You have probably used Linux today — especially if you don’t have an iPhone. And if you browsed the web today, there’s a big chance that the website you visited was served by Linux, too.

Linux is an operating system, but unlike software like Microsoft Windows and macOS, Linux was developed by a self-organized community of volunteers.

Over time, with the effort of over 10,000 developers and evolving processes to manage the scale of work, the Linux kernel has grown to over 20,000,000 lines of code in total. It forms the stable foundation for…

• Every Android phone and tablet on the planet
• 66% of the world’s servers
• 100% of the top 500 supercomputers

This technology didn’t come from an orchestrated team with a thick policy book and layers of management. It came from a few carefully-chosen and culturally-embedded policies, and a shared mission.

In this post, I look at how a technology so essential, complex and important could have been produced so effectively without traditional management structure. But first…

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Maybe you’re the sort of person who sits down at their desk for 8 hours solid and hammers out as much as possible.

Maybe you use the Pomodoro method or your own task management techniques.

I don’t know what sort of person I am yet.

I used to give it no thought — wake up, lob a coffee down my throat, sit down and start typing.

Lately, my tasks are harder to define and I find myself having trouble with time management and prioritizing.

Right now I’m using Pomello, a Pomodoro timer that lives in Trello and times my work on each card. Click here to get it.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be sick of it and defiantly hammering on the keyboard until it’s time to sleep…

In my seemingly neverending quest to get shit done, I’ve seen a ton of strange methods and lists. And, let me tell you, working at Process Street — a task management system for businesses — I’m making myself practice what I preach.

Here are some of the task management techniques I’ve come across.
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The following is a guest post from Ryan Gould, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing. An expert search, social and content marketer, Ryan leads Elevation Marketing’s digital strategy department, helping brands achieve their business goals, such as improving sales and market share, by developing integrated marketing strategies distinguished by research, storytelling, engagement and conversion.

Without software, you’d be hand-writing purchase orders, using a Rolodex for a CRM, and doing your newsletters via smoke signal.

Alright, maybe that last one is a little far-fetched, but there’s no denying that in the business world, technology is absolutely necessary and enables amazing things.

…But not everyone on your team gets enthusiastic about the prospect of learning a new tool. Even if that tool will help them improve productivity, do a better job, and escape the white-collar equivalent of hard manual labor.

Your goal when rolling out software is always the same: to help your business improve operations, boost efficiency, and enable sales. These days that means staying up to date on technological trends as well.

Deciding which tool is right for you will always hinge on fundamentals, like whether it can automate your vendor payments, purchase orders, employee onboarding, lead management, etc. However, there are other considerations, such as whether your solution integrates with cloud software and is responsive on mobile devices.

But, even after you’ve selected the solution perfect for your operation and your employees – after all the sales demos, comparison docs, and review reading – you’ll find it’s that the human element that trips you up.

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A support rep’s life becomes much easier when their help desk seamlessly fits into their workflow. Tools are simple to use. Tasks get accomplished faster. A personalized help desk lets your rep do things their way, so they can solve human problems instead of figuring out software.

The more you customize your help desk, the more useful it is to your team. While all help desks have customization options, not all help desks can be personalized to the same extent.

To spare you the trouble of perusing lengthy FAQs and comparing free trials, we took a deep dive into the features of four popular software— Freshdesk, Help Scout, Zendesk, and Groove—to decide the best help desk of them all. Here’s what we found.

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We’re a big fan of cloud services on this blog, and Vinay has written on Process Street about Dropbox vs Google Drive in the past as well as a great guide on how to migrate to the cloud.

If you’re wondering how to host a website on Google Drive for free, well, I just did (and it took me 2 minutes!) so I’ll tell you all about it.

Even though the new Google Drive has made it harder to host websites, there’s still a pretty easy workaround I came across. It comes in the form of a Google Script written by an expert in the field, Amit Agarwal. First I’ll show you this way — the easy way — then I’ll explain how you can do it without the script.

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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

How to Automate Your Business and Personal Life

There’s always something which can make your life easier. Whether you’re stuck watching infomercials at 2 am through lack of sleep or discovering the wonders of the gimmick section of your local supermarket, the idea of a faster and easier path saturates every part of our daily lives. Even the coffee sitting on my desk could be seen as part of this hunger for convenience; I didn’t grind the beans myself, after all.

‘Typing “how to get rich quick” then hitting the search button on your PC will give you different (and even ridiculous) ways of making a dishonest living’ – Charlene Sampilo

Now, here at Process Street, we know just as well as anyone that, more often than not, any offer of help we are given with a too-good-to-be-true scheme turns out to be flawed. The ads that you see on clickbait sites, running along the lines of “I made $570 in 6 hours, and so can you!”, or some such nonsense, prey on this desire to save some of the time and effort we put into earning our daily keep.

Despite all of this, finding easier methods and time-saving skips isn’t a bad thing. The desire for efficiency without extra effort can be incredibly useful in having a better day-to-day life, whether it takes the form of dodging traffic by taking the backstreets on the way to work or saving hundreds of dollars by going to a single price comparison website.

Well, now you can take full advantage of the power of programming even if you have no experience or technical skill with computers. This little application will allow you to automate your emails, manage your social media accounts and much, much more, with the bare minimum of setup time.

We present you with Zapier.

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Earlier this year we compared planner sisters Trello and Asana. But if you’re the owner of an Office 365 subscription, Microsoft has rolled out its own project management tool with kanban cards into your account for free.

It’s called Microsoft Planner and claims to “take the chaos out of teamwork.” Let’s see.

Sign in to Office 365 with your work or school email, and go to the app launcher by clicking on the Rubik’s cube menu in the top left corner. There you’ll see this friendly Planner logo:

Here’s our take on Microsoft Planner, including some tips and tricks for becoming a super user, and our take on how it differs from the other tools out there:

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At Process Street, we’re always asked about the best ways to construct, track, and analyze processes.

There are loads of techniques in the school of business process management to help you with these three concerns but in this article, we’re going to give you an introduction to process mining; a data driven way to create, understand, and optimize your processes.

We’ll cover:

• What is process mining?
• 9 process mining tools to automate your analysis
• How to act on your mined results to optimize your processes

We cover solutions for enterprises all the way down to basic approaches for startups. Jump in!

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Are you ever at a loss when it comes to planning your tasks? A good chunk of the time, I feel exactly like that.

That’s ok. Task management exists because planning and executing projects is hard.

Last night, I sat down with my wife and we wrote down everything we’ll need to do when we move house. It was two A4 sheets of paper before we even started breaking it down into subtasks. Two A4 sheets of paper.

The amount of items a human can hold in working memory is around 7, so when it comes to projects, of course you’re lost if you’re not planning them properly.

Don’t worry. There’s a simple way to do it, and once you’ve got that down, you’ve learnt it forever. And the start of it, just like I sat down to do last night, is writing everything down.

Here’s how to brain dump your tasks and make sense of them.

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Staying safe and secure online has always been important but now more and more people are waking up to the fact that we need to take extra steps to protect our various accounts.

Banking online. Shopping online. Communicating online. Running a business online.

These have all rapidly become standard in today’s world. Given how embedded the internet is in our lives we need to take the necessary steps to stop people taking advantage of our online presence.

I recently put out a post explaining how to enable two factor authentication (2FA) across your accounts, including this handy checklist for enabling 2FA with Google and Slack.

Today, we’re going to look at password managers. 1Password vs LastPass vs all the rest!

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why you should use a password manager
• The Challenge: Can third party password managers be better than your inbuilt systems?
• What do the 6 leading password managers offer and which one is right for you?

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