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Productivity Tools – Explaining
Productivity Tools allow for the viewing, creating, and modifying of general office documents. Office productivity tools also include applications for managing employee tasks. Productivity tools are fundamentally different from instructional software. While instructional software is concerned with the content, productivity tools use to create a product in instruction. Robles and Doering state that there are three basic types of productivity tools: word processing, presentation, and spreadsheets.
These tools often come in suites, sold together as a package. There are many examples of these tools. Microsoft Office is a suite that contains essential productivity tools. Microsoft Word is a word processing software, Microsoft PowerPoint is presentation software, and Microsoft Excel is spreadsheet software. These productivity tools can make any classroom more efficient.
Basic Productivity Software
Essential productivity tools have a unique impact on education. These tools can be used directly in instruction, behind the scenes to allow teachers more time to focus on preparing robust lesson plans, or as a tool for students to showcase the materials, they have covered. For example, a teacher may use PowerPoint to deliver information to children, Excel to keep track of received forms or allergies, and Word to create handouts and instructions for students.
However, students could use these same tools in an entirely different way. For example, they could use PowerPoint as a visual aid for a speech or book report, Excel to show trends in weather patterns, or Word to write a paper on the content they have covered in class. By modeling proper uses of essential productivity tools and then placing them in the hands of the student, teachers help prepare students to assume adult and professional roles that require them in the future.
The Best Productivity Apps & Productivity Tools
Team Communication Tool & Updates, Goal Setting, Company Intranet, Particular developer for Work
Format: Online & mobile-friendly
Friday is your homepage for Work. Keep your everyday Work in one place and have a clear purpose of what you need to complete each day. You’ll see your meetings, to-do list, and daily check-ins in one central place, from tools you’re previously familiar with, like Google Calendar, Outlook, Zoom, Asana, Trello, etc.
With integrations to all these apps, you get a clear day roadmap and sync with your team. For example, Friday automates team updates, provides check-ins that replace meetings, and helps couples feel connected while avoiding another meeting.
Free and Paid Apps to Improve Productivity
The best production tools make it simple and easy to improve competence between teams, both in the office or working from home.
The main features of efficiency tools will focus on collaboration and project organization. No matter where an individual is, they can remain in contact with the rest of their team and provide the latest updates and information that everyone needs. This can be done on a per-project or by-department basis so that managers can ensure that the right people are in the right place to get the job done.
Management tools are also essential to prioritize schedules and work to deadlines, such as time management and task management. They also interface needs to be simple and easy to use so that managers do not become bogged down in administrating it all. Additionally, everything needs to be presented clearly to be easy to find and activate contact management information.
Other tools can help improve productivity and efficiency by making complex tasks more straightforward and accessible. This could be everything from managing backups to social media monitoring or customer relationship organization.
Here are the best productivity apps on the market, showing our featured preferences with additional ones to consider.
Types of Productivity Tools Every Marketing Expert Needs
Productivity tools are dangerous. Oracle reports that the regular professionals might only spend 10% of their workday on real task-related Work. The other 90% can be enthusiastic about task transference, the concept of moving Work throughout a workflow. This can be related to waiting on task clarification, gaining approvals, or organizational tests in an agency or business setting.
While it’s unlikely that you’ll ever develop productivity to the point you’re 100% enthusiastic about task production, mainly if your Work involves innovative features like most incoming marketers, you can become more effective. And this is where tools are critical. The right tools remove uncertainty from complex processes, allowing professionals to get started and finish much quicker.
In this blog, you’ll learn about the various tools that agency and corporate professionals can use to streamline their processes and tryptase organized significantly.
We’ll also share a bit of vision into some of the IMA team’s Favourites:
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Work Management/Project Management Software
Project management software has its fair share of critics, many of whom feel that it’s so cumbersome to manage that it can rapidly become incompetent. The trick here is to find a tool that’s precisely no more complex than what you need. For example, suppose your business needs something light and nimble for basic processes like Basecamp, and you’re working off Atlassian’s heavy-duty Jira for complex software engineering portfolios. In that case, it can become a time-drain to manage and monitor. Pick the nimblest answer, dedicate someone to working on the software, and see immense benefits.
PM software is handy if your team involves remote members, contractors, or freelancers, who may not report to daily meetings or work typical nine am-to-5 pm hours. Some options are listed below:
- Basecamp
- Teamwork PM
- Trello
- Jira
The IMA team works off Basecamp, which suggests elasticity and ease of use!
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To-Do List Software
If your business is slow to hold PM software or has many “hot jobs,” to-do list management software might create additional transparency among busy professionals. It’s always optimal to compact your solutions as much as likely. If you’re confident you’re working to utilize a PM program better, you might not want to enforce task management software.
On an individual level or in locations that aren’t ready to embrace a complete task management software, to-do list programs can be the next best thing.
- Teun-Deux
- Remember the Milk
- Wunderlist
- While many IMA team members embrace the to-do list, our primary priority management duties occur via Basecamp.
3. Performance Management/Time-Tracking
Time tracking software is another output tool that receives unfair negative courtesy. For most businesses, asking workers to track their time isn’t a function of wanting to monitor productivity to ensure 100% utilization closely. Instead, it’s about understanding processes, getting sufficient data to help employees work towards better efficiency, and having enough data to exploit revenue and business success.
Managers can find that the visions in time following data allow them to hire additional effectively, sell more of their most profitable service lines, and provide more accurate deadline estimates to clients. In addition, all of these belongings can lead to internal and outside satisfaction metrics rising.
- Toggle
- Forecast
Additionally, many online project management solutions offer time tracking and timesheet functionalities!
The IMA team tracks time on Estimate, which offers suitable integration with Basecamp for task-based analysis. However, we’ve also used Toggl!
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Editorial Calendar Management
Most major content marketing plans incorporate a high volume of sponsors. They may encompass several internal contributors, external workers, and curated content. Approval processes can range from content demanding to pass a single employee assigned to removal to complex workflows that run through the company’s risk management department.
Regardless, editorial calendars are critical. The best explanation here is one that you’ll use consistently. In addition, it needs to scale with your growth if you’re considering creating more content in the year to come. Increasingly, organizations choose to consolidate campaigns, blogs, and social media into a single calendar.
- HubSpot editorial calendar
- Google Spreadsheets
- Content DJ
The IMA team uses a combination of Basecamp and HubSpot to plan our content marketing efforts.
5. Internal Communications/Email Management
Email isn’t always the best tool. Even for organizations working off Google apps for business, emails can quickly get buried and ultimately neglected. Of course, no one needs to drop the ball on crucial tasks, but it can happen in a heavily reliant setting on email. Email isn’t meant to act as a filing system, and it’s certainly not meant to serve as a project management software.
Even worse, email can be inefficient. It’s typically a lot faster to engage in real-time conversations with colleagues. Chat programs can streamline negotiations about creative concepts and tasks more quickly than a long email thread. Alternatively, inbox management programs can remove distractions and also allow you to prioritize your emails that require action.
- Slack
- HipChat
- Sane box
- Active Inbox
The IMA team communicates internally and also shares files via Slack. A highly-centralized and easy-to-search repository of team conversations.
Conclusion
Productivity tools are the apps and services or the software programs that boost the current functioning of an individual or machinery for better results in less time. Productivity tools are software applications that allow the data and information related to any project to get centralized on a common platform. This allows people seated in remote areas to access the data conveniently, and the works keep going with no time-lapse moments.