Improved Productivity Tools

Time is the one commodity that we can never accumulate. We start our lives with a finite, yet unknown, amount and can only choose what endeavors to spend it on. Most of us spend the largest blocks of our allotment on activities necessary for survival. In modern non-hunter gathering societies, the largest block is most likely spent working to amass enough debits so that our ledger balance is black when our time runs out.

   For the greater part of our history, working longer and harder was the only way to increase worker output. In the 19th and early 20th centuries manufacturing process improvement and new productivity tools increased worker output significantly until those gains started to plateau in the second half of the 20th century. In the latter part of the 20th and the early 21st century, the rise of Information Technology began to drive increases in economic productivity. Email, electronic spreadsheets, mobile phones, instant messaging, web presentation software, and file sharing services are just some of the great tools to come out of the golden age of information technology however; working longer and harder was still the mantra to wring out the last bit of productivity gains.

   As we close the second decade of the 21st century, we have finally come to the realization that working longer and harder is not the right answer. Working smarter is. Working longer and harder only has benefits for short-term well-defined goals and cannot be the mantra for long term success and productivity. The information technology tools of the last quarter century have also grown to help us work smarter if we can learn to embrace these tools and adopt a more pragmatic approach to how we work. Application suites such as Slack and Microsoft Teams have taken some of the best aspects of earlier tools and welded them into the productivity engines of the next decade. A single window can now be the gateway to working on shared documents, meeting face to face via video or sending an instant message to someone for a final piece of information to finish a project. How these tools are adopted and used will determine just how valuable they will become in driving productivity.

   Meetings are one facet of the work environment that these applications add measurable benefit. Successful meetings that truly drive the growth of ideas and facilitate advancement take place between no more than 6 to 10 people. Once you go beyond ten people collaboration drops off quickly and you enter the realm of presentation as all participants can no longer provide meaningful input to the topic at hand. Presentations can certainly be facilitated by these applications but meetings between small groups is where they shine. Content sharing is very simple to undertake with these tools as there is no central presenter, each participant can easily share out a window or desktop as needed. Audio, video, and chat as communication options can be seamlessly selected by participants. Face to face communication and body language is helpful to complete understanding and these applications easily add passable video to any meeting leveraging just about every device commercially available today.

   Organization is another strong point of these engines. As projects come and go channels/teams can easily be created to pair the correct people together in a fashion that helps them to keep communications, data and interactions focused on whatever topics or projects are relevant at the time. Email requires a lot of attention and planning to keep organized so you can go back and look up relevant project information after just a few weeks, let alone months. Collaboration suites allow you to maintain messages and files in their respective groupings without any struggle. Once a project or team is disbanded the items can be archived or deleted as needed.

   Freedom to manage access is another plus for the new wave of tools. Employees can add people to their channels/teams without waiting on outside help from IT staff to manage access. Invite or remove members as needed and customize your space to what works best for you. The chat function allows one to one or one to many messaging in real time. All these suites have both desktop and mobile instances that allow for the utmost freedom to access data and other team members easily.

Change is never easy. Moving away from what is comfortable is often the only way to realize real gains and afford new opportunities. If you have not tried any of these collaborative tools you should take the chance. I am sure that you will be pleasantly surprised at just how fast you will not want to part with them after a short time of use. Flexible remote workers can leverage the strengths of these applications to stay connected to their peers to be successful and maintain an important work life balance. The most productive workers are those that work smarter not harder.