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The seven productivity tools that proved their worth in a fully remote team.
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[00:00] Hi everyone this is your host syed ifaan with a new episode of the SIA business podcast so let's get started now um I think that a lot of you uh might be glued to your tv screens or watching you know news all the time about uh you know the coronavirus pandemic um so I thought what if um I can share something which will take your mind away from it a bit and
[00:42] Also help you to be more productive at work even if you are at home and learn from the experiences of our which is a remote first company for the I would say six or seven years so yeah let me share our top seven tips on working productively from home okay so number one uh the first uh tool that we use is to track our time um so you have to make that when you are working remotely that
[01:25] That you're keeping track of your time because it's easy to get distracted by something that's happening at home or or you know by by the neighbor's dog or something or you know just just by you know your your mind telling you to you know take it easy and take a break and so on um so we uh being a remote first company all of our team members whether they are working from you know whatever location they are working from uh they have to use hub staff
[01:56] Now we have um eight uh core team members and three of us are based in the same city and we do have a physical office right uh but I mean sometimes when when you there is an emergency such as there is right now for instance um you know which is I think bigger than anything we expected but still or or when we have uh meetings with someone from a different time zone then we do have to communicate and we do have to work from home as well
[02:28] At times so this is my home office and it has of of massive use to me uh because because you know I I um like I said we have been working remotely for for years upon years even though we have a physical office uh and you know this is my my second office my home office right so we use um hubspot to track our and uh you know this is what my uh my my uh tracker looks like uh my hub soft so you can see that I have worked almost
[03:00] Seven hours already and uh you know I'm currently doing the sie podcast project and and you know so on it has also a lot of other useful especially if you are a manager or a because that gives you the power to analyze the work that everyone else is and it also helps you to sort of you know you can you can ensure that everyone is for instance working in specific shifts if if that's something that you need you can also integrate it with other tools like
[03:31] Trello and quickbooks you know and you can also set uh limits in terms in terms of the amounts uh that you are paying to your your team members whether it's you know your core team members or freelancers or anything like that um and you can also set limits in terms of the number of hours that they are required to do right so there are a lot of other cool features that you can check check out and by the way uh in the description of of this this um
[04:02] You know this this podcast we will also uh include a link to um our infographic uh which which we created some time ago on on hub staff on how we managed remote teams with hub staff so that's an and come to think of it we also recorded an interview uh with liam martin a podcast interview with liam martin on you know what they do at staff.com and time doctor which are by the way uh kind of competitors of hub staff in fact they are definitely competitors
[04:38] Of hubstaff right uh so so definitely check that out as well uh now the second tool that will help boost your remote work productivity uh is conducting video meetings um now I used to be against uh most of meetings uh I guess I still in in in you know to some extent but uh I have came to realize that um all meetings are not created equal and you know it's important especially if you are working remotely with the team members being in different locations and team members who may have a
[05:20] You know different culture and a different style of working and whatnot it's important to conduct these meetings the only critical thing to to remember is to have a specific agenda and every agenda item to have a specific time um so that you know you you don't go off on a tangent and you know one thing leading to another and then at the end of the of a long meeting you have not accomplished anything but but but you have just spoken a lot on different things right
[05:51] And and you want to keep a record of of the things that you have discussed um and you know we will try to include kind of screenshots in in this video later on when I'm done um or we will include them in in the uh I'm not sure I I have to sort of you know see see my schedule and whatnot but but um I I will have to basically it to someone but still that will still need my time to sort of guide them and
[06:21] Whatnot right but you need to have agent items you need to have time allocated to each agenda item for these meetings and then you also need to make sure that you're following up on that so what we do uh and that's like I guess a you know that that comes from that is part of sort of the fifth tool as well that we use a spreadsheet for for different types of readings right um and then in the next meeting the next weekly or monthly meeting we
[06:51] Try to follow up on you know okay what was decided in the last meeting and what what tasks have we uh accomplished by now uh we do need to get better uh at it but but you know that's a bit of background on why I think video meetings are extremely this is extremely so we use zoom uh but we also use uber uh the reason being that one of our team is based in uae and uber conference works there so far but zoom typically does not work
[07:24] So you know when we are interacting with her it's usually uber conference and uh but but most of our clients who are were you know almost all of the clients um uh you know that we have they use zoom um so we have to kind of juggle between now both do offer recordings uh but the cool thing about zoom is that these are video recordings right and the good thing about um remote work is that you know if for instance you don't have a team member
[07:52] Who could attend a specific meeting you can just share the recording with them right uh both uh you know have like both are really good I mean the connection quality and whatnot is quite good and I I don't think I uh ever had any disconnection problems now uber conference does not come with any kind of whiteboard uh tool but zoom does come with a whiteboard tool and so you can you know if you are analyzing a a document or you know a product or a website or
[08:25] Something you can really you know highlight stuff and you know use you know arrows and whatnot to really sort um you know make sure that the other side has understood your your point right um so it's it's a really good tool for brainstorming as well by the way uh the whiteboard feature of zoom uh uber conference uh I don't see any kind of whiteboard tool but I really hope that they come up with one and I also hope that they start video recordings as well screen share is obviously a must for
[09:02] Video meetings and and it's something that's available in both these tools uh hub stop by the way it's it's I mean they do have like a small free version I think if you are a single user it's free but for someone um our company um you know you you you need the paid plan so we are on the paid plan and I think we are on one of the more expensive paid plans because we needed those extra features uh as well uh zoom in uber conference so
[09:28] Far we are using the free version and it uh fine for us but it is possible that in future we will have to um you know uh maybe go with the zoom paid version um because we also have some new stuff coming up in near future like webinars and recordings uh and we are considering to do that on zoom because it's just really a good tool um now in you know our aim has been to reduce our dependence on email because you know with email um
[10:04] It's hard to prioritize things right um your psychologically you are focused on the most recent email and just because an email is the most recent does not mean that it's the the most important uh uh or the most critical task at hand right so for general chat and short updates or you know journal discussion and whatnot we use slack and we try to have different channels for different projects and then we also have some other channels like you know journal and random and I think there is one called
[10:36] Um resources channels so if we come across something cool which is related to our work we typically share that in the resources channel right one desired feature that I think slack is lacking is the voice note feature so I think it should definitely have like an inherent voice note feature um a lot of times we we want to explain something over a voice note and the only thing that seems to work well for that is whatsapp so far but we do want to avoid whatsapp but I think that it's important to have
[11:14] Voice features or maybe video features or something like that you know video plus voice I but so so there are a couple of plugins like third-party uh plugins for slack that you can use to voice note to your slack but the problem that I have seen with maybe one or two that I have I've tried is that they will take you to a website and there on that website you have to record a message and then you come back to slack and you sort of add the the wise notes link
[11:43] There so that's not very user friendly and it takes a lot of time and the other thing is that I definitely I specifically need the voice note feature when I'm on the right when I'm not at the house or when I'm traveling or something like that and this you know from what I could see from the one or two plugins that I tried um you can record a voice note from what I could see you could only you can only record those voice notes when you
[12:10] Are on your desktop computer right so I think that's a major uh major feature that will make slack so much more cooler however if your team is growing and your your work is growing and you have multiple projects um slack is slack alone is not going to cut it um and you definitely need a project management tool so we have tried a lot of different project management tools in the past several years we have tried asana I think we have tried um base camp and maybe there are one or two others
[12:46] That I'm forgetting about we had tried trailer before as well but I would call it uh our mistake that that you know this habit of checking email has been very very hard for us to to um you know to uh to ditch uh but we are keen on um you know improving our ability to to work on trello and uh we are hoping that you know as we are really keen on making sure especially in this quarter that you know we just get very good at using trello and remember
[13:22] Uh trailer is kanban based so you know that's one of the agile methodologies um you know based on my sort of basic understanding of that I think one of the methodology is kanban kanban or kanban and the other one is scrum right so so you know um we are keen on uh basically uh I'm trying to show you my my trailer but I I think I will just minimize it and maybe share a screenshot later on or maybe I will just add a video of that later on right uh okay actually
[13:56] It's open now so let me maybe show you a quick um okay um which one should I show you okay I guess I will chance and try this um okay you know for instance for graphics and video we have uh this this one um trailer board right so you can have different boards for sort of different projects right uh any ideas that we get we might add them to the ideas
[14:37] Um column um and you know these are as cards so these are different cards and you know you can have a resources uh you can have you know a couple of things I think which which we are we have not really done well is that we should have in this particular board we have done it in different ports in other ports but like um you know uh there there I think it used to be a a column here uh which is current tasks so any any task that is currently being
[15:10] Done would be added there and you know they are prioritized so the task or the card which is at the top is the most high uh priority task and and then you know so on and once the team member who is assigned that task once he is done with that he will move it to the ready for demo uh column and once I get to review it uh then I can either approve it if it's already done or you know I will I will basically move it to um you know um I'll basically
[15:42] Move it to you know current tasks again after adding some comments under that that card after opening that card so that is how it sort of works now you know for for the Google suite is is Google suite is the best option I guess right now you have Google docs and you have spreadsheets like just earlier this we were working on like a content asset for a client and it was two team members me and another team member we were editing the same uh spreadsheet at the same time so we were creating a
[16:20] And um you know she the my colleague was working on a separate section of the same sheet and I was working on on on a different section of the same right so that was pretty cool um so you know you definitely want to have a Google suite account and you know I mean in case you don't know you can get it but if you have Gmail and you will just download Google drive and but if if you are a business user you should probably go for the paid business account uh
[16:54] Where you will have a you know a shared Google drive where you can add your team members and you can organize all of your stuff in much more organized fashion right now the sixth tool um is screen capture right so for screen we use sketch as well as jing I used to use jing only but ever since I upgraded my operating system jing does not work on it anymore so I'm a macbook user so for some reason jing does not work anymore and I really liked
[17:35] It because jing was jing was awesome for two reasons uh was not jing uh did not only take you know like static screen shots but it was also able to take like it would it was also able to record like very small videos very quickly right uh but since zinc does not work for me I think it still work on windows I'm not sure and it also works on older versions of mac os um so so since it does not work for me uh I started using sketch um
[18:08] And you know uh sketch is pretty good offered by evernote by the way uh in both jing and sketch the cool thing about both is that once you have taken a screenshot um you very quickly um get the the URL of that image right so your screenshot gets uploaded to the the jing server or the skid server and all you have to do if you have to share that screenshot with someone is to share the URL so that's a much much more easier and effective option then having to take
[18:43] A screenshot download it save it and remember where you saved it and then going to your you know like email and then attaching and finding the email finding the image wherever you stored it and then attaching it right and then sending it so this is a much much faster better approach so since sketch does not come with video recording and also because jing even even even uh even though jing uh allow you to record videos uh if it works on your computer um uh the problem with jinx video
[19:18] Recording is that um it's it's like very short videos uh I'm not sure it's like five five minutes or something like that and the second thing if I recall correctly is that you there is not a lot of features um in terms of video editing or adding a custom thumbnail or adding you know some other cool features so that brings me to uh the final tool of uh today uh so tool number seven is the videos video capture tool or I guess we do screen capture tool called
[19:52] So loom is really really good uh this video by the way I'm recording it with loom and I just I have just fallen in love with this tool I mean it's so amazing like so useful and it has saved me so much it has made it so much um it has it has made our lives as a marketing agency so much more beneficial and and interesting and amazing I mean there is so much that you can do with this tool uh in terms of features um you know you can you can uh you know
[20:28] You can take the camera capture like you know like the way you can see my face over here and you can of course take the screen capture as in a video recording of the screen so you can do both of them at the same time and it comes with sharing URLs as well and you can also download your videos and then you can upload them to you know YouTube or wherever right so that's a cool feature as well I would uh for a lot of different reasons right
[20:57] I mean you can you can you know record cool videos with it and then upload videos to YouTube uh so by the way I'm not a pro user when it comes to YouTube so I don't know if you'd have YouTube has something similar I do not think it has but you know just just saying um another cool feature of loom is that apart from you know like some pretty nice video editing options trimming videos and so on you can add um but the best thing is that you can
[21:27] Add call to actions within the video um so you know that's awesome as well that that you can add a call to action so that you can when someone has finished watching your video you can um persuade them to you know subscribe to your newsletter or you know leave a comment under your YouTube video or you know leave a review under your you know so yeah these are our top seven tools that make it possible for us to stay quite despite working remotely um and you know um
[22:06] If if you learned something from this video if this was of benefit I mean make sure that you leave a comment uh you know wherever you watching or listening to this we will be posting this on YouTube but we will be also posting as a normal you know quote unquote uh audio podcast um and you know we if you are if you are uh if you want to find out more episodes of ours you can go to our YouTube channel sig or digital or you can
[22:41] Find us on any of your favorite listening apps like itunes or stitcher and so on um if you if you if this was of benefit to you please do leave a comment or you give us a five star review on itunes that would really help us this is our third season um this is the third season of uh the sie business podcast and you know we have been doing this for a long time now and even the smallest feedback the smallest piece of feedback that you can provide or any kind of
[23:18] Encouragement that you can you can provide it it does motivate us and it helps us to to do better and to do more so yeah thank you so much and I wish you good luck and thank you thank you so much for watching bye