When I started at Process Street, I was just a writer. I had the organizational skills of a child, and I was used to delivering a single piece of work at a time. As I was given more responsibilities, I started forgetting my regular tasks and working on whatever seemed important at that moment.

Since every task management system I’ve tried has quickly become crowded and unmanageable, I decided to create a Process Street checklist specifically for my recurring weekly tasks.

Now, I get a simple list of tasks in my Process Street inbox every week. As I work through them, I can track my weekly progress and use the checklist as a way to report my work to my manager. You can do the same, and it only takes about 10 minutes.

Here’s my checklist:

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I’ve written before about how we collect feedback on our marketing material and how that helps us write useful posts for our subscribers, but the other reason we gather user feedback focuses on expanding and improving the Process Street app.

With user feedback data, we can:

• Choose which features to build based on the frequency they’re requested
• Get data on bug reports which helps our engineering team build fixes
• See the most common industries and use cases for our product, which guides our marketing in the right direction

Whether you’re in software or not, you still need to be gathering and processing feedback from everybody possible: leads, prospects, free users, and paying customers.

In this post, I’m going to outline the three methods you can use to gather feedback for your company. These are three methods we’ve used ourselves in the past as our business has evolved, so the complexity and usefulness of each method is higher than the last. Which method is right for you?

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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:

• Structured checklist apps vs todo list checklist apps
• Which checklist app should you choose?
• Take control with Process Street’s checklists!

Let’s get started.

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We send out feedback requests to new blog subscribers so we know what kind of content to write that will be the most useful. Sometimes, the answers surprise us.

In particular, I often get awesome responses that give me insight into how our customers plan and create their processes:

One reader plans out their processes in a spreadsheet because columns make it easy to build the steps out. Another said they analyze a Trello board of tasks and lists to make sense of how a successful project was executed, then writes a process to recreate those steps. And, of course, we have our suggested ways that we have found our customers have the most success with.

In this post, I’m going to go through four methods you can use to document processes accurately, quickly, and naturally.

1. The minimum viable process
2. Turning an archived Trello board into a process
3. Mapping a process in a spreadsheet
4. Turning a screencast into a process

Let’s look at each method in detail.

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Your boss has just asked you to write an email telling your customers their free trial has ended and encouraging them to upgrade to premium. But writing isn’t your thing and you could use some copywriting examples.

I mean, where do you start? What do these emails look like? If you had a swipe file, you’d have a reference point straight away.

Swipe files are collections of material kept by creatives for easy reference, consisting of great material you can learn from. If you’re just starting out, you’ll probably want to start making one and be prepared for your next assignment.

It’s best to amass your swipe file as you go, quickly adding quality copywriting examples when you see them and tagging for easy reference. Keep reading to find out how to do this using Evernote. But first, let’s look at where you can find awesome material to get started.

Swiped.co

While relatively new, Swiped is actively archiving a large selection of new and classic ads, emails, pop-ups, sales letters, direct mail examples and more.

If you’ve already got some material for your swipe file, go ahead and upload it to Swiped! It survives on user uploads and is an amazing labor of love by Mike Schauer.

It was created because archives of ads are sparse, and if you’re a copywriter or advertisers without a hefty swipe file you’ll have to rely on the rare chance that someone has uploaded the advert you want to reference somewhere on the web.

As it turns out, most people don’t really like ads that much. More often than not, you won’t find what you’re looking for.

Swiped’s collection is small, but growing quickly and has an active community of marketers uploading their finds and even making annotations to highlight the effective elements.

Processes are a lot more interesting than you’d first think. That isn’t some kind of joke — they’re interesting, I swear. But what is a process?

Although they’re defined as “a collection of interrelated work tasks initiated in response to an event that achieves a specific result”, there’s a bit of a backstory that helps us cut through the corporate tranquilizers and understand what a process is, and why processes matter.

First, a few examples of processes:

• Cleaning the store
• Finding an email address
• Deploying software
• Customer profiling
• Onboarding a new employee
• Planning a wedding

But why are those processes? Why aren’t they just jobs to be done? The point is that when you formalize a process, you think about the workflow with productivity in mind and it makes it easier to execute and optimize.

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While your blog is the external face and voice of your company, your support team is the internal one, which is why you need an effective customer support process in place. According to Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, SaaS companies — especially startups — should be using their company’s product, even if the teams don’t strictly ‘need’ to.

In Jason’s article, he recounts how PayPal president David Marcus ranted ‘use our app or quit‘ to his employees. While it could be argued that David Marcus is being an angry egotist and going a little too far for an app that everyone may not have a use for, he says that the reason he wants everyone using it regularly is so that PayPal can ‘get better, and better’.

That brings up an interesting issue — by putting every single employee on support in some capacity, you’re tackling several problems at once. You’re lightening the load of the dedicated support teams in busier times, teaching employees about the product they may well be advertising or marketing and gathering vital data from users on how the product could be improved.

Over the several past weeks, I’ve looked at the definition of customer success, why it’s important and how to reduce churn. Now we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of customer support for SaaS companies, including strategies, workflows, and tips for getting set up.

• Everyone should have a customer support process
• Develop a customer support process document that works for your team
• Create a customer support process workflow (and make sure it gets followed)
• Segment your support tickets to keep engaged with the customer
• Create a recurring workflow to run for each ticket
• How to start this customer support process for every employee
• Get the Ebook: The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies

Let’s get started by looking more closely at the support model briefly described earlier.

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:

• Remote-friendly team-building ideas
• Activities for face-to-face teams
• Team-building trips

Let’s build some teams!
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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.

• Think about the process
• Slot your tasks into 4 boxes – Urgent vs Important
• When you have two frogs to eat, eat the ugliest one first
• Use the ABCDE method for precise prioritization
• The simplest method: Pick your 1-3 most important tasks
• Prioritize task prioritization today!

Let’s get prioritizing!
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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.

What’s more, it links seamlessly with Gmail!

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.

This Process Street post will be covering:

• How to use Google Keep
• Using Google Keep with Gmail
• Google Keep tips and tricks
• Using Gmail as a to-do list

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