Product Review: Asana
Asana’s tagline is to “work on big ideas, without the busywork.” How much latent productivity could you unlock if knowledge workers spent more time on their area of expertise rather than on the mechanics of managing and reporting on their personal workloads? This is where Asana seeks to add value.
Product Review: Smartsheet
Smartsheet bills itself as an enterprise collaboration platform that combines email, documents, calendar, file storage, and communication capabilities in one application. As I took Smartsheet for a test run, I was most struck by its versatility.
Product Review: Ricotta
Working with your team to measure progress against your OKRs can sometimes feel like pushing a boulder up a mountain. There’s got to be an easier way. Enter Ricotta, a Slack add-on for OKRs tracking.
Product Review: Hive
Hive is productivity and collaboration software that is famously used by teams at world-class companies ranging from Google to Starbucks to Toyota to IBM. As a productivity and community building enthusiast, Hive was on my list of products to try.
Invisible Work
After nearly 13 years as a technical program manager, I’ve learned that program managers and engineers are different people. And thank goodness for that—because our roles could not be more different.
Product Review: Roadmunk
Roadmunk is a roadmapping software designed to fill a gap left by many popular project management products—the ability to communicate strategy to an executive audience. I’ve faced this challenge many times in my career when using the work management products commonly available in an office environment.
Product Review: Ganttic
This product review is about Ganttic, a resource planning software named after a project manager’s best friend, the Gantt chart. While the Gantt chart and I may not be besties, I was intrigued by Ganttic’s flexibility and large number of potential use cases, ranging from team calendar management to project management.
Product Review: Hey
Oh, hey! Here comes the ubiquitous Hey product review. Hey is a subscription-based email service that was developed by Basecamp, a time management software company renowned for its forward-leaning practices around the future of work. Productivity nerds like me have been eagerly awaiting the launch of Hey for months.
Product Review: Microsoft Planner
I’m not a spokesperson for Microsoft Planner, but I should be. It’s no exaggeration to say that this tool transformed the way I work and helped me recover from a place of burnout. Let me give the context for why I find Planner to be such an effective tool.
Pruning the List
We can try every possible hack to become more productive. We can use a Kanban board to visually document the backlog. We can batch similar tasks to knock them out more quickly. But ultimately what we need to do is prune. If we haven’t pruned, we’ll forever be rough around the edges—overcommitted and overextended.
Storyboarding for Report Writing
On the last few deliverables I’ve worked, we were having difficulty synthesizing the information in a coherent manner, incorporating perspectives from multiple authors, and organizing the content in a logical sequence for the reader to process. So, I’m trying a new approach. Here is our plan to storyboard as part of the report writing process.
Product Review: Bridge24 for Trello
Trello is one of my favorite productivity tools—I use this free Kanban board application to track progress against my goals. So, when I came upon an application that advertises itself as an analytical extender for Trello, I had to test it out. Here is my review of Bridge24 for Trello.