A productive and collaborative team: it’s the dream. A dream that – whether you’re back in the office full time or trying to make a success of hybrid working – is not always that easy to achieve.
But before you resign yourself to mild chaos and miscommunication, there is help at hand. You’re probably familiar with the likes of Slack, Trello, and Asana, but here’s a rundown of ten tools that could help your team to be more productive and more collaborative.
Evernote
Apple Notes and good old Notepad are useful, but Evernote is notetaking on another level. It's more than a place to keep your to-do list; you can make templates, create tasks and assign them, connect schedules and calendars, scan documents and clip from the web. Plus you can sync it to all your devices so you've always got the important snippets to hand.
Pomodoro Timer
You've probably heard of the Pomodoro technique – a way to work more productively by breaking work down into intervals and having short breaks. If you or your team are struggling with focus the Pomodoro Timer is a great way to schedule and assign tasks. It's a fun and customisable time management tool.
Get drawing!
Not a single app but more of an underused function in lots of the video conferencing apps you already use. Hangouts, Zoom, Skype, they all have whiteboards built in and using them is a great way to collaborate and engage people. In physical meetings people love using the old flip charts, and whiteboards are no different, they can free people to think more creatively and visually.
Notion
If you're looking for a multi-function tool, Notion is a great choice. It's got lots of great features all in one place; calendars, reminders, notes, databases, wikis, Kanban boards, so you can use it for creative collaboration and more admin-based tasks like workflows. Having everything in one streamlined place is a short cut to efficiency.
Freedom
For even the most self-disciplined of us it can be a battle to block out the noise. Freedom does the hard work for you, blocking out websites and apps that steer you away from the task in hand. You can set up blocklists and control devices and session lengths to get the focus you need to concentrate on the important stuff
Hey
"Email sucked for years. Not anymore — we fixed it." That's the claim on Hey's homepage. It's a pretty big one, but if your inbox is unmanageable it could be the answer you've been looking for. It's consent-based email where emails go into 'The Screener' where you decide if you want to accept their email. If you don't, you'll never hear from them again...If you do you get to classify which pot they go into. There are loads of intuitive and helpful features to help you take control of your emails - not the other way round.
ClickUp
Another great 'do it all' app is ClickUp. It's a really flexible way to manage your to do list, project management, docs, emails, goal and time tracking, people management and chat all in one place. The customisable spaces are a really interesting feature for collaborating on projects too.
Krock
Krock is an app specifically designed for the management, review and approval of creative projects. Neat features allow you to collaborate on projects, share and review them and approve creative in a really simple, streamlined way. It's great for building pipelines, controlling workloads and sharing progress with clients too.
Calendly
If you're looking for a really simple to use but intuitive calendar you can't go wrong with Calendly. You get to meet the way you want by setting availability preferences, so it only offers times that work for you – taking the hassle out of scheduling meetings and removing time-consuming back and forth emails.
Monday.com
Monday is all about making workflows work for you. It allows you to play, track and collaborate on projects on one easy to use platform. Its drag and drop set up is simple to get to grips with and it integrates well with Slack, Trello, Dropbox and other platforms so has the potential to become the hub of your productivity and project management.