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A Quick Photo Tip
If you’ve ever photographed a sheet of paper or some other rectangular object, the image may have come out skewed because you inadvertently tilted the camera. The iOS 11 Camera app has a level feature to help you avoid this problem, but it’s so subtle that you may not have noticed it. To use it, […]
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Hammerhead Charging Bundle
Is E-mail Taking Over
E-mail is great, but sometimes there’s just too much of it at work. Ok, don’t jump to conclusions just yet about me, I know e-mail is critical for most of us to perform our jobs. However, it can get a bit overwhelming and, to be honest, annoying. Sharing information as a collective team frequently brings with it e-mail that just clogs your inbox. We all can probably say we have a friend or co-worker that overly uses the share all option or responds with unnecessary answers. To continue with my theme of honesty, this is why I Bcc ( blind carbon copy ) any company wide e-mails. I have found Bcc to be the only effective means of not cluttering up the in-boxes of others with excessive responses. It is unfair, however, to insinuate that a cluttered in-box is solely due to those who overshare. Marketing offers and other junk fills your inbox almost at breakneck speed. It seems we are being bombarded from every corner, and it sometimes seems to me that my e-mail loads feel like the pile of dirty laundry that seems to never end.
Here at Small Dog, we rely heavily on e-mail for communication and the Apple chat program. Chat is a very effective means of quick communications with individuals, but it’s become more challenging to have group chats. Another downside to Chat is it’s perhaps overly easy to send a message in error to the wrong person. Most of the time there is humor in the wrong chat sent, but it’s also resulted in some red faces of embarrassment.
Recently I learned of a group messaging service Slack, which is free but includes paid plans with additional features. Slack, which has apps for macOS, iOS, Windows, and Android, isn’t conceptually all that different from Apple’s Messages app. You type short messages and other people in the conversation can reply. You can share graphics or other files in the discussion, and search through past messages. Slack supports person-to-person voice calls, and if you switch from a free to a paid plan you can also use team, group calls, video conferencing, and screen sharing. One of the hiccups we’ve had here at Small Dog with Chat is that not everyone uses the same version of software or, in the case of trying to AirDrop a file, not being able to use personal iCloud accounts.
An appealing feature of Slack is that it has channels that are easy to create. It can bring together all communications relevant to a particular workgroup, project, or topic. You might have a private #marketing channel for everyone in that department, a private #annual-report channel for the people who need to put together that document, or a public #facilities channel to talk about burnt-out lightbulbs and stuck doors. I feel this is a way better way than organization-wide mailing lists because you can pay attention to just those channels that matter to you, and ignore the others.
You can also choose to be notified of replies to threads you’re in. Then you can override those defaults for any channel or conversation you’re in, which lets you make sure that important messages get through and water cooler chatter doesn’t interrupt you. Plus, if you leave your computer, Slack can repoint notifications to your mobile devices automatically, with separate settings to make sure you aren’t overly nagged while at your kid’s soccer game.
Slack provides tons of other features that can prove useful in organizations of any size. You can share and comment on files of any type, which is far more effective than sending attachments around in email. You can create “posts” and get others to edit them collaboratively—a boon when trying to craft the perfect bit of text for some purpose. And you can integrate hundreds of Internet services into Slack so it can act as a single dashboard for many other apps.
We have not deployed Slack here at Small Dog, time will tell if we do choose to make a switch. However, this find was an exciting one for me to come across so I wanted to share this software tip with our readers.
Find My Friends
Last week my oldest daughter went on a school trip to Boston, and, on the second day of the trip, I got a frantic call from her. She was in tears and in fear she had lost her cell phone. Between her sobs and hysteria, she was pleading with me to track her phone. After […]
Trello Can Keep You Organized
For several years now I have been using Trello to help coordinate, collaborate and stay organized between different staff members and departments. I have even used this for keeping things organized for personal tasks as well. What I love most about this application is that you can access it via your computer, iPad or iPhone and it’s free. You do get some added features if you pay for the upgraded service, which I have also used as well depending on the scope of my organizational needs.
What sets Trello apart from so many other systems is that it takes a real-world approach to managing bits of information. Imagine a whiteboard, with columns drawn on it to indicate different stages of a process and sticky notes that represent tasks. You can write on the sticky notes and move them between columns on the whiteboard, so you can always see at a glance where things stand in the overall project. Trello translates that basic concept into the digital world, with “boards” that are like a whiteboard, “lists” that mimic the hand-drawn columns, and “cards” that are like sticky notes on steroids.
You can have as many Trello boards as you like, and you can share each board with any number of people. Each board can have lots of lists, and each list can contain as many cards as you want. Don’t go nuts making too many lists or cards—just as with a physical whiteboard, that could make things just as overwhelming.
Cards are where the magic happens. Each card has a title and an optional description, and its own comment thread for people to discuss the card’s topic. You can add checklists to a card, upload attachments, and even assign a due date. People can be connected to a card so they receive notifications of new comments or attachments via email and via iOS notifications. Labels help you categorize cards in ways beyond putting them in a list. And perhaps best of all, an Activity section tracks everything that anyone does on a card, so you always know what has happened. Additionally, you can specify who has access to each board.
Imagine a Trello board for tracking job applicants through a hiring funnel. It could have a list for each part of the process, starting with receiving an application and going through each interview to the eventual decision. Each applicant would get a card containing their contact information, with the person’s resumé attached and checklists for mandatory questions. Labels might identify applicants for different jobs. After an interview, the interviewer would add a comment with notes about how it went, and move the card on to the next person. At all times, the hiring manager could see where any applicant was in the process and access all pertinent information.
Many Trello boards end up being process-oriented, where each list maps to a particular part of a process, and users move cards from list to list as the process goes along. But that doesn’t have to be the case; for example, you could create a collaborative calendar where each list maps to a week, or you could build a board that tracks client leads with a list for each person in a sales group.
In fact, the possibilities are endless. Whether you use Trello to track your family to do’s, your employees and their tasks or just helping to organize an event, I encourage you to give Trello a try.
