Overview
Check your email, check your Slack, jump on a meeting, answer a Slack, and on and on and on. And that’s all before 9 am. In the MOPs world it’s a battle to control your time and make the most of every minute when you have stakeholders to support and requests coming at you from every angle.
We can help you get a little bit of time back in your day with these three fun tools that will make you a little more efficient and help you spend time on the things that matter.
Control the Chaos
If you work for an organization using Slack, reminders are here to help revolutionize the way you and your team work and make sure that important messages don’t get lost in a sea of notifications.
Slack offers 3 different types of reminders: message reminders, channel reminders, and personal reminders. Message reminders can be accessed by clicking the 3 dots when you hover a message. For channel reminders and personal reminders, just type /remind into any channel and follow the prompts. All 3 types of reminders are aggregated in the Later tab, which you can then use as your personal to-do list.
Here are some different ways you can use reminders:
- Use message reminders in your personal Slack channel to leave yourself notes and comments and then remind yourself about them later on
- Schedule reminders to surface during working session or calendar blocks so you know you have time to tackle the requests
- Use channel reminders to prompt folks to update weekly meeting agenda notes or complete similar repetitive tasks.
Master Task and Calendar Management
Are you trying to wrangle the chaos of requests coming in from various channels – email, Slack messages, project management tools and more? It may be time for a more robust solution.
Akiflow is one of a few tools that provide a centralized solution for managing multiple Google calendars, emails, project management tools, messaging tools, etc. With a tool like this you can centralize all of the tasks or requests you’re getting from multiple places all in one tool.
With a quick set-up and integration with your different tools, you’ll have one centralized place to manage all of your tasks. The benefit of a tool like this is that it is bidirectional so it can make updates to your calendar, mark starred emails as complete, and complete Asana tasks all from one centralized place.
An even bigger bonus feature is that you can create a custom keyboard shortcut that lets you quickly add things into the tool from anywhere. You may be in the middle of writing an email, but the quick shortcut will let you set reminders for everything from pulling a report to remembering to mail a package.
Optimize Your Meetings
Now that you have your tasks and calendars optimized, you can turn to another time consuming aspect of your day – optimizing your meetings. Google Building Blocks can help improve the way you prepare for meetings, take notes and follow-up all in one place.
Google Building Blocks are optimal if you have meetings with the same group on a recurring basis and need to collaborate on an agenda, take meeting notes or send follow-up items. You can select a specific meeting from your Google Calendar which then automatically populates all of your attendees and then you can add any action items or meeting notes.
You can also utilize the Email Building Block to prep any follow-up email communications and collaborate as a team. You can add in any of your follow-up notes to the body of the email block and format everything within your Google Doc. Since you’re in a Google Doc, you can also add comments and tag in other teammates to add their own details to the email. Once you’re ready, you can push the entire building block into a new Gmail email draft.
With Building Blocks, you’re able to keep copying the existing blocks from week to week and update your information without having to recreate new notes or emails each week. You can also keep additional notes outside of the Building Blocks to keep yourself organized. You’ll never forget to prep your meeting notes or send follow-up items again!
So now what?
Are you ready to learn more? Check out our on-demand session that deep dives into these great tools complete with demos from our super knowledgeable consultants.
Still need time back in your day? Let us know how we can help!
