If you’re a serious side hustler, you likely rely on a trusted network of collaborators and contributors to allow your operation to grow sustainably. Yet, like any entrepreneur you know that time is money and that efficiency is the key to fulfilling the dream of making your lucrative hustle a profitable and thriving business. The trouble is that managing your own productivity is tricky enough, especially when you’re juggling your entrepreneurial activities alongside a full time job and parental duties. When you throw in the added element of collaborating with others this raises even more opportunities for inefficiency and poor time management. Fortunately, in the digital age, collaborating with your colleagues can be as easy and efficient as you need it to be. It’s merely a case of selecting the right tools for the trade and developing the skills you need to use them effectively…
Vertex
If you’re looking for an all in one solution to allow you and your colleagues to collaborate through the cloud look no further than Vertex. Designed as a solution to enable SMEs to empower their employees to work from home it can also be used for small scale operations consisting of a handful of people working remotely. It allows users to create a virtual desktop which is accessible from any device and includes essential software like the latest versions of MS Office as well as secure copies of emails, files, data and other apps. The beauty of this is that all of your data is secure and protected so the chances of data loss are virtually non existent and even if a colleague should lose or damage their remote device all their data can still be retrieved.
Slack
Don’t you just hate when a conversation starts in person, carried over onto phone calls, then texts, then WhatsApp then email? You have to trawl through various communications solutions to pick up a forgotten thread of a conversation. This is a colossal waste of time which can seriously derail your efficiency. Take the conversation over to Slack. On Slack you can create working groups and communicate within those groups allowing for quick and easy data retrieval.
Asana
Having trouble remembering who you’ve assigned to what task? Struggling to recall individual deadlines? Asana takes a lot of the hassle out of running several concurrent projects. Projects are assigned to collaborators and each is given a deadline, which can be changed. When the task is completed it can be set to “pending review“ allowing you an opportunity to check over the work before you mark it as complete.
Google Docs
While many businesses are still reliant on MS Word, for our money, Google Docs is the better word processing solution, especially for those who work collaboratively. It’s not only completely free, it allows contributors to edit and annotate one another’s work and editorial comments are color coded so it’s easy to see who’s made them. No more ping ponging a document back and forth via email or juggling multiple versions of a document and wondering which is the most up to date.
