Remote teams can be a nightmare to manage.

The distance (and potential time zones) between each team member mean that everyone has to be trusted to work on their own without constant supervision. To successfully do that, they need to have as few roadblocks as possible.

To remotely manage a team effectively you need to overcome the communication and availability issues that regular offices don’t have.

Automation is a must, especially with marketing, but if your core practices are running aground no amount of automation will help you.

During my last 3 years with Process Street I’ve learned a lot about both working in and organizing our remote marketing team. We’re constantly striving to be more productive and keep a consistent output of high-quality work.

In doing so, I’ve come to realize the key elements which decide whether your remote team is going to run like clockwork or become an untrackable mess of blame-passing.

Let’s get straight into it.

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“Airtable vs Trello. Which is better?“

Our team had been using Trello for years and had only recently undergone a transition to Airtable. We were having a tough time adjusting (old habits die hard), and my Process Street colleague Ben Brandall was trying to get to the bottom of why.

We love improving our productivity using everything from business process automation to focus music, and this case was no different.

Trello is a powerhouse of task management but Airtable is a masterful mix of database, spreadsheet, task and project management app. How are you supposed to choose?

That’s why I’m writing this post. After having used both apps personally and professionally for more than three years, I’ve been able to get to grips with who these apps are designed for and what makes them useful.

Most of all, you can learn from this to see which app would suit you instead of spending years testing them out yourself.

Let’s get started.

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Whether you’re writing a blog post or building the world’s largest commercial aircraft, you need to be able to rely on your systems. To do that, your platform has to have a set of basic workflow system features.

That is unless you want to follow Airbus A380’s example and waste massive amounts of time and money because of a few simple oversights.

“Building the Airbus A380… required production facilities from across the globe to build individual parts of the airplane… During installation, they discovered the parts designed by different teams didn’t fit together.

This cost the company $6 billion to put right and set the project back two years.” – Greg Bailey, 4 Famous Project Management Failures and What to Learn From Them

Here at Process Street we’re no strangers to what makes workflow and bpm software effective. That’s why we’ve collected a list of the 14 essential workflow system features that every team (and individual) needs to be useful.

Let’s get started.

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It’s easy to fall prey to the pursuit of productivity.

All too often we’re too preoccupied with finding the “perfect” productivity software to see that we’re wasting time doing it.

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done” – Bruce Lee, 30 Productivity Quotes I Wish I Knew 10 Years Ago

You don’t need to test 101 apps. All you need is a solid base to go from and tweak your performance.

That’s what this post will give you.

From time-keeping software to writing apps and process management, read on to see how to see which business apps everyone should use to stay productive without pulling their hair out.

Let’s get started.

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Web design is more than how something looks. It dictates everything from your audience’s initial impressions to how easily they can navigate your site, and can be easily messed up entirely if you don’t have the right processes to prevent mistakes and remember key tasks.

That’s why we’ve collected this pack of web design process templates.

“… a well-designed user interface could raise your website’s conversion rate by up to a 200%, and a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400%.” – Goran Paunovic, covering this Forrester report in The Bottom Line: Why Good UX Design Means Better Business

Over the course of these 13 templates we’ve provided documented processes to make the most common web design processes, tasks, and actions run smoothly every time. These include:

• Animation Design Process
• Social Media Image Design
• Usability Test Plan
• Usability Testing Template
• Blog Image Design Process
• Web Design Process
• Website Design Client Onboarding Template
• UX Design Process
• Brand Identity Design
• Header Design
• Graphic Design Process
• Logo Design Process
• Website Launch Checklist

Better still, all of these are free, ready to use, and can be edited to suit your needs should you want to customize your processes. Let’s get right to it!

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Everybody has good and bad days – the trick to being successful is making sure that you’re consistently motivated enough to keep the bad days to a minimum.

Without motivation it’s not only difficult to do as much work as usual, but even starting a new task becomes a herculean effort. If you can get started and make some progress then you might be able to build momentum up off of that, but otherwise you’ll be left floundering for the rest of the day.

I’ve struggled with this exact problem over the last three years of working remotely – it’s especially hard to stay motivated when you’re working from home without a physical team to back you up and keep you focused.

After trying everything from browser extensions to complex business systems, I realized that I was over-complicating things. The best to do list template in the world won’t help you if you don’t have the basic practices behind motivation down.

So, to save you from going through the same troubles I’ve collected nine tips which I’ve found most useful in staying consistently motivated all day every day.

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When Michael E. Gerber gives you advice for starting a business you listen to it.

With a career spanning over 40 years and working with hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide, Gerber’s expertise is invaluable to anyone looking to start their own venture. Lucky for us, he’s written several books on the topic, the most famous of which I’ll be summarizing in this post.

This E Myth summary will take the core business tips from Gerber’s work and condense them into a single post. It’s all of the value, proven with examples from companies like Facebook and Zenefits, and doesn’t need you to spend 40 years to learn it.

In particular, I’ll be covering:

• Balancing your business personalities
• Creating a business, not a job
• Working on your business, not in it
• Why your business needs systems
• The idea of your business being your product
• Motivating employees with the idea behind their work
• Make topics human to make them interesting

Let’s get started.

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Office work isn’t just monotonous – it’s outright deadly if you don’t take steps to combat the fatigue that sitting brings. When sitting for half the day approximately doubles the risk of diabetes and heart problems, you need to do something about the time you spend working.

That’s where desk yoga comes in.

“Approximately 3.2 million deaths each year are attributable to insufficient physical activity” – World Health Organization, Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health

The dangers of sitting are all too obvious, with studies showing links to everything from an 11% rise in the chance of dying per extra seated hour to increased risk of various types of cancer. To combat this, you need to be regularly stretching and moving in ways that most don’t bother with.

So, after years of personal experience with yoga classes, books, self-practice, and scouring the contents of some of the most popular free yoga resources on the internet, I’ve compiled a list of desk yoga exercises to help you stay alive and stretchy at your desk.

• Seated crescent moon
• Hand exercises
• Neck rolls
• Shoulder circles
• Forward fold
• Sun salutation (the full body workout)

Enough chat – let’s get started!

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“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one” – Haley Marie Craig, 7 Phrases You’ve Been Misquoting

Sometimes, you don’t need to be a specialist – just someone who’s flexible enough to weave between disciplines and bring the strengths of all.

A full stack marketer.

These are marketers who have knowledge and experience of all aspects of marketing, from social media and video to user experience and content. It takes a lot of dedication and consistent learning to become one, and it’s often hard to find someone who has that wide of a spread of knowledge.

So, if you’ve ever wanted to brush up your marketing skills, know what the pros and cons of a full stack marketer are, or wondered why you’d bother to hire a non-specialist in the first place, keep reading this post. I’ll cover all of that, plus give a list of helpful resources which can get you started on the track to gaining that knowledge for yourself.

Let’s get started!

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Project management is the key to sticking to your budget and deadline, whilst keeping the most important tasks at the forefront of your company. Without it, you leave the future of your business at the mercy of your teams and employees (which, in case you weren’t aware, is not a good business model).

For such an important process, the project management steps are a little muddy, with sources citing differing numbers of steps, timelines, etc. Then again, it’s a massive topic with a huge margin for error; how the hell do you convey these steps when the project could be anything from “get winter clothes in stock” to “grow to $220,000 monthly recurring revenue”?

Well, we here at Process Street hate making things complicated, so we’ve simplified the project management steps of any and every undertaking to five easy stages.
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