How To Find Your Optimal Work Environment To Boost Productivity

Apr 25, 2017 by Guest blogger

work environment

The search to be as productive as possible while you work is one of the journeys that everyone makes at some point during their career. Some people have a great work ethic and can complete tasks with little inspiration. Others need to find the perfect set of circumstances to be able to do their very best work.

There is no shortage of articles online that detail ways in which you can boost your productivity at work, but we have found that the best tips are spread across a large number of articles on different sites.

So, here is a list of all the best tips and pieces of advice. These will help you find your optimal work environment and boost your productivity.

Find The Right Time Of Day

It is a fact that most of us will be the kind of workers who have a 9 to 5 type job. You might have noticed that through the course of your day you experience periods of extreme motivation and also periods of procrastination. The goal here is to take note of those times when you are feeling most positive and inspired, and plan your day around working on your most important projects during these periods.

Of course, if your employment allows more flexible hours, then you have more freedom to mould your work around your most productive hours. It could even be in the middle of the night if you are self employed and work from home.

Be Picky About Your Surroundings

You would be surprised by just how much the look of your surroundings can affect your productivity and enthusiasm for your work. Is your office space too cold? Is it too warm? Temperature is a big factor in how effectively a person can concentrate on their work.

Similarly, having plants and bright lights around you when working can also inspire you to be more productive. Position yourself near a window if possible. The lighter and more spacious your work environment is, the more productive you are likely to be.

Low Noise Levels

Though this can vary between individuals, the general consensus is that the louder the noise levels are around you, the less productive you are going to be. Using noise cancelling headphone can be an excellent way to shut out external noise so that you can concentrate.

There are plenty of playlists that you can subscribe to that are filled with songs intended to help you focus. Alternatively, if you operate best in complete silence, working at home may work well for you. Then you can completely control your environment and sound levels.

Be in charge of your attention span

Do you often get distracted by the notifications you get from your favorite social media apps, from your email and from your team chat? You may want to reconsider your notification settings. If you switch off notifications, or at least use a “do not disturb” mode, you are in charge of who gets your attention and when.

Also, be mindful of this when using a chat for teams. While technology can be built to help us be more productive, team chat culture i.e. how we use technology usually determines whether we become more productive.

Prioritize Your Workload

Are you more of a morning person or an afternoon person when it comes to productivity? If you find that you can’t get into the swing of things before noon, then arrange your work tasks in an order that brings the most difficult assignments in the hours where you are feeling most focused. Alternatively, if you feel more focused in the mornings, then commit to completing all of your biggest, hardest tasks first so that you only have smaller jobs to do in the afternoon when your productivity starts to fade.

Set Reward Milestones

Do you find it hard to be productive when you know you still have four of five or hours of work left in a day? Then, it’s a good idea to split that time up and set reward milestones for hard work. For example, after every hour of focused work, give yourself a ten-minute break to grab a cup of coffee, browse social media … whatever you like. This is a really effective way to train your mind to stay productive as your concentration starts to dip at the end of the day.

Just Start

The hardest part of being productive is actually getting started. No matter how unenthusiastic you are feeling about your work, half the battle is already won if you just bite the bullet and dive in. You will find that the minutes tick away much quicker when you actually get busy.

Robert Morris is a freelance writer from New York, currently working as a blog editor at top essay writing companies blog. He shares advice on productivity, digital marketing and writing.

How Business Intelligence Tools Can Keep Your Business Spending Under Control

Apr 21, 2017 by Guest blogger

business intelligence tools

There are many ways to cut costs when running a start up business - ensure effective communication in a team, keep operation costs under control, encourage using time management tools, and so on. For bigger companies though, business intelligence tools can really help keep business spending under control.

Companies operate using the information that they have. While small enterprises may have low volumes of information which could easily be handled, this is not the case with larger firms – and there may be a need for business intelligence tools.

Some of the data that every business holds dear includes customer information, business processes, partners, competitors, partners, business prospects and much more. With this information, the company can adequately plan and manage business costs, predicting impending expenditures in order to stay within a set budget.

This information is scattered across different sources and needs to be categorized and transformed to help the business cut down on costs. While this can seem like a daunting task, fear not: business intelligence tools are here to save you and your bottom-line. Below we list a few ways that these tools can help you find ways to cut down on costs.

Respond in Real-Time to Problems

These tools exist to extract real-time information from large volumes of data at impressive speeds, aiding business owners in making crucial, real-time decisions. Rather than referring to quarter-end reports, a visually-stunning business intelligence dashboard can give you updates on your business in real time, allowing you quickly respond to concerning changes or issues.

With such tools, you will be able to look at the sales cycle trends and see which ones are bound to affect the business and in what ways, then the course of action can be taken in time.

Align Business Activities with Corporate Strategy

When departments within a company are not aligned with the company strategy, the entire business is sure to incur enormous costs both directly and indirectly. To prevent this, one needs to identify the metrics, and key performance indicators as provided on the company strategy then make use of the tool to provide visibility and inspire accountability.

The tool will align the activities and also show the results of the preferred strategic objectives.

Empower Your Employees

Employees can access the data thus inspiring business growth as every employee is turned into a business maker. This software provides the employees with real-time data about the company, and every effort they plow back to the firm is data-drive thus will impact the entire organization positively.

Minimize Time on Data Entry Manipulation

A perfect business intelligence tool among other things copies and pastes data from different databases and also performs the required calculations thus saves time that could be well spent on doing other things.

The employer also saves money which could have otherwise been used to hire data entry contractors. What is left for the employees, therefore, is to generate reports. In the end, better decisions are made, and profits realized.

Identify Areas to Cut Costs

The results provided by the software aids the business decision makers to know where exactly to cut costs and keep the company forging in the right direction. These sums could be used elsewhere or used to maintain the company. The business owner can look at their inventory and know a good time to make an order, or tell when sales of a certain a product stall.

Command Productivity

Employers can observe how their employees on the network are working. They will spot those who use the network on activities that are not work-related and also what the traffic is like in in the entire system.

The employers can decide to shut some internet services during office hours so that employees can concentrate on work. If the employees are aware that they are being monitored, they will spend adequate time doing activities that are profitable to the organization.

Lewis Robinson is a business consultant specialized in social media marketing, CRM, and sales. He has managed two startups and currently freelances as a writer and consultant.

Fleep quarterly review: Q1 and plans for Q2

Apr 5, 2017 by Katheriin Liibert

Fleep quarterly

It’s Springtime! Which for us at Fleep means the beginning of a new quarter. To continue our tradition, we’d like to share our Fleep quarterly product plans with you.

But first, here’s a review of the first quarter of 2017:

Trello integration – use this long-awaited integration to send updates from Trello cards and lists to a Fleep conversation. The updates are posted as messages to the conversation. Read more: Introducing the Trello integration in Fleep!
appear.in integration – we’ve built an integration with appear.in so you could create and join audio-video calls directly from Fleep conversations. Read more: Voice and video calling in Fleep now with appear.in.
Team labels 2.0 – we’ve made some changes to how team labels work. Since the launch of Fleep Teams, every team created is accompanied by a team label that is automatically added to all team conversations. Now, the team label is also added to all 1:1 conversations between team members and you can add it to any other conversations as well. Your conversations, your rules.
Left pane rewrite – we have been busy working on the left pane data and storage sync for the web app. The main difference you will notice, besides improved performance, is how the left pane is now a bit wider.
Other – we re-hauled our sign-up flow, which now works with code based verification, continued working on Fleep for Business, and also started work on message reactions.

What’s coming up next? Here are our plans for Q2 of 2017:

Left pane search – we’re continuing work on the left pane in the web UI, including bringing message search to the left pane. As a part of this, we will sunset the All Conversations view in the web app.
Tasks 2.0 – we are making lots of improvements to Fleep Tasks behind the scenes, to make the conversation Taskboards snappier, and we will start working on the long-awaited My Taskboard feature.
Mobile label management – while we’ve had labels for a while, we will now also bring the functionality that lets you add and remove labels to Fleep mobile apps.
Reactions – as we’ve already started work on Reactions, we will of course finish it by polishing and bringing message reactions to you :)
Fleep for Business - we’ve made lots of progress on our upcoming paid subscription with admin controls, and there’s some more work to be done. Stay tuned!
Multiple VMs - we’re also continuing work on scaling our server infrastructure to better serve increasing server load.

We hope you like the direction we are moving in. As always, don’t hesitate to give us feedback at support@fleep.io. Let’s also stay in touch on social media! You can find Fleep on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Top Apps For People Working At Home

Mar 31, 2017 by Guest blogger

Apps For People Working At Home

When working at home, you need to pay attention to a lot of factors to make sure you can make it work. From a peaceful working environment to effective communication in a team and with your clients, managing documents and files, and so on.

All aspects of working at home require structure and a good system. Thankfully, there are a lot of apps for people working at home, which makes remote work actually work. Web and mobile development agencies all around the world along with the branding agency Dubai offer their free and paid applications for people working at home. These mobile or multi-platform apps are a blessing for working at home.

Let’s take a look at some of the top apps for people working at home.

Apps for video conferencing

While Fleep is great for team chat or project communication, people working at home will often need to use apps for video conferencing. Talking face-to-face or having an audio call is great for making sure everyone is on the same page, and that everyone has everything they need to start working on a task. This is to ensure that no errors are made while doing the task.

For seamless audio and video communication, Fleep has the appear.in integration. Other apps that are often used for voice calling include Skype, Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp with its calling feature. You can also use the apps GoToMeeting or Join.me. The former ones offer great quality face-to-face calling.

Apps for schedule management

Are you worried about how to manage your schedule? It’s time you get some help from the applications available. Many apps for schedule management can help you keep track of your work schedule, remind you of task deadlines and thus help you in completing them on time. The feature of such apps include keeping track of the work progress and indicating where you lacked in the process.

Some great apps for schedule management and workflow management include Basecamp, Harvest and Trello (Fleep also has a Trello integration!). If you are looking for something simpler or more basic, then you can use Fleep Tasks or go for the Wunderlist or Any.do app.

Apps for sharing files

Whether you want to share your idea with your colleague or send the final draft of the document or image, you need a medium, right? You can always share files in your project chat in Fleep, but there are also dedicated apps for sharing files. The top apps for sharing documents, images, short videos, GIF images are designed keeping this use in mind.

Applications like OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive fulfill this purpose flawlessly. Fleep also has integrations with all of these.

Apps to save time and mobile space

Freelancers, remote workers or those working from home often use smartphones for much of their work. This takes a lot of phone’s space, slows down its speed and makes it difficult to work smoothly. There are different apps that can help improve the phone’s life and storage.

Apps to save time and mobile space include CCleaner and SD maid.

All the apps mentioned in this article are used for one purpose or another, and are great for those who work from their home. Start using these apps and you’ll see how quickly and smoothly you can carry out your tasks.

Junaid Ali Qureshi is a digital marketing specialist whose current ventures include Elephantation, eLabelz, Smart Leads.ae, Progos Tech and eCig.

Voice and video calling in Fleep with appear.in

Mar 30, 2017 by Katheriin Liibert

video calling in Fleep

Today, we’re launching voice and video calling in Fleep with our brand new appear.in integration!

While Fleep is great for text-based communication as your project messenger or for your team chat, sometimes you just need to talk face-to-face. That’s where the appear.in integration comes in. Use it to talk face-to-face (or voice-to-voice, if that’s your thing) to whoever you’re working with in Fleep.

How video calling in Fleep works

It couldn’t be easier to use appear.in for voice and video calling in Fleep. Simply type and send “/call” or choose Start a video call from the message box actions menu on the desktop version of Fleep.

start a video call

This will create the call and launch it in a browser window for you. A system message is posted into the conversation where you start the call, saying that you have started a video call.

Everyone who wants to join can just click on the JOIN link at the end of the system message – and the call will be launched for them.

Fleep video call

Note that currently video calls can only be started from the desktop version of Fleep (Mac, Windows apps and web browser). However, anyone using the Fleep mobile apps can easily join the call by clicking on the JOIN link.

Why we love appear.in for video calling in Fleep

In short, appear.in is a simple product that just works! The longer version, if you’d like to read…

You can have group video conversations with up to 8 people at once.
No registration or download necessary. Simply join the call in your web browser. At most, you may have to allow popups for Fleep in your web browser, and then allow appear.in to use your camera and mic. That’s it.
Easy to use screensharing.
Join the call from any device. (App required on iOS. Get it here.)
Excellent video quality. Enough said!
Fun auto-generated URLs. https://appear.in/dynamic-shrimp. https://appear.in/delirious-chicken. We approve.
Stickers! A little fun never hurt nobody. Also, they’re practical. You can use them to show approval without unmuting yourself, for example.

Find out more about appear.in on their website or browse their FAQ.

That covers it! Feel free to send us your feedback by Fleeping us at support@fleep.io or on social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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