastinate (as much) and gets things done.

Whether they help or not is up for debate but here is a rundown of four of my favourites.

TRELLO

Keeps track of everything, from the big picture to the minute details.

www.trello.com
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.
Trello is made up of boards, on those boards are cards. You assign tasks, pictures, lists, due dates etc. tocards. You can assign staff members to the cards and move the cards between boards making it easy to track tasks and their progress and the overall project.

How I currently use Trello?

I know that I am probably not using Trello to its full potential but it does make my office life a lot better. I have several boards such as, general tasks, specific projects, sales leads and an invoicing board. On these boards I have several lists, coming up, to  do now, review (waiting for clients to respond), developments, work complete. Within these lists I create cards for specific tasks or jobs. These cards i get to move from list to list and from board to board and assign staff member to them. Great for tracking projects, who is doing what, completed tasks, sales leads, the limits are endless.

What this means for my life.

• I remember the things I need to do.
• I can assign tasks to my team when i’m out of the office or if they are based in a different town.
• I can see when projects are completed, moved or ready to do something.
• Works with my phone and desktop.
• For more info check out Trello

POCKET

When you find something you want to view later, put it in Pocket.

www.getpocket.com

Reading, keeping up to date with crazy bits of information, mostly internet articles and blog posts, that’s me. The problem is I’ll come across something I want to read but I don’t have time right this second. This is where Pocket comes in, I save it to my pocket reading list and I read it later.
Pocket, an application and service for managing a reading list of articles from the Internet. The application allows the user to save an article or web page to read later. The article is then sent to the user’s Pocket list (synced to all of their devices) for offline reading. Pocket removes clutter from articles and allows the user to adjust text settings for easier reading. – Wikipedia

How I use pocket

Here is a cross section of what’s in my pocket at the moment.
Several articles about design, e-commerce, how to improve my writing, an interesting article about selling all my junk and paying off my debt – will I ever do this? I’m not sure but I know if I wanted too I know where to turn. Plus, I’m a tennis player so this is where I keep my tennis tips.

A great way to keep yourself informed… when you’re ready.

Slack – Be Less Busy

www.slack.com

I like to keep my inbox pretty clean, anything clogging it up I don’t really like. I don’t have the problem that larger offices have, emails from other staff members, if you have this problem then Slack could help reduce the inbox overload.

Slack offers one-on-one messaging, private groups, persistent chat rooms, direct messaging as well as group chats organized by topic. All content inside Slack is searchable from one search box. Slack integrates with a number of third-party services, including Google Docs, Dropbox, Heroku, Crashlytics, GitHub and Zendesk.

How do I currently use slack?

Well admittedly I’m not sure if i’m the perfect candidate to be using it as Yellow Design is only 2 staff, given that, I love these kind of apps as my friends all know too well. I can see it being awesome in a larger office and even more so if people are working out and about or based in different towns.
It integrates with Trello, Mailchimp, Twitter and heaps of other this so I can just keep track of lots of these things, all in one place.

Evernote – Your life’s work

www.evernote.com
Evernote, designed for note taking and archiving. A “note” can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten “ink” note. Notes can also have file attachments. Notes can be sorted into folders, then tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched, and exported as part of a notebook.

How I use Evernote

I often listen to podcasts, (Reply All being one; interesting tidbits about the internet) read books and the odd article, I use Evernote to take notes on the things I want to remember. I often go back to these notes, read up and become more learned. Who knows if remember the info but i’m sure it attributes to something.

ALL THIS TALK ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY; Does it help?

Do they actually make me a better person and help me get stuff done? It is hard to be the judge of that.

I know when I put an item into Trello, it is not on some piece of paper floating round my office getting lost. If someone asks me to read an article I can save it to pocket and not forget about it and read it at my leisure. I think yes they do make me more productive or at least free up some time so I can enjoy the things I enjoy, something we all want.

Do you use any of these apps? How do you find them?
If you want more info then I am happy to help. E-mail me – info@yellowdesign.co.nz