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Managing remote teams along with multiple projects can very easily become overwhelming in a very short time frame. Fortunately for us, we live in a time where a whole world of apps can quickly and skillfully step in to help us take control before everything begins to fall apart.
Team and project management apps exist to make your life easier. They make it easier to get organized, stay the course with deadlines, set milestones, schedule your work and your team’s work, create central hubs of files and data, and create open channels of communication in order to cultivate collaboration.
In short, these apps help you maximize your productivity with minimal effort and therefore, in many respects, are practically necessary.
Here are 5 apps that make my life easier and far more efficient:
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Basecamp
Basecamp functions as a central hub for everything. It allows you to organize projects and break them down into smaller components such as to-do lists and tasks. It stores all the notes and files (practically every type of file) everyone enters as part of a project and everyone on the team can see everything. It allows everyone to discuss issues openly and keeps the conversation focused on individual deliverables.
Toggl
Toggl is an easy-to-use, straight-forward, time tracking app. Time entries to particular tasks or projects can easily be started and stopped — giving you a more accurate time record of how long a project actually took to complete. Begin a task in the morning and you can stop for lunch and then continue afterwards. Daily, weekly and monthly reports show exactly how your team(s)’ time was spent.
Toggl also has a fairly neat, but limited, integration with Basecamp via a Google Chrome extension.
#slack
Slack is a team communication app mainly focused on one-on-one messaging, private groups, and channels. Channels are completely open, public chat rooms within your organization that are ideally set up per department. Slack allows you to upload and share practically any type of file of any size. All content inside Slack is searchable from one search box and it very easily integrates with a ton of other apps such as: Google Docs, Dropbox, Basecamp, Sprint.ly, GitHub, and many others.
Please note, some of the integrations mentioned above are native while others involve a third-party, specifically Zapier.
IFTTT & Zapier
Automating apps is by far the most amazing thing ever! I love both IFTTT and Zapier because of their integration with popular tools like Gmail, Dropbox, Basecamp, MailChimp and Slack.
IFTTT is a bit more impractical from a working professional perspective. IFTTT is far more geared towards everyday casual users and the “internet of things.” That does not mean its not at all useful, it just happens to be a bit more limiting. I still highly recommend its use as it can have a serious impact in making you daily life easier while making you more productive.
Zapier on the other hand is deeply focused on more business oriented apps, particularly professional and productivity apps, and they currently support integrations with about 450 apps — this list is only growing. You can very quickly and easily automate mindless tasks that eat away at your productivity.
Both are incredibly fun to play with and open up an entirely new world of possibilities once you understand their use which is fairly simple.
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These are only a small set of apps that I use in my daily life and I am constantly on the hunt for new apps so please feel free to send any apps that you find useful my way.
And with that I would like to close on my advocacy towards making use of apps. I am a strong advocate of leveraging apps to make your life even easier and more productive. I believe in having a strong work ethic but at the same time I believe we need to work smarter. Simply exerting more effort is not the true definition of working harder in today’s world. That old school mindset of exerting more effort, or energy, will only lead to burning oneself out in this ever challenging and demanding modern world.
The options of apps and how they can support you are essentially endless — it will simply take a bit of exploring in finding the right app or mix of apps. One great resource for discovering new apps is a website called Product Hunt. The team over at Product Hunt do an amazing job at curating a vast array of products (apps and actual, physical products) that make our lives easier.
