Amidst the coronavirus outbreak worldwide, work from home has been considered a smart way out, to control the spreading of this pandemic that has brought the world to a standstill. The respiratory infection that has spread like a wildfire affecting hundreds of thousands of people globally, can be wisely tackled by eliminating contact and gatherings. That is why work from home has come out as a great solution to avoid infecting people at the workplace.
Given the conventional setting of workplaces, adapting to the work from home style has been a challenge for the professionals globally, who are striving hard to keep afloat amidst the global crisis. If you are one of them, you can make it easier with some apps, here’s a list of 10 useful apps, that is specially curated for improving the overall efficiency of work from home:
Slack
Work from home means working all alone from your place. This means all the discussions with
your colleagues regarding the project can not be done as you simply can’t walk down to your
boss’s cabin or teammates’ cubicle to have a quick talk.
Well, with slack you can very much do the same, but from your remote working stations
virtually. Slack
has made communication easy. This app lets you send messages and communicate with your team
in real-time.
What’s even better is the fact that it lets you create different team groups, and have a group chat too, for a seamless group discussion to get going with your projects. Slack also offers third-party integrations with platforms like GitHub, Zapier, Dropbox, Google Drive, Trello, Heroku, and many more, to make your remote working much more effective.
Trello
Work from home doesn’t mean you cannot work on a series of tasks with your team. Trello lets your team coordinate the
tasks list and assign them to the fellow colleagues. It lets you get a list of your tasks
and helps you manage it efficiently in a simple to-do list manner.
You can maintain the status of your workload in the form of tasks and keep a track of them.
Trello is a great app for remotely working professionals, which can be used in both personal
and business capacities.
Being an online cross-platform application, you can access your Trello Board from anywhere
using your laptop or smartphones, which lets you work from anywhere you want. Moreover, it
offers a wide range of third party integrations like Jira, Typeform, GitLab, Freshdesk, etc.
for better coordinated and efficient working.
G Suite Apps
G Suite Apps is a series of different apps
created by Google to assist professionals in working from remote locations. It offers
applications like Google Drive, Calendar, Gmail, Hangouts, Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Keep,
Tasks, and many more that give well-rounded assistance to a working professional.
It allows you to share documents on your Drive (Cloud) and share it with colleagues; make
real-time changes in them, and get their comments. Apart from this, it helps you schedule
meetings, tasks, and communicate with your teammates and business associates.
G Suite Apps offer multi-dimension efficiency to your remote working and are widely recommended worldwide by professionals.
Zoom
Conferences and meetings become nearly impossible when you are working from home and
especially in times like today’s when social distancing is highly recommended. Zoom Video Communications allows you to host and attend call
conferences, making meetings go virtual.
You can schedule meetings, get reminders and send invites to colleagues and business
associates and make the most out of your work from home.
Basecamp
Project Management could seem to be difficult when working from home, but by using smart
web-based project management apps like Basecamp, you can
communicate with your team and keep a track of the project in real-time. Unlike traditional
web-based project management products, Basecamp lets you organize in a more efficient and
interesting manner.
Basecamp also offers third-party integrations with applications like Google Drive, Calendar, Zapier, Slack, Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, and many more for better project management.
Dropbox
Dropbox is a great app to share files securely with
teammates and colleagues in real-time. It offers large storage of up to 2 TB with their paid
subscriptions. It lets you store and update the documents in real-time with the smart-sync
feature.
Dropbox is widely used by enterprises and individual professionals throughout the world and
is a great app to use for secure storage of Documents.
Noisli
Home is a place to relax and work from home becomes difficult as many people find it tough
to concentrate on work amidst the hustle and distractions at home. Noisli makes it easy with sound therapy that lets the
user listen to calm music for better focus.
It offers different playlists and allows its users to choose and play music for better
concentration. This makes Noisli a great application for professionals working from home,
helping them work more efficiently using sound therapy.
Evernote
Working from home doesn’t mean that you have to give up on an idea simply because you
couldn’t note it down and will eventually slip out of your mind. The answer to this Evernote. It lets you keep a track of all your ideas,
in the form of simple notes.
You can use Evernote to organize, manage tasks, and archive, apart from taking down the
notes. This is very useful in cases where you want to take down an idea and communicate it
with teammates.
Evernote lets you make notes using the content of any form such as text, images, web content
excerpts, drawings, etc. and share them by tagging and exporting it to the colleagues. You
can also get their feedback and comments on them, making updates and edits in real-time.
Microsoft Teams
Another way to communicate and collaborate with your teammates and colleagues online is via
Microsoft Teams. It is a unified platform
that offers real-time communication in the form of chat, video meetings, conferencing within
the client software, Voice over IP, along with PSTN conferencing that allows its users to
call on phone numbers given by their client.
Microsoft Teams lets you create different channels for individual teams along with
third-party integrations like MailChimp, Skype, Twitter, Github, Asana, Bing News, etc.
making the overall coordination and collaboration seamless and smoother.
Mindmeister
While the Big White Boards and Conference rooms make the best place for brainstorming in
office, Mind Meister lets you do it remotely. It lets you visualize, share, and present your
thoughts on the cloud with your teammates.
Mind Meister is a virtual way to brainstorm with
the team on ideas making collaboration from remote locations easier than ever. It lets you
make mind maps using images, file attachments, videos, and hyperlinks; share and edit them,
get comments and feedback on them from the teammates.
On a closing note
With these 10 useful apps that are listed above, you can make your work from home easier in this hour of crisis. But what is even more important is the thought to reflect and stay indoors, while delivering efficiently, at the same time spending some quality time with the family. Making the best out of this opportunity shall be a lifetime experience because it’s high time to acknowledge the power of remote working and leverage it to make our lives better.