When you think of team building, it probably summons up one of two images:
Awkwardly passing balloons between your legs at school
Awkwardly falling backwards into to the arms of an awkward colleague
Good news: it doesn’t have to be that way.
At Process Street, we are all about team-building – but definitely not in that cringey, uncomfortable way corporate people do it. Team-building should be fun and believe me – we know how to have fun. So check out some of the cool things we do around the Zoom window:
You’ve got a ton of work to do right now. Your to-do list is an unstructured mess of action items, and you’ve only got a faint idea how to prioritize tasks.
Luckily, there are a few (almost automatic) ways to quickly get your to-do list prioritized without much effort. In fact, you can apply one of these methods within 5 minutes and know exactly what to do next. There have been a number of methods over the years, and all have their own quirks and considerations. Which is right for you?
In previous chapters of my task management guide, I’ve taken you all the way through from writing, organizing, and planning your to-do list. Check those out if you haven’t already.
Now, I’m going to take you through a few of the ways I prioritize my tasks as a content writer for Process Street.
While it’s getting more popular lately, Keep is one Google’s of less popular products. It’s been around since 2013, and is a 100% free way to manage your tasks and store information.
Because of this, you can now use Keep and Gmail together to create a lightweight task management system that lives inside your inbox. If you’re the sort of person who likes to start each day on to-do list / inbox zero and you’re striving to be more productive, you’ll love this.
If you look at the Wikipedia definition of a workflow, you’re probably going to get confused as I did:
“A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of business activity enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person or group, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.”
Let’s put this simply…
Workflows are the way people get work done, and can be illustrated as series of steps that need to be completed sequentially in a diagram or checklist.
Think of it literally as work flowing from one stage to the next, whether that’s through a colleague, tool, or another process. You can execute a full workflow alone (like writing, editing and publishing a blog post), or it can involve multiple people (like invoicing a client).
In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at:
How do you name a new server, export config data, or fix that one really annoying bug that keeps popping up every 2nd Thursday?
For prepared IT professionals, that information is stored in a runbook. A runbook is a set of standardized documents, references and procedures that explain common recurring IT tasks. Instead of figuring out the same problem time and time again, you can refer to your runbook for an optimal way to get the work done. What’s more, you can also delegate tasks and onboard employees more effectively if you have documentation to train them with.
Whenever you do a task, think of this quote:
“Will you remember how to do these things 6 months from now? I find myself having to re-invent a process from scratch if I haven’t done it in a few months (or sometimes just a few days!). Not only do I reinvent the process, I repeat all my old mistakes and learn from them again. What a waste of time.” — Tom Limoncelli, The Operations Report Card
In short, the less time wasted figuring out how to do a task, the better it’ll be for your business efficiency, productivity, and sanity.
Finding the best checklist app isn’t easy. I’ve written about my pains with productivity before, and I’m not the only one who has trouble sorting themselves out — you probably don’t know which productivity solution is best for you, either.
Part of the problem is that there are so many different apps for slightly different purposes, it’s hard to know which to choose…
Which is why, for this post, I’ve gone in search of the best checklist app ever created, and found some pretty under-the-radar stuff as well as apps most people already know!
Read through these sections to get completely clued-up:
Without documentation, software is just a black box. And black boxes aren’t anywhere near as useful as they could be because their inner workings are hidden from those who need them in the open.
Software documentation turns your software into a glass box by explaining to users and developers how it operates or is used.
You’ve probably seen documentation before, but if you need a refresher, here’s an example from Slack‘s API:
As you can see, Slack explains everything about its API in excruciating detail. Any related pages are linked, there’s a sidebar with easy-to-access topics, and screenshots of what the user can expect to see.
To explain software documentation in more detail, we will cover the following topics in this Process Street post:
A proposal has a lot of different purposes, but there’s only one good way to write one: the way that pulls together all of the information in a concise and persuasive way and helps you get what you want … whether that’s a whole new software system, or just a tweak to your marketing strategy.
This Process Street article isn’t about a business proposal — also known as a quote — but instead about the document required when formally pitching an idea for action and execution by managers or department heads.
To explain how to write a proposal document and get what you want, we’ll go through the following:
This is a guest post from Rhiza Oyos, the inbound marketing manager at Spiralytics.
Customers relationships are the lifeblood of every SaaS business. However, regardless of their years of operation, there are moments when these relationships can — for better or worse — dramatically change
A customer’s experience is everything. It helps SaaS companies attract customers, retain them, and generate referrals
So, businesses who understand the importance of customer experience end up winning the race and beating the competition. In particular, winning companies are those that understand the human factors and emotions at play in experience, design, and production.
Harley Manning in a 2012 article for Fast Company writes:
“In other words, if you want that next sale, if you want good word of mouth, and if you want to keep your customers, it’s unlikely that anything else you do matters more than delivering a superior experience”
Experience is all about moments.
In designing an exemplary customer experience, businesses should know about the four moments of truth that can help them get ahead.
We’ve all been baited into those lists of recycled tips where the author lists 10,000 excruciating content creation tips, all of which you’ve heard over and over again.
I’m pretty sick of it, so thought I’d compile something from my personal experience from a year of writing.
This is stuff I’ve had to learn pretty quick since I ‘fell into’ control of the Process Street blog. I think it’s time to give the marketing community something new that they can use and ditch the typical list post content we’ve all seen trotted out over and over.
Whichever part of the content creation process you’re at, there’s a nugget of wisdom for you here.