Whenever one needs to spend excessive time juggling tasks, deadlines, etc., it’s time wasted. This is irrespective of the professional activity. The same goes for any team leader or a freelance designer.
There are better ways to go about managing these tasks. These ways that are faster, more efficient, and far less prone to error.
Project management and team collaboration areas have seen technology come to the rescue. The help comes in time and task tracking, reminders, or to-do list management. This is beside numerous other tools.
You can always hire someone to help you stay organized, meet deadlines, and track expenses. Thereby, you can free up more design time and free time for you.
But, that comes at a significant cost.
A better approach is to invest in a tool that automates everything for a very affordable price. Just like one or more of the following.
1. monday.com
monday.com is a team management tool that initially targeted startups and tech companies and was designed to accommodate teams of any size from a pair of freelancers collaborating with one another to thousands collaborating around the globe.
Because of its reputation for ease of use, transparency, and communication and collaborative features, it was quickly discovered by non-tech companies. Today this team management tool, which was until recently marketed under the dapulse brand, serves more than 22,000 teams across 200 different verticals, of which 70% lie outside the tech sector.
monday.com makes it easy to build and manage workflows that are customized to fit your exact needs; so, you’ll never have to adjust your workflows to satisfy the tool. It’s “cheetah fast” so you never have to wait no matter how complex the project or how many projects you are tracking, and if you and your team like colorful visuals that make it ever so easy to understand what’s happening, what has happened, and what’s in store, monday.com is spot on.
2. Taiga
Taiga is a free, open source, easy to use project management platform that designers, developers, and project managers have come to love. This powerful tool not only addresses a wide range of project management scenarios, it gives you complete control over your projects and is beautiful to look at as well.
Agile methodology users have likely heard of Epics. Although a precise definition of what an Epic story looks like is hard to come by, it’s safe to say that Epics on Taiga opens a host of planning opportunities for anyone charged with managing multiple interrelated projects – a tough act to handle in almost any circumstance, but quite doable for a Taiga user.
There’s also no problem managing projects being worked in other platforms in Taiga. In short, if you’re responsible for managing or tracking several projects, interrelated or not, it makes good sense to go with Taiga.
3. Mason
Mason differs from most productivity and collaboration tools in that it allows teams to collaborate on actual software elements, rather than just on mockups or prototypes. It is especially useful when changes need to be made to existing products by letting any user change colors, button styles, or images to better emphasize a brand and then seamlessly push those changes into production with no downtime or coding.
One way to look at how Mason operates is that allows users to assemble digital products, rather than code them, by boiling products down to their atomic patterns and then reassembling those patterns into configurable, solution-based building blocks which are deployable into any application and are delivered on demand. Mason’s library of software solutions currently includes Authentication, User Onboarding, Content Feeds, and Navigation.
Non-designers (clients, marketers, etc.) can also make changes using Mason, taking some of the maintenance pressure off designers and developers. Mason is free to use. You pay only when changes made appear on the customers web or mobile products.
When a participant in a meeting comes unprepared, it can mean wasted time for others, not to mention a need to reconvene later. With RunYourMeeting, incidents like these can be avoided.
This productivity tool helps you prepare and conduct meetings efficiently and follow up on them as well. Meeting minutes and actions addressed or taken are kept in one place, and to-do lists are updated and automatically shared. What you want done, gets done.
5. ClickTime
ClickTime enables project managers to keep tabs on who is working on what, whether a project is on time and within budget, and who is available for work if needed. Attractive and easy-to-read charts display how many hours remain on a task or project, which of those hours are billable, and the costs of performing the work.
You can also manage employees’ time off and expenses.
6. ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab is a project management software that boosts team productivity by centralizing collaboration and allowing total control over planning, assigning, and managing work. Telephone tag and messy email communications will be history since comments and feedback are kept in one place and organized around projects.
Information can be stored for all to see, but you can also set permissions to determine who can access what.
If you want to enhance communication on your visual projects, give Futuramo Visual Tickets a try. This app enables teams of designers and developers to exchange tickets with bugs, change requests, and feedback on digital projects.
It offers a visual annotation tool, comments section, filtering and sorting features, and the ability to create tickets within tasks and projects. The major feature is the tool that allows adding visual feedback directly on the screen uploaded to the ticket.
8. Nutcache
Nutcache, like our furry friend, excels at saving important things until there is a need for them. This business oriented productivity app will be especially helpful to those managing projects in that it manages a project throughout its life cycle and within Agile’s set of principles.
Nutcache makes it much easier for creative teams to collaborate and conduct their work more efficiently.
Conclusion
Find the app(s) that offer solutions to any project management challenges you’re facing. Then, you should quickly discover that your job just got a whole lot easier.
Productivity and collaboration are common threads throughout these software solutions. However, a wide range of features and capabilities are there for the choosing.
It should not be difficult to find the best fit for your needs or the needs of your business.
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