We’re very excited about the latest release of our iPhone app, which does some really cool things with LinkedIn.
WorkSnug connects mobile workers to the nearest and best laptop friendly places around the world - and now, for the first time, you can connect your LinkedIn account and see other WorkSnug users near you.
It’s a bit like sharing a virtual business card with other laptop workers. It’s completely optional, of course, and you can switch the LinkedIn feature on or off at any time.
Anyway, it’s best to see it in action! So, make sure you check out the video above.
Download
If you’re an existing WorkSnug iPhone user, look for the update in the App Store. New users can download the app here. It’s totally free, by the way.
We’re fashionably late to the Evernote party. The note-taking suite of apps and services has been around since 2008, and we’ve used it - on and off - since then, but we’re only now beginning to fully understand its potential for workers on the go.
We think it’s the - ahem! - second best app for mobile workers out there, and here’s why…
It’s everywhere. Because Evernote is supported by so many devices, platforms, browsers and third-party apps, it’s always with you - and just a click away when you want to capture something. So, whether you work for an organisation with a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy or not, you can find Evernote on whatever platform you use or are supposed to use.
It makes your devices more useful. Evernote’s mobile and desktop apps use more than just your keyboard to take notes. When at your desk, you can use your webcam to quickly scan handwritten notes (and recognise text), or your mobile device’s camera and microphone to take pictures and audio notes on the move.
It helps you travel light. Empty your rucksack of paper notes and business cards, scan them to Evernote and they’re always on you - in the cloud, rather than on your shoulders. Evernote can also ease the load on your inbox: just forward important email that you’ll need to reference again to your Evernote email address - out of your inbox and into an Evernote notebook.
It’s collaborative. We wrote about our favourite collaboration apps for virtual teams, but shamelessly left off one of Evernote’s unsung features - and that’s its shared notebook feature. You can create notebooks that are shared with one user, the entire world or somewhere in between, and give others rights to create, edit and delete notes. Its great for idea-forming stages of projects, especially when team members can’t be in the same place at the same time.
It makes working anywhere easier. Ever emailed a document to yourself to work on when you got home or at another computer? Email it to Evernote instead, avoid your inbox and focus on the task at hand. It’s secure too, so the IT department won’t have to worry: both the Windows and Mac desktop clients let you encrypt text in notes.
What are your favourites apps for working on the move? Let us know in the comments
San Sharma (@WorkSnugSan) is community manager at WorkSnug
Google Docs: As an alternative to Microsoft’s desktop offering, Google’s free web-based suite of office applications is fine - at worst, mildly irritating, as you get used to working in your web browser. But as a rival to Microsoft’s bloated ‘track changes’ features in Word and Excel, Google Docs really comes into its own. Real-time collaboration means that up to 50 people can work on a single document at the same time. Have fun chasing each others’ cursors around the screen - or chat with your collaborators in real time.
Writeboard: For quick and dirty collaboration (well, not necessarily ‘dirty’ - it’s actually a very clean interface!) - you can get started remarkably quick and easily with Writeboard from 37signals. Don’t expect much in the way of style and formatting: Writeboard works best with plain-text documents. For that reason, it’s perfect for copywriters, bloggers and editors. You can quickly compare versions, add collaborators and comments - and you don’t even need an account. Just give your Writeboard a name and a password and get collaborating.
MindMeister: For whiteboard-style planning sessions without the whiteboard, MindMeister allows location-independent teams to work on mind maps anywhere and anytime - in the browser or from an iPad, iPhone or Android device. What we really like about it is its History Playback feature, which is like a Flux capicitor for collaboration, allowing you to travel back in time to previous versions and play back your thought processes. This kind of collaboration comes at a cost - £9.99 per month, but you can take advantage of a free 30-day trial.
Doodle: For all this virtual collaboration, sometimes it pays to meet up in person - that is if you can decide on a date and time! That’s where Doodle steps in. Doodle lets a meeting coordinator set up a poll of available date and time slots and invite meeting attendees to vote on a slot that works for them. The most popular slot wins! But the real winner is your inbox, which is kept from the usual back-and-forth of meeting planning.
Skype: Skype is a no-brainer, right? But its potential for collaboration extends beyond simple voice and video communication. Did you know that you can use Skype to share screens? It’s as simple as pushing a button - and far less laborious than trying to explain what you can see on your screen. Great for IT support, working on design documents and - for the very patient - helping mom and dad with their ailing desktops.
What tools do you use to collaborate with your team? What would you add to this list? Do you use packages like Jive or Podio that bring a lot of this stuff together? Let us know in the comments.
Today’s mobile workers are a fiercely nomadic bunch who travel through the borders and frontiers of Laptopistan: working from home one day, Starbucks-hopping around town the next, and also brooding for periods of time at their local coworking space.
Technology certainly accounts for this ability to move around with ease. Independents are no longer bound by location restrictions because of an array of online tools. They work for anyone (global outlook), anywhere (local source) through virtual channels, such as e-mail, Skype, and virtual networking, on laptops, iPads, and smartphones.
But it takes more than just technology to make yourself productive— especially when you’re juggling multiple clients and team members.
Here are some grounds rules to effective communication to consider:
Pick the right tools and technology solutions that work for you and your team. We’ve come a long way: from smoke signals, carrier pigeons, and the telegraph to e-mail, IM, and video chat. While our tools today may seem more sophisticated, it doesn’t mean that communication and collaboration has gotten easier. Whether you use a collaboration tool like Campfire or a basic IM chat, find the medium that works best for everyone you work with. The ideal tool is: low friction (easy-to-use) and widely available.
Keep weekly status notes. One of the horrors of antiquated corporate life was having to write up weekly status or progress reports for the boss. Status reports were usually bureaucratic, fine-grained form reports that were long-winded and Shakespearian in self-importance (“full of sound and fury signifying nothing”). Ditch this method and simplify it by writing up status notes instead. These brief notes, which can be easily cobbled together over your Monday morning coffee, should have the following: a) What you did last week; b) What’s on your plate this week; and c) Any issues that may be making it hard to do b). Have everyone exchange these notes by e-mail or post them on a virtual bulletin board. Keep your notes staccato-brief and make sure you and your team members submit them at the start of the workweek (say, Mondays). Drafting these notes at the beginning of the week sharpens everyone’s focus to what needs to be done. It’s a great way to share the what’s-in-progress’ big picture with colleagues.
Save team meetings for the big stuff. Formal meetings with the whole gang can take some creative wrangling and calendar coordination especially if you work in wildly different time zones. While there will always be a case for regular meetings, decide if your agenda warrants the effort. Meetings for the sake of having them and feeling important are the stuff of Dilbert-land. Most of the time, weekly status notes and one-on-one meetings with key people on an as-needed basis will usually suffice. To make these virtual meetings as painless as possible, keep them brief and to the point. Always have a clear agenda to make sure deliberations move along smoothly and with focus. Ramblings and idle chatter are great for lunch breaks and social gatherings, but when everyone is eager to get back to work, they can perilously derail discussions. Keep to the agenda. After each meeting, write up a brief summary of the discussion and circulate over e-mail. Use easy-to-read bulleted lists or outline format and cover the basics: a) List of attendees, b) Topics discussed, c) Decisions made, and d) Action items and who’s responsible. Don’t muddle the meeting minutes with heavy details. If people have questions, they can simply follow-up. The goal is to minimize the noise and clutter, and make sure people can return to their work with little disruption.
Go easy on IM. IM can be as disruptive as machine gun artillery. Some people can become overly enthusiastic about sharing every little thought or idea and often expect an immediate response (“Are you there?” [10 second pause] “Yoo-hoo!?”). IM recipients then feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond as the desperation and tension mounts. This wastes time and causes misunderstandings. It’s also irritating. A better option is to switch on IM during designated times. For example, make yourself available for chats or “office hours” in the early morning or late afternoon. Any other time, should be an IM blackout— and let people know. A less obtrusive option to IM is to set up a virtual bulletin board where questions can be posted and answered at any time. Basecamp and Campfire provide these features. Use can also use Twitter as an office newsfeed, letting people post pithy questions or concerns as they arise.
Focus on outcomes, not hours put in. A results-based focus is much more efficient than making everyone clock in a certain number hours everyday. Set expectations for what needs to be done for a given week and hold people accountable for that. Your individual team members are then responsible for delivering on those goals. Rigid daily schedules aren’t very practical when you’re focused on results, but it’s good to encourage everyone on your team to be available when you need to get in touch with them. Set policies – for example, an e-mail turnaround of 4 hours to answer questions or a 30-minute turnaround for a phone or chat request.
Success for mobile workers managing far-flung teams can be boiled down to this: have a flexible and simple communication process in place that lets you keep in touch with the key stakeholders for your business— your co-founder, contractors, clients, and business colleagues— without it taking over your day.
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? According to this infographic from Online Schools, an astonishing 35% of you boot up your smartphones.
We’re all “always connected”. But what impact is this having on our education, productivity and wellbeing? The infographic below raises some interested questions. Take a look, and let us know what you think.
We want to make WorkSnug magical. We’re seeking a mobile user-experience magician who can wave the wand.
WorkSnug is seeking an extremely talented freelancer to design an intuitive and impressive user experience that’s consistent across our mobile platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian^3). We’re particularly looking for:
Solid UX design experience and a firm understanding of information architecture issues
Experience in mobile UI development
Applicants should also be experienced in Photoshop, Illustrator and Visio (or similar) and have a passion for design
A track record of excellence, please provide published examples
Applicants will preferably have experience of working in an Agile environment
Being London-based is a plus
WorkSnug connects mobile workers to the nearest and best laptop friendly workspaces. See WorkSnug.com for more information. We’re proud to say that we were founded at The Hub Kings Cross, and are now based in East London, absolutely nowhere near ‘Silicon Roundabout’.
If this could be you, please get in touch. Email hello@worksnug.com
Last week, during a ‘How to work from home’ workshop at coworking space Central Working in London, WorkSnug community manager San Sharma (@WorkSnugSan) talked us through 10 tech tools to save you time. As a few people couldn’t make it, I promised to write up San’s list and add a few of my favourites as well.
So, what were San’s time-saving app recommendations?
Chrome: A good browser is really important. This one is quick, secure, has great add-ons and works across all platforms. Mac users should also check out Safari. Tip: make sure you are making the most of tabs.
Instapaper: Save the bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar and whenever you see great content you’d like to read later, send it to Instapaper for offline reading on your phone through the Instapaper app. ShowYou is a similar service for keeping track of video content you’d like to go back to.
Google Reader: RSS feeds are a great way to stay productive. Instead of visiting various sites to find relevant content and news for your industry, have it come to you through Google Reader. You can star items you want to save for later and also tweet right from inside Google Reader. Mac users will like the aesthetic of Reeder, which also gives you the option to send to Instapaper.
Delicious: Tagging bookmarks and saving them to your Delicious account is another way to save time, by making it easy to get back to great content. The social side of Delicious may not be to everyone’s liking (i.e. you may not want to show the world what you’re bookmarking), so note that you have the option to keep everything private. Either way, you get to make the most of great tagging features so you can easily find your saved bookmarks. More advanced users will want to check out the Stacks feature.
Evernote: Another classic app, available across platforms, Evernote offers a great way to organise information. Especially useful when making travel plans or keeping track of receipts - send or scan information to Evernote, tag it or do a key word search, and watch the character recognition at work.
Flow/Toodledo: I am a big fan of Getting Things Done by David Allen, and ever since reading it I use a task list to manage my business and personal to do’s. Personally I use Outlook tasks, but both of these apps are great cloud-based ways of tracking your tasks.
Twitter: We looked at a range of Twitter options from Twitter’s own app to more complex solutions, like TweetDeck and Hootsuite. The latter are great if you need to manage more than one account, if you want to schedule tweets or track analytics. Overall, the preference was for Hootsuite for being more user-friendly and having a more appealing interface. We also briefly discussed apps like Qwitter, which let you see who unfollows you (might be best not to find out!), and Tweriod, which lets you know when your followers are most likely to be online.
Buffer: Sstill on the subject of Twitter - we all agreed that scheduling tweets needs to be done with care, as it’s a good idea not to flood your followers with tweets. So, if you are catching up on your reading, send tweets to Buffer and let it automatically spread your tweets out throughout the day. Since the workshop, I have now added this to my Google Reader, so I can tweet to buffer straight from there - time saving or what?!
Basecamp: a great project management app from 37signals, which has a free option that gives you full functionality for a single project. So, whether you’re managing your wedding (as in San’s case!) or a client project, it’s another great way to keep everything organized and in the cloud.
Dropbox: Everyone attending the workshop was already using Dropbox, though perhaps not to its full potential. This is a great way to work offline, backup to the cloud and get access to your work from any browser or machine in which you can log into your Dropbox account. I personally have saved all of my business and personal documents to Dropbox (the free account is large enough for this) and can access them from 3 different computers, from any browser and from my smartphone - essential for any mobile worker.
iftt: San’s bonus to the list was completely new to me and a great little service that lets you automate various tasks. ‘If This Then That’ lets you set triggers and actions: so if you would like to save the photo you take with Instagram to your Dropbox account you can. Simply look at their list of top automations to pick the ones that would save you time.
My bonus
The following 2 apps are essential daily tools for me:
Office365: This is how I manage my emails, calendar and contacts. Office365 is a recently launched service from Microsoft that offers Exchange Online to sync all your data across as many devices as you like. I have Outlook on 3 different laptops at home (I am in tech, remember!) and also manage my calendar, contacts and emails on my phone. Sometimes, when I am working on the go, I will borrow a laptop and access all my data through an Outlook browser app. Unlike everything on San’s list, this one will cost you £4+VAT a month and is available for both Mac and PC users.
1Password: Another essential for me - password management software, so you never need to remember your passwords. Sloppy password management will make you vulnerable to hackers, so it’s important to keep strong and different passwords for everything. Spending some time setting up this software is a great way to protect yourself and save time from having to reset passwords when you can’t remember them! Again not a free one, but in this case also worth paying for.
I hope this list of 13 apps proves useful in saving you time. If there is anything we’ve left off the list, leave a comment and let us know how you use technology to beat the clock.
Is it a good or bad thing that you can now work wherever you are? Long gone is the excuse that you can’t get to your email, you’ve left the file at home or your smartphone isn’t so smart. It is! And your files, your apps and your settings can follow you around in a virtual cloud that hangs above all of our heads.
But there’s a positive side to all of this too: you can work wherever you are! You don’t have to be at your desk or even be at a desk at all. You don’t have to work when the office is open and you don’t have to worry about backing up your data (kind of).
cloud com·put·ing: working with files and software on the Internet, rather than on your hard drive
Here are 10 cloud-based apps that can help you work wherever you like:
Dropbox. Dropbox is a cloud app with wow-factor: for people new to working in the cloud especially, it’s very impressive. It’s a folder that sits on your computer, like any other folder, but the difference is its contents are stored remotely and synced across other computers and devices that are are signed into your Dropbox account or sharing folders with you. In summary, it could do to the USB stick what the MP3 did to the MiniDisc. Because it looks like any other folder on your computer, it can also turn regular apps into cloud apps by hosting files and settings. For example, I use typing shortcut utility TextExpander. I put its settings file in my Dropbox so that my shortcuts sync across my desktop computer at home and my laptop when I’m on the move. Dropbox Basic is free and includes 2GB of storage; other account types are available
Evernote. Evernote is sort of like Dropbox for your brain. It helps you “remember everything” by allowing you to capture notes and ideas, photos and screen grabs, sounds and links, sync them automatically to the cloud and access them from practically anywhere. Evernote is available through your web browser, Windows and Mac desktop apps and mobile apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry and Web OS. Evernote is free; Evernote Premium is $5 per month or $45 per year
Google Docs. Google Docs might not be ready to take over Microsoft Office just yet, but it’s edging ever closer. It includes apps for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and forms. You can upload files from your desktop to get started, access documents from connected computers and smartphones and collaborate in real-time with colleagues. Google Docs is a free product
Gmail and Google Calendar. More from Google now, and I include them knowing full well that you understand what they are, but as a reminder that if you work on the move it is essential to have hosted email and calendar. Google’s solution is a good one, and it’ll sync with your Android phone, of course, and with your BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows and Nokia phone using Google Sync. Gmail and Google Calendar are free products
Hootsuite. Power users will tell you that TweetDeck is the only way to manage your social media presence, but I disagree. I resent that you have to install third-party software (Adobe Air) in order to use TweetDeck on the desktop, and I find its interface a bit grim, to be honest. HootSuite, on the other hand, runs in your browser, on your smartphone and tablet device, does everything TweetDeck does and more, and it’s better looking. Oh, and The White House (@whitehouse) uses it too. HootSuite Basic is free; HootSuite Pro is $5.99 per month
Delicious. It looked like it was all over for Delicious when Yahoo! dropped it, but fans and YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen bought it and have kept it going. What is it worth it? Yes! Delicious is a bookmarking service that keeps all of your important links in the cloud, so you can get to them from any computer. It keeps them organised with tags; team it up with a service like ifttt and you could get your bookmarks to work for you. (Let me know, if you need an ifttt invitation, by the way, in the comments!) Delicious is a free product
Instapaper. Ever get sent a link to an article that you don’t have time to read right now? ‘Read Later’ with Instapaper by clicking a bookmarklet in your web browser. The article is automatically made read-friendly and synced with Instapaper, ready to read on its website, and offline on your iPhone, iPad or Kindle - perfect for when you do have time to read, like when you’re travelling. Instapaper is a free product
Toodledo. It’s not the best-looking todo app, but it works really well. Get tasks out of your inbox by forwarding them to your Toodledo email address, organise them by folders, tags, context and subtasks, and sync them with your iOS, Android or BlackBerry device. Better-looking apps include Flow and Wunderlist. Toodledo is free; Toodledo Pro is $14.95 per year; Toodledo Pro Plus is $29.95 per year
Salesforce. Salesforce is CRM software that sits in the cloud, allowing you to take your customers’ details with you on the move. Salesforce starts at $2 per month up to $250 per month, depending on your requirements
Basecamp. Basecamp is project management software that’s perfect for remote teams, allowing you to share files, deliver projects on time and - crucially - keep communication organised and out of your inbox (no-one needs more email, right?). There’s a free version of Basecamp; a basic plan for $24 per month; Plus, Premium and Max plans are also available, up to $149 per month, depending on your requirements
What did I miss?
What cloud apps do you use - on the move, at home or in the office? Let us know in the comments below.
Due to serious outages with our hosting at Amazon, we’ve had to temporarily withdraw our mobile applications. We’re hoping this will only be for a small number of days, while work to ensure we have a more reliable host. If you’d like us to let you know when the apps are back available, leave us your email address here.
WorkSnug connects mobile workers to the nearest and best laptop friendly places around the world - and now, for the first time, you can connect your LinkedIn account and see other WorkSnug users near you.
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