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: Time is Limited
Time is Limited has a mission to measure organizations’ productivity data, with the goal of identifying inefficiencies that encourage leadership to make improvements. But how this does work exactly? What data do they measure? How do they safeguard employee data considering potential privacy concerns?
How to Tell Your Team You’re Leaving
Being straightforward is especially critical when breaking bad news. This includes sharing that someone is leaving the team. Here are some tips for how to break the news of an employee departure.
Product Review: Moqups
Moqups sees its product as a solution to the ongoing challenges around requirements definition. In their view, creating good requirements is “more art than science.” Engaging a diverse swathe of people early in the process and continuing to question and refine initial hypotheses is key to generating the best possible set of requirements.
Generation Next
The consequences of cultivating a culture of transparency are that, sometimes, the things that come out of your employees’ mouths are going to strike you as ridiculous at best or downright insolent at worst. If you truly wish to practice radical candor with your employees, then you’re a hypocrite if you dish it out but can’t take it.
How to Take Care of Yourself So You Can Thrive at Work
I recognize there are infinity articles on the Internet about self-care and how to structure your self-care habits to maximize productivity. But, I also get a lot of questions about how I manage to stay so on top of things, so I figured there’s nothing wrong with contributing my little footnote to the genre.
Product Review: Fellow
I have high standards for when you should have a meeting in the first place and how to run meetings effectively. I love Fellow’s mission to disseminate this knowledge to your colleagues by making it easy to create meeting agendas in a collaborative manner, record decisions, and track action items.
When to Say No to Things at Work
For the first five to ten years of your career, you should say yes. To everything. You should say yes so much that you’ll want to throw up from saying yes. Once you achieve a certain career threshold, you need to shift from saying yes to saying no. And, if you thought saying yes was hard, it’s nothing compared with the difficulty of saying no.
How to Demystify the Promotion Process
You know you’re ready for a promotion. But, somehow you don’t have the title. Short of being the first one online in the morning and the last one offline at night, how do you demonstrate your value to the business? I’d recommend pursuing a few specific actions to help demystify the promotion process.
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.
Leading through Crisis
When you become a manager, no one hands you a playbook telling you how to lead through a crisis. Like the rest of us, you just have to do it. Here are some principles that I adopted for my team and me this past year that have helped us navigate a challenging time.