We often hear the phrase – “but there aren’t enough hours in the day”. Well I hate to burst your bubble – everyone has the same number of hours in a day.
If you want your day to be more organised, get control on whether your team are completing tasks and you want a bird’s eye view on your projects, personal or business, these management tools can help you.
Milanote
Milanote is a tool for organising creative projects into beautiful visual boards. By design, it feels a lot like working on the wall in a creative studio – visual, tactile and sometimes a bit messy – Milanote is a great fit for designers who work in teams remotely.
There is a free version available with no time limit and the PRO version is only $9.99 per month with annual and monthly plans available. Milanote is filled with hundreds of built-in templates to help you get started.
Key Features:
- Write notes & to-do lists, upload images & files and save things you find on the web
- Organise visually using the flexible drag and drop interface
- Boards by default are a private place to think, but with a single click you can create a shared workspace for collaboration with your team.
Evernote
Another great resource to manage your tasks. Evernote allows you to capture and organise your notes and research and share it from anywhere. You are always in sync as this tool allows you to sync your all your devices together.
Some of the great features that Evernote has:
- It has features that let you collect everything that matters all in the one place. If you are ever looking for something – a note, a reminder, an article – you access Evernote.
- You can use links, checklists, tables and attachments within your notes. Even things you have written manually can be stored there. It also lets you add audio recordings.
We recently had Joshua Zerkel, Director of Global Community at Evernote on the Business Brain Food Podcast. Joshua is well worth listening to – he is so organised he even uses Evernote to list his favourite burger joints around the world! He shares some great productivity tips in this podcast interview with Ben Fewtrell.
Trello
If you and your team are project driven, then Trello is the tool to use. It helps you stay organised, collaborate and it is pretty fun to use. It is especially good for tracking and visualising the progress you and your team are making on projects.
The way it works is simple. Once you download Trello, you create boards. These boards essentially become your management website. Within the board, you can create lists or “cards”. These cards contain all the information for a particular task. If you create a card for one of your team members, you can invite said team member to view the card as well. Within this card, you can create lists, checklists, attach documents, chat and assign deadlines.
Some examples of what you can call your “card”:
- To-Do
- Doing
- Next Action
- Waiting on Supplier
- Done
Your initial card can be in the to-do list but once the task has begun, you can drag it to the “doing” list. It’s that easy.
If you get distracted easily by awesome online content, then Pocket is the app for you. This app gives you the option to bookmark the article you were reading and save it for later. It is very easy to stop what you are doing and read a bit of content that you find interesting. If you use Pocket, you can save it for later – a virtual bookmark so to speak.
When you save your link to pocket it fetches all the content from that page. It then saves it in your app that can be synced across all your devices for later.
Some of the main reasons to use Pocket:
- Stops Distraction – save whatever you were looking at for a later time.
- Helps organise your day – whilst it is important to learn and educate yourself it is equally essential to separate work time from learning time.
- Your very own library – pocket makes it easy to build up a library of resources and articles.
Slack
Another great project management tool. Just the resource you need as a business owner to kick off projects, organise events, stay in touch with your vendors or finalise your budgets.
Slack has some terrific features:
- It makes communication within your team very easy. Everyone can participate in conversations, share attachments and stay up to date with projects etc.
- It integrates with some of your everyday apps like:
- Google Drive
- Zendesk
- Salesforce
- Zoom
Sonia Irani
