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Gary Edwards

Task management app Asana raises $50M at a $600M valuation led by YC's Sam Altman | Tec... - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...aluation-led-by-ycs-sam-altman

Asana Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • As more businesses move their work processes online — creating documents and other data in apps like Quip or Google Docs or Microsoft through; communicating with each other (think Slack or Yammer) — productivity apps are having a moment right now. Just last week, BetterWorks — another platform that helps workers set and manage tasks and goals — announced a Series B of $20 million.
  • Indeed, in addition to BetterWorks and Asana itself, there are others like Basecamp, Wrike and Trello all offering ways to boost productivity and help organize so-called knowledge workers (essentially, those tied to keyboards or screens to get their jobs done). That makes for a competitive landscape but also a sign of how there is a ripe opportunity to do more.
  • For its part, Asana has been testing a beta of a product called Track Anything, which sounds like a dashboard-style product that will let people automatically signal to colleagues jobs for completing tasks without them having to do the legwork. In a working world where we are forever multitasking and may be more intent on getting things done rather than ticking and updating progress reports to let people know that we have, adding in automation seems to be an essential development. This is a challenge that others are tackling, too. BetterWorks is building integrations with whatever software use most, which in turn communicates our progress on a task in the background.
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 16
     
    "Asana, an enterprise app that lets people set and track projects and other goals, has hit a goal of its own: today, the company is announcing that it has raised $50 million. The Series C round - led by Y-Combinator's Sam Altman - values the company at $600 million, the company tells me. As a bit of context, Asana last raised $28 million in 2012; that Series B was at a $280 million valuation, according to our sources. Co-founded in 2009 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early FB employee Justin Rosenstein out of the belief, in their own words, that "every team in the world is capable of accomplishing bigger goals, and that software could help empower them to drive work forward with more ease, clarity, and accountability," the company will be using the funds to continue building out Asana's functionality (more on that below) and also expand its customer base internationally (it's largely a US-based list of clients today)."
Gary Edwards

3 steps to digitizing your work for maximum productivity | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-for-maximum-productivity.html

Office-365 productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Why go digital?One advantage for businesses to ditch paper– and perhaps the single most important factor – is convenience. Digital data is both highly searchable, and is also easily transferrable. What’s more, the mature state of cloud services today means that you can expect the information you store online to be available across whatever devices you may own -- be it a smartphone, tablet, PC laptop, Mac computer – or even a Web browser at a cybercafé or hotel lobby when on a vacation.Digital documents are also clearly suited to data backup. Despite the calibration required to get things set up in a way that works for you, it’s infinitely easier to make a copy of digital data versus photocopying stacks of printed invoices or bills. And a growing list of cloud storage services (Dropbox and SugarSync, to name two) have taken document storage a step further by saving multiple versions of a doc so you can revert to earlier versions of a document if necessary.
  • Finally, digitization opens the door to greater levels of collaboration at work by making it easy to collaborate with coworkers on only the relevant data. On this front, an entire generation of online tools are available for a diverse range of tasks such as time tracking (Toggl), project management (Asana) and collaboration (Yammer) – of which all are captured digitally without printing out a single piece of paper.So how should you go about joining the digital document revolution? More like this 12 Evernote hacks and apps for power users 8 time-saving productivity hacks 20 uses for Evernote that you probably haven’t thought of yet on IDG Answers How to disable the Windows button on a Microsoft Surface tablet?
  • 1. Choose a digital notebook systemOne of the starting points for digitizing your business docs is to decide on a platform for filing away notes, ideas and documents. Not only does it serve a critical role as a virtually unlimited digital repository for filing important details, charts, audio clips or screen grabs, a good digital system will make it easy to organize and find the information when you need it.
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  • Microsoft OneNoteThe popular Microsoft OneNote allows you to enter rich text, images, media files or even drawings into fully searchable notebooks. OneNote works on a variety of platforms, including Windows PCs, Mac computers, Android and iOS devices, and even from a Web browser.The strength of OneNote is its support for freeform data, with complete freedom to align (or misalign) text and all supported objects. The latest version also adds Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for images, making it easy to search for specific words within new images, and adds support for Dropbox on top of Microsoft’s own OneDrive cloud storage service.
  • EvernoteEvernote is another popular, free, online note-taking service. It offers effectively unlimited storage, albeit with a monthly upload cap (which is much larger for users willing to shell for one of the two fairly inexpensive tiers). The advantage of Evernote is its support for an incredibly diverse list of platforms, which includes native support on the BlackBerry 10 smartphone, third-party clients for Linux, and even scanners with the capability to scan straight into Evernote.Notebooks can be shared among multiple users – including those without a paid account – while individual notes can be shared publicly with a unique URL. Evernote also saves multiple versions of a document, which ensures that any accidental edits can be undone. Finally, paid users get to work offline, and can utilize the service to conduct text searches through Office docs and PDFs, as well as stored in Evernote.
  • Other optionsFor those of us who keep a to-do list, Trello and Todoist are digital equivalents that can facilitate collaboration with colleagues. Google Keep captures notes, lists, photo and audio via supported Web browsers and mobile devices. Finally, there is the text-only SimpleNote, or even the Notes feature in Microsoft’s Office 365 or an on-premises Exchange Server deployment.
  • 3. Effortlessly digitize legacy dataHaving the tools and the capability to natively capture your notes, docs and the like in digital form is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop receiving paper bills, invoices, statements, receipts, business cards, product brochures and other printed material.One of the best ways to minimize ink-on-paper collateral is to aggressively digitize all documents whenever possible. You have a variety of options. The easiest is to use a smartphone app such as Scanner Pro to quickly capture everything from business cards to paper printouts. Quality may vary, however, depending on such environmental factors as lighting and the quality of your smartphone’s camera.
  • A more robust alternative is to make use of an automatic sheet-fed scanner – such as the NeatConnect Wi-Fi scanner – to scan printed sheets straight to OneNote or Evernote. Portable scanners also exist, such as the battery-powered Doxie Go Wi-Fi and Doxie Flip. The former lets you scan wirelessly to an iPad or iPhone, while the latter is best described as a portable flatbed scanner that can be inverted to scan items that are fixed in place, or which are too thick to pass through a sheet-fed scanner.
  • Finally, the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 is a deskbound scanner that simplifies digitizing magazines and bound books. Items are placed face-up on its scanning mat. The scanning takes about three seconds to dump into a USB-connected computer. Any curvature in the pages is automatically smoothed out via software, resulting in a high quality capture.Depending on your needs, the ScanSnap SV600 could allow you to continue scribbling down your ideas and notes in a physical notebook, yet be able to quickly scan the physical pages into their digital notebook of choice at the end of each day.
  • Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digitizing your work. There are hundreds of tools that exist to facilitate the full range of business activities and processes without ever having to involve a single printed sheet.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15
     
    "From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, the driving factors are collaboration and productivity, as opposed to any ecological or "green" concerns. With this in mind, we take a look at the advantages of going digital, and outline how workers can embrace this new digital-first paradigm to collaborate more, do things faster and work more efficiently than ever."
Gary Edwards

Ditch Your Office - & Watch Employee Productivity Soar - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...tch-employee-productivity-soar

Cloud-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Email Email generates a “push” interruption in your daily work. When people want something from you, they sends you email, which interrupt your flow of thought. In our company, we turned to alternatives to reduce email — options such as Basecamp, Asana and Slack. Now, when someone is contributing to and working on a project, instead of giving a “push” with email — which distracts the people from their work —they make a “pull” and retrieve information directly from the place where everyone is working together on the same project. Additionally, it encourages more collaboration. The problem with email is that all the information remains enclosed between the sender and receiver. The communication remains behind closed doors. When a new team member wants to join in on a project, they have to bother another person to catch up on the state of the job and learn the way the project is advancing, triggering another flow of email to catch the person up to speed. Now, that new team member can simply log onto the platform, Basecamp, for instance, search for the corresponding project, and find everything they need to begin working.
  • Meetings As shown in this infograph, $37 billion dollars are lost each year in the United States alone because of unnecessary meetings. Employees spend more than 60 hours per month in unproductive meetings (with half of those being considered by them to be a total waste of time). Who creates meetings? Yes, people who live from one meeting to the next —managers! Their agenda is full of meetings. This is due to the fact that they are not the ones doing the true work — the work that serves a purpose, which has value and adds up, the productive work. The ones who do the productive work are the programmers, designers, etc. They need to have a work schedule with no meetings for them to reach their maximum level of productivity.
  • Another reference point is this article by The Economist, where a study showed that a factory was able to save the equivalent of eliminating 200 jobs just by limiting meetings to a maximum of 30 minutes and 7 people per meeting.
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  • Embrace the Digital Workplace When you work without email, meetings (both by phone or physical) or bosses, you will go from having synchronous to asynchronous communication. What this means is that if someone needs something from you they will have to communicate strictly by text using the project management tool and when you finish your three to four hours of continuous work you will be able to answer the messages based on your time, without it being an interruption.
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 16
     
    "Six years ago, we surveyed our employees with the goal of determining the optimal place for each of them to work in terms of maximum efficiency and productivity. What we quickly determined was that no one wanted to work in the office. Workers Can't Concentrate in the Office When asked to identify the best place to get work done - specifically work that requires maximum concentration and creativity, such as designing a web page, programming new functionality for software, developing a financial report or writing a sales proposal - not a single member of our 34-member team chose the office. Rather, they selected: An extra room at their home Their favorite coffee shop A train or airplane Our finding wasn't an anomaly. In a much larger study based on 2,600 interviews, FlexJobs concluded that 76 percent of workers prefer to avoid the office when they have important work to do."
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