One of the questions that popped up during our first #OnAirWithLithium with the Lithium Community team (watch it on demand to hear their answers ~0:44:05):
"What are your favorite apps/tools you use to stay organized or increase productivity?"
Our community team had many to share, and I'm really curious to hear what yours are and why?
My organization actually goes through a couple of steps and tools - I'm not sure if it makes me more or less productive, but here's what it looks like 😉
- OneNote - love being able to draft notes tied to specific meetings on my calendar, categorizing them and being able to interlink notes to other pages. It's also where I keep my to-do list which I review several times a day .
- Google Docs - editorial calendar, drafting & reviewing blog content, community plan overview - anything that requires live updates from different people & external resources, great for reviewing/approving suggested changes.
- Confluence - internal documentation of all our guidelines, processes, finalized plans, programs & notes. Linking to JIRA projects and other resources.
- JIRA - for project management, capturing internal requests, task assignments, tracking progress to completion, calendar overview of all projects.
Thanks to @TreyWaddell for the great questions - and look forward to hearing how you all stay organized!
I tend to like to keep it simple so rather than using multiple tools my primary time/organisational management tool is Outlook. Between the Tasks, the Calendar and making sure only emails that still require action are in my inbox (I have MANY folders but I find the search feature helps me out if I cant find a particular email).
I also use Notepad ++ if I am doing any sort of coding (LOVE the tabs) and OneNote for writing blog articles.
I wear a few different hats in my role so staying organized is really important.
To help me achieve this I keep things fairly simple, Outlook, my smartphone and Text Edit 🙂
- Outlook – Likewise with AndyK, I strive to achieve inbox zero before I leave everyday. To do this I leverage flags and folders and rely heavily on the search functions offered by Outlook. Long story short, if its in my inbox, it needs action
- BlackBerry Passport – Disclaimer, I work for BlackBerry but I can honestly say without my device I’d be lost. Simply put, managing high volumes of email is extremely easy thanks for shortcuts and having complete 1:1 synchronization of Outlook and my device is amazing.
- Text Edit (or Notepad) – Nothing better for taking quick notes and maintaining a daily log of activities 🙂
We have several tools in use in the organisation but my working day will include the following:
- Outlook (rules and folders to organise, try to stay close to a 0 inbox) also managing calendar for meetings.
- Lync - Instant Messaging / conference calls.
- Asana - for shared team task and project management and collaboration.
- Coda - brilliant development tool for coding.
- Fireworks CS6 - retro I know but if we need to create/edit image assets for the web.
- Our Community - believe it or not, we have ideas boards / hidden boards for different teams, user groups that we interact with regularly.
- LSI - have to keep on top of trends and what's happening on our community, helps inform focus.
Interested to see what others use.
Robert
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The apps I use are -
- Notepad++ for coding, nothing beats its simplicity and power.
- Google Docs
- Still need the MS Office
- Outlook in particular for mails and meetings
- Skype for internal communication
- Trello - manage the project tickets
- Basecamp - for client communications
- Our Lithium communities 🙂
Tools -
@tyw - Rightly said, "managing high volumes of email is extremely easy thanks for shortcuts and having complete 1:1 synchronization of Outlook and my device is amazing." I use BlackBerry Z10 for mails and calls. Email handling on BlackBerry is fun and easy and great.
I'm using a similar toolset to the previously mentioned. Ordered by importance and everyday usage they are:
- Skype - Yes, I love our apps 🙂 Every group, workstream, project, topic usually gets its own group conversation. Links to further documents in SharePoint or JIRA end up in the group chat topic. Using search in conversation I can quickly re-access information previously shared. If a conversations needs a follow up I do right-click -> "Mark as unread" and my "Recent" conversations act as my inbox second to the one in...
- Outlook - Similar to already described this holds my appointments and the communications with Microsoft colleagues not yet converted to the Skype model above 😉 Tasks and categories are helping to keep the calendar colorful and allow me to check I'm spending my time the right way
- JIRA and SharePoint - Tracking improvements, bugs, specifications, contracts. The key is finding the right folder and/or tagging structure. I'm currently combining both, but don't feel I have found the ideal setup yet.
- Notepad++ and Powershell - All kind of text editing and some light scripting 🙂
I heart Smartsheet. I know Google docs can do a lot of the same stuff, but for project planning and management, Smartsheet has a lot of great built in features.
