Productivity Tools & Workflows WordPress Meetup

At this Metro Detroit WordPress Meetup, several different presenters talked about their favorite productivity and workflow apps/hacks. Here’s a short summary of each presentation with links to their recommended tools.

First Presenter: Anthony Montalbano on his favorite productivity hacks (slides).

• Break things down in to measurable pieces
  • 1-3-5 list: (1) big thing, (3) medium things, (5) little things. Do this every day.
• Build better habits!
  • Way of Life app. This tool helps you set up daily check-ins to build better habits.
• Manage your time!
  • RescueTime – helps you maintain work-life-balance to help you focus and better use your time.
  • Bonus: use a flic.io button, with IFTTT and RescueTime to lock self out of computer to maintain your focus time.
• Accountability – putting things on a calendar helps keep you accountable.
  • Google Calendar
• Record Everything – you never know when you’ll need it.
  • Evernote / Voice Recorder – record everything!

Second Presenter: Deborah Edwards-Onoro talks about using Harvest for invoicing and time management.

• She chose Harvest because it was easy for her as a small business owner to use.
• Bonus points that Harvest does both time tracking AND customer invoicing.
• A benefit of Harvest is that it is all online, it can be accessed anywhere on any device that can get to the web.
• Within the customer invoicing feature, it allows you to link to a payment page for your customers to pay online.
• Harvest has built-in support for PayPal and Stripe payment processing, and integrations with tools like Asana, Trello, Slack, Basecamp, QuickBooks, and over 100 other services.
• Invoices are customizable, you can add custom messages to your invoices, and you can set up Harvest to sent late notices when payments are past due.
• Time tracking is a lifesaver, you can track by clients, project, and tasks individually, and creates itemized invoices for you.
• They have two plans, a Free plan and a solo plan.
• Downside is they don’t have 24/7 support.
• They have Android, iPhone, Windows and Mac apps, as well as Chrome and Safari extensions.

Third Presenter: Eric Malcom talks about Trello

• Of note, just today it was announced that Trello was purchased by Atlassian.
• Eric gave us a nice walkthrough of the Trello UI, he uses it for managing his work tasks through multiple boards and cards.
• Trello is a nice drag-and-drop UI to manage your tasks.
• Eric utilizes one board with a backlog swimlane, and swimlanes for every day of the week to manage his day-to-day work. When something from a project needs to get worked on, he’ll pull the specific card from the project onto his in-progress board, on the specific day he plans on doing the work.
• You can use the Power-ups to add things like a Calendar, Gantt charts, etc.
• You can find lots of examples at https://trello.com/inspiration.

Third Presenter: Amit Rathi – Pomodoro-ish

• Tried using phone/watch to manage time, as well as harvest.
• Now with Ambr, uses Liquid Planner.
• What is Pomodoro?
  • Pomodoro is a time-tracking technique where you set small amount of time to maintain focus on single tasks in a single block.
  • Typical block is 25 minutes.
  • If you get an interruption, you write it down and log it, and get back to task at hand.
  • At the end of your 25-minute interval, you take a 5-minute break.
  • After 4, 25-minute intervals, you take a 10-minute break.
  • Forces you to look at projects in small, manageable blocks.
• Use your first 25-minute interval to set up your future intervals and plan them out.
• Cons of using Pomodoro
  • You are supposed to stick to the timer even if you finish the task early.
  • It is more difficult to implement for teams, it’s best for individuals.
• Last bit of advice: don’t overthink it!