Your jam-packed work productivity toolkit has space for low-noise tools
Have you counted the number of productivity tools you use at work? Email, conference call service (e.g. Zoom), instant chat (e.g. Slack, MS Teams, Whatsapp), work phone, work management platform (e.g. Monday.com, Wrike), CRM (e.g. Salesforce), cloud/shared drive, plus your area's specialist tools.
It's a packed toolkit, and it looks perfectly balanced to maximise your productivity in every aspect of work. You may say that it's all good, there is no need, and certainly no space or time for a new one.
Why not spend two minutes on the next section, and see if you resonate? If so, you have space for great productivity gain in the self-work area, with a few low-noise tools.
Your work comms tools are too noisy and dis-organised for productive self-work
We have written a full article to explore this topic in details, below is its synopsis.
Your work communications tools (the likes of emails, instant chats and conference calls) are great for real time teamwork, when you need to quickly feed back on a proposal to get it out before the 5pm deadline, or engage in team discussions that narrow down options towards the right decision. They grab your attention as soon as a message arrives and stir you into response. The more frequently you and your team build on the communication thread, the faster the exchange of thoughts, and the greater the collective output.
Yet teamwork is only part of your work. You spend a lot of time on self-work, when you are quietly synergising pieces of information, designing strategies or driving insights out of data. For those, you need big chunks of uninterrupted time, plus all relevant information structured and laid out for consideration.
Your communication tools do a bad job at self-work. They keep grabbing your attention, breaking up your self-work time, and creating distractions. Your self-work time is far too noisy. And when they deliver information for your self-work, they are spread all over the communication threads (e.g. email chains, instant chat transcript). You have to comb through the messages to piece information together, and they are often corrupted with personal opinions and tangential discussions. You have little time to self-work, and are exhausted before it could start for real.
If this resonates with you, we have some tools that will fit nicely into your toolkit's gaps.
Your toolkit has space for low-noise, high-organisation teamwork tools
You shouldn't put your existing communication tools on mute. You will miss out on those occasions when real time, noisy team-working is necessary.
And you can't fully restore self-work productivity with ways-of-work. It only takes one colleague to start an instant chat thread on a non-urgent question to grab your attention. It requires too much self-discipline from everyone.
What you need are teamwork tools that are low-noise, high-organisation by design. This way, you move what doesn't need to be noisy and real time out of the your communication tools, and create space for self-work.
Here are a few suggestions:
Industry Box is a low-noise team productivity tool that keeps every team members updated and ready
For you to be ready for work on a project, you need to know about the general scope, latest developments and have key information (e.g. competitors' analysis) at hand in an organised manner. These are not urgent and do not need to grab your attention. And it is a plus if these information are regularly sent to you as they arise, so that you don't have to stress over a daunting catch-up when you are called in.
Industry Box is a low-noise team productivity tool for this purpose. It helps team leads publish latest project updates and key information to the team members. These published posts are like news or blog articles, which are not interrupted by myriads of responses, and the core messages are presented as they are intended. Easier to the eyes of the readers.
Project leads can set up project tracks, similar to news article categories. Team members associated with a track are added as subscribers. As a team member, you will only see posts from tracks you are associated with. No irrelevant posts creating noises, and no relevant posts missed.
Plus, Industry Box has the "Daily Digest" feature, which collates all incoming posts from all your subscribed tracks, and send out a digest email at the end of work day. Everything you need to catch-up on across multiple projects, neatly organised into one daily email.
Doodle is a meeting scheduling tool that get a meeting time confirmed without the conventional back-and-forth
Team meetings are great for teamwork. A time slot is properly blocked out ahead of time, an agenda is set, and members could prepare towards it. It prevents those ad-hoc teamwork through instant chats thread and long email chains which catch people out as they want to do some self-work (or happens to be teamworking elsewhere).
But all the hassles go into getting the date and time right for everyone. Even if you have visibility to everyone's calendar, rarely do you find a common free slot. And as soon as you send an email suggesting some times and ask people if they could shift around, it degenerates into a protracted but inconclusive discussion. You waste so much time on getting an agreement across the attendees that you would think twice about hosting a meeting next time.
That's where Doodle comes in. It's a polling tool but with features designed towards getting a meeting slot agreed. You can start with your own calendar and pick time slot candidates definitely free for you, create a poll and send to all attendees. You can set deadlines to the poll, limit number of choices an attendee could tick, or indicate slots that are "okay but not great".
All those back-and-forth emails, or having a meeting invite with lots of declines and disparate alternative time slot suggestions, are now gone. You can send a poll, focus on your self-work without distraction, then take a look at the results later. Everyone feels more at ease, and look at multi-attendee meetings more favourably.
Agreedo is a meeting agenda collaboration tool that organises meeting inputs and outputs
Continuing on this thread of team meetings, Agreedo will make them even more productive without all the noise and disorganisation in the run-up to the meetings and in the follow-up afterwards.
The more attendees and the more important the meeting, the more disagreement on the agenda - what to include, the sequence, and getting materials submitted ahead of time. Using communications tools to tackle these points will mean lots of preparatory meetings, lots of emails and countless chat transcripts. You will need superb organisational skills to sort them out, using your self-work time.
And when it comes to ensuring the meeting outcomes are acted upon, you need even more efforts in liaising with the key attendees and see where they are with work. Attendees have the tendency to over-commit during meetings and under-deliver afterwards.
Agreedo focuses on smoothening this meeting lifecycle and keep it organised. When you set an agenda, people can raise suggestions through Agreedo, and you can then review and make decisions. When the meeting is done, you can attach meeting notes and distribute to every attendee. Actions are created on the meeting's task list for the action-taker to tick off when done. You can see which tasks are still outstanding through the task list, and give a nudge.
Agreedo removes all the back-and-forth emails, ad-hoc meetings and instant chats from the process. And it becomes easier for people to buy-in to the agenda and contribute towards it ahead of time. There are fewer chase-ups in on reading the prep materials before, and checking that tasks are completed after.
Prezi and Industry Box give you a thorough understanding of the team's engagement with critical updates
There are times when a piece of information is very important, and must be read for teamwork to be productive. Conventionally you would need to check with each team member individually, and you still couldn't be sure. That's a lot of communication, lots of noise, and hard to keep organised.
When you create a presentation through Prezi, and distribute the cloud version through a URL, the viewers' viewing data will be recorded. You can then review the analytics after a while, identify who hasn't accessed the presentation and who has skipped a particular page, and give a friendly reminder.
If you need to distribute important messages which are not as dense a presentation, do it as Industry Box posts. Apart from the advantage of creating targeted posts by track, it collects user analytics for each published post (with personal privacy fully respected). Each track has a list of subscribers and you can see who have not read the post yet, and give them a friendly reminder.
In both cases, you are saved from these noisy back-and-forth asking each team member, and having to do the mental summing up yourself.
Low-noise, high-organisation teamwork tools open up new routes to greater productivity
And we mean collective productivity - yours, your teams', projects you lead, and projects you participate in.
For a long time the modern workspace has been emphasising the virtues of real time, interactive (noisy) teamwork. The preferred way-of-work is to kick-start an ad hoc request and everyone jumps in. It's quick, it gets everyone's input, and you get some outputs instantly. But it doesn't get everyone's deep thoughts. The initial outputs need a lot more iterations later on. Quick to start, followed by a slow and treacherous journey.
When you add low-noise, high-organisation tools to your toolkit, you make space for more self-work. And self-work feeds into the teamwork to give more refined outputs. A more muted start where people are self-working, but you get to the end point sooner, and with fewer frustrations or surprises along the way.
Industry Box is the leading low-noise team productivity tool for general day-to-day use. When added to your toolkit, it will help you juggle multiple projects, kick-start projects with a remote-working extended team more effectively, and stay connected with distant but fast-moving projects.
Give these tools a try, and feel the new possibilities for yourself.
About Industry Box:
Industry Box is dedicated to introducing streamlined & frictionless stakeholder management, as we believe this to be a hidden productivity blackhole for most companies and managers.
Apart from raising awareness about this issue and promoting industry best practice, we have also designed a digital tool with all the best practices built in, so that managers & leaders can introduce and benefit from best-in-class stakeholder management without the learning curve.
See here for our other blog articles on raising productivity through better stakeholder management, or by becoming a more productivity-conscious stakeholder.