5 Hacks And 10 Tools For Team Collaboration And Productivity For 2020

The biggest challenge plaguing the modern workplace is the difficulty to remain productive in the fast-paced business environment. And most people easily get lost in the shuffle. As a result, it becomes difficult to achieve project milestones, effectively send invoices to clients, meet deadlines, and conduct effective business communication, among other things. At times, it gets even trickier when you have to manually handle every single task by yourself, one of the biggest reasons to use collaboration software.

But, thanks to technology you can easily slay the “things are getting rather difficult to manage” just invest in project management software, use hacks, and various tools suited for collaborating with teams, managing your work and organizing your life.

Hacks That Will Get You Going In 2020:

Is your to-do list growing into a mountain of “important activities” that need immediate attention? These useful hacks can be a lifesaver for you and help you increase productivity:

• Set Up a reporting cycle – This allows you to keep a check on the completed and uncompleted tasks. That way, you will be able to determine whether there is still enough room for a new task. Besides, setting up a reporting cycle draws a clear picture of what being worked. Thus, it motivates you to give your best throughout the reporting period. As a result, it leads to increased productivity.
• Setting up reminders – Once you have scheduled every task ahead of you, you need to set up reminders for important tasks. For example, you can have an application that allows you to customize a milestone tracker. That way, you will keep a linear flow of information and ensure easy delegation of tasks while keeping you at par with the progress.
• Setting goals and targets – If you are looking to complete a project within a set time, you need to set achievable targets holistically aligned to the goal and one that needs to be completed in a sequence. This increases your morale and productivity as there are less pressure and no Goliath expectations within an unreasonable time frame.
• Take a break from your digital world – it’s very important that you unplug from social media, emails and even from your best apps. You need to find time to exercise, and probably mediate. It helps quell the anxiety that may be building up.
• Creating a competitive atmosphere – If you are a manager, give out tokens to any team member who goes out of their way to have a task faster and in an exemplary way. As a result, you’ll motivate the rest of the employees to increase their efforts towards achieving the group’s goals.

Productivity Apps/Tools:

In this age of technological revolution, there are plenty of productivity tools that can help improve your productivity.

• Google Drive – allows you to keep up to 15GB of data. The beauty of the tool is it allows you to easily access or share the saved documents anywhere, on any web-enabled gadget.
• Trello – This makes project management in organizations more structured so that managers can meet deadlines effectively. It breaks down big tasks into smaller cards so that all team members can keep track of progress and complete tasks with the provided resources.
• Slack – This is one of the fastest-growing communication tools. It increases team collaboration, enhances data sharing, and helps members communicate through video chat, three-way conferencing and instant messages. Slack also makes it possible to set reminders and provide notifications for important events, thus helping ineffective time management.
• Canva – If you are a designer or photographer, you can easily and at a far less cost create and edit images for various uses. The tool has numerous image templates that allow you to come up with various designs you can use to create the images of our choice.
• Hootsuite – If you are a content marketer or a logger, you can easily schedule posts for later publishing on social media platforms. And most importantly, Hootsuite provides you insights that you need with regard to how your audience interacts with your content.
• Bitly – Short and precise links are easy to share, unlike long ones. Bitly allows shortening and customizing of links. Besides, the tools help track the number of people who have viewed the content you’ve just shared.
• Surfly – If you wanted to engage in interactive conferences and video chats with shared browsing sessions, this is the tool for you. The real-time communication makes it easy for you to pose a question and get sufficient responses in real-time without having to send follow up explanations.
• Taco – This is a great task organizational tool that allows you to drag tasks on your PC screen to the desired location and arrange them based on their priority.
• Focus – Allows you to block potential destructive sites that can divert your attention to other matters when you are engrossed in a certain task. You just need to come up with your set time period, enable it on the tool and immerse yourself into your job. That way, you’ll be able to maximize your output without the struggle of toggling through the tabs.
• Evernote – Who would have thought that having a journal will exclude carrying diaries? Well, thanks to Evernote, a cloud-based service, such struggles are long gone. You can now easily create notes and sync them to the cloud where you can access them from anywhere across the globe.

There are some major distractors out there that might get in your way.  And as a result, such challenges may affect your output negatively. If you use the above tricks and tips, you can rest assured that your productivity will increase exponentially!