How's social distancing going for you all? Yeah same, we miss human contact too. Luckily, we live in a golden age of technology where connecting to friends, family, and colleagues is just one text or call away.
Professionals are now relying heavily on technology to juggle multiple tasks, improve productivity, and keep communication flowing. In our roundup of go-to WFH apps, we picked the top 6 tools that will help you stay connected with your team.
1. Notion 📝
This collaborative tool blends all types of documents and integrates them into one platform for the whole team to access. It can also be considered a Service Provider Pro alternative for its seamless document collaboration features. This document editor provides an array of templates to organize and store your notes. It acts like a giant reference vault. P.S. Another solid pdf document editor is cocodoc if you need to share PDFs.
Easter egg: You can integrate any social media links, Youtube and Vimeo videos by typing out “/video.” The items will appear and you can view the visuals without leaving Notion.
2. Zoom 📹
Hello? Can you hear me? Oh, you're on mute! Hey, we can't see you. Sound familiar? If you're a Zoom user, chances are you've probably heard or said this. This video conference calling app has become a popular tool to stay connected with remote team members. But, it's not just limited to big groups. You can still set up your one-on-one water cooler chats with your team members.
Easter egg: Whether you're picking up your call from the depths of outer space, a sunny beach, or from chilly Alaska mixing up your daily Zoom calls is a fun way to stay connected while practicing health social distancing.
3. Google Calendar 🗓
If you want to maximize productivity, meet Google Calendar. This scheduling and management tool was designed to organize your personal and professional life. Features include sharing your calendar with other team members, setting reminders, and planning weeks or months in advance.
Easter egg: Did you know you can still use Google Calendar even when you’re offline? You can respond to invitations, schedule, edit, and add events. Your changes will automatically sync once you’re connected to WiFi. If you want to bring your Google Calendar within your Notion. You can 2-way sync Google Calendar with Notion with the tool 2sync - this allows you to quickly manage your calendar events right into Notion.
4. Matter 🗣
In a time where productivity may dip with the adjustment of work-from-home, feedback is needed now more than ever. WFH may prompt you to work on skills that you didn’t even know you needed to improve. Matter provides actionable feedback to keep you proactively on top of your professional skills. Matter is especially helpful if you are a professional looking to start your own venture and the business formation process.
Easter egg: Praise your peers with the Kudos feature. On Matter you can choose between thank you, amazing job, and team player to celebrate your peers or team. We HIGHLY recommend this team feedback tool. 😉
5. Slack 💬
There’s no such thing as over-communication. Slack funnels asynchronous conversations among non-work channels to help teams stay connected. Even with less in-person contact, our Matter Slack community is bustling with various channels like #yums, #wfh, #social-media, #marketing.
Easter egg: Even though Slack provides a plethora of emojis, you can have the option to customize your own by clicking your name on the top left corner and then choosing “Customize Slack” from the dropdown menu.
Bonus: Another effective team collaboration tool is Chanty - all-in-one team collaboration tool, with unlimited message history, powerful features and apps to make your team super productive.
6. Figma 🔮
Figma's nature is centered around collaborative design. This real-time tool allows designers to create, edit, share, and open prototypes. Besides mock-ups, you can create competitive analysis that allows cross-functional teams to collaborate with designers.
Easter egg: Just like Google Calendar, Figma has an "always online" feature. Various team members or clients can jump on and make changes to a design in real-time. Also, you don't have worry about being out of sync, all change are saved.
There is light in adapting to a new environment. Working-from-home is an opportunity to enhance your productivity, responsiveness, and multitasking skills. Celebrate those small victories like responding to a Slack message or planning out your week on Google Calendar. It's the small strides that lead to an epic evolution.
Lastly, a few honorable mentions:
1) Our social media scheduling and management tool that helps us share with the world everything going on at Matter.
2) Our hosting platform Hostinger. Or a Wordpress hosting if you are on Wordpress.
3) Ad blocking platform AdLock.
4) And a solid guide of tools for finance teams.
