Tools for working from home

When we need to work from home, we often face a problem: being far from the office and most of the business tools we have available there, such as working efficiently >? And how can we maintain contact in an efficient and even social way with our colleagues?

Well, that's what we want to share today!

There are more and more tools available for remote work, from home or anywhere else!

Shall we go to them?

Meetings

When you are in a remote work environment, it is still necessary to maintain teamwork, take decisions, share ideas, to do brainstormings and even socialize!

There are a set of excellent tools, many of them free, which can be very useful. 

In addition to Skype , which we all know, there are two tools that are very interesting for holding remote meetings and that are free in a simple version: Zoom and Whereby .

TO Zoom allows up to 100 participants free of charge but the duration of meetings is limited to 40 minutes. If we want more time, we have to start a new meeting or purchase the paid version. But isn't it a great way to keep meetings efficient?

TO Whereby it is also a spectacular tool. It works as if it were a meeting room, in which we can give our room whatever name we want. Then just send the link to whoever is going to join us and start our meeting. The door can even be closed and anyone who wants to enter will have to knock.

Both tools allow audio, video and screen sharing.

Still on the topic of meetings, one of the biggest problems for those who work from home is background noise. THE Krisp.ai is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to eliminate background noise from a call made on your computer or phone. 

The most interesting thing is that it allows us to eliminate our background noise but also the background noise of whoever is calling us!

In the case of the computer, Krisp There is a free version that allows you to save some time for free, so you can use it for that meeting where you want to keep quiet!

If you want to record your screen with a video presentation without having to do the actual meeting, then Drift Video is a great option!

Team Chat

For chatting, we are all very used to using Whatsapp and we can use a computer version on web.whatsapp.com.

But we have two problems: firstly, with all the groups and friends we don't stop receiving messages. If we put WhatsApp in front of us, it won't be easy to work! On the other hand, what happens if we run out of battery on our phone? Or if we simply want to turn it off to work better? There goes Whatsapp and our work tool.

An excellent alternative is theSlack. With this tool we can create a list of people with whom we work and create closed and open groups that allow us to communicate in a selected way. We can turn on notifications for a specific group or department but not for a specific project that we just want to be informed about.

Slack is free in its basic version and has excellent features .

Working with Documents

To create texts, spreadsheets and presentations, most of us are used to MS Office - Excel, Word and Powerpoint. The problem is that often we don't have the license installed on the computer and we can't use them.

As an alternative, we can always use the tools in Google Docs. 

The advantage, besides being free, is that the latest version is always recorded and therefore we don't run the risk of losing our work.

Furthermore, we can work in collaboration with someone - one or more people at the same time, which if we don't want to work with more than one person on the same document without the possibility of being in the same room, is excellent!

There are two additional tools that we can highlight:

LanguageTool , which is a proofreader that not only helps with spelling but also with grammar , and DeepL for those who want to do some translation but are not close to that person in the office who always helps us with these things.

Backup and file sharing

To ensure backup of your work files and even share them with your colleagues, we suggest two tools that allow you to avoid pen drives and external disks and that are free up to a certain capacity.

EITHER Dropbox and the Google Drive. You can create an account on Dropboxfree which gives you access to 2 Gb of free storage and realtime synchronization with your computer.

Google Drive is available to anyone with a Gmail account and is also free and provides 15 GB of storage space , also allowing synchronization with your computer.

Notepad

To save your notes, we have several alternatives.

EITHER Evernote, which allows you to take notes, copy website pages and even save documents of any format can be a solution. 

EITHER Evernote It is excellent for scanning documents with your phone and automatically saving them to your phone.

Another very similar solution is the Pocket, particularly useful for saving website links.

A solution that is also quite simple to use for those who have a Google account and that works almost like a PostIT of any size you want, is the Google Keep. You can write notes in different colors, very simply and quickly.

All these tools work in the cloud and so you won't lose your notes if you lose your computer or phone.

Time management

Managing time can be one of the biggest challenges for those who work from home or remotely.

The first and most simple suggestion we have is Google Tasks. It works like a very simple to-do list as always associated with your Google account calendar. 

If you want a more complete tool that allows you to manage work in teams, the Asana It can be an excellent solution, allowing you to have projects, teams, etc.

EITHER Trello it works on the kanban concept and has enormous flexibility. It is organized by columns where virtual post-its are placed. It's excellent for visually organizing our ideas and tasks.

EITHER workflowy and the Mindmeister These are two tools that allow you to think in a tree logic.

EITHER workflowy It is extremely simple to use and works by bullet points: it is excellent for listing ideas, making lists of activities and even summarizing meetings . 

EITHER Mindmeister It's more visual and allows us to do a kind of brainstorming ideas, even if it's with ourselves.

Finally, if you want to organize your work and breaks with the pomodoro method (typically 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of break) there are several tools for that. 

For example, the Pomodoro focus It will allow you to define how long you want to work and how often you want to take a break. It's great for staying focused!

Well, we hope you enjoy it! And if you need more tools, let us know

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