5 Tools and Apps for Working Remotely

When working in a team, it’s essential to be able to communicate, share work and all be able to access key information even when away from your designated computer. We live in a world where it is becoming far easier to access everything from work either on your personal mobile device or your home computer. Simply put, it’s becoming easier and easier to work from wherever you want.

We wanted to compile you a list of the 5 best tools and apps for working remotely to make it easier for either your whole company, your small start-up or even your family to communicate, share files and more all through some simple apps and tools.

Slack

Slack is without a doubt, one of the revelations of 2014. Not only did it finally challenge the decade-old ’email’ by offering people a modern way to chat but incorporate many files, plugins and more but it was well adopted across many workplaces and has even been taken into a less formal setting of friendship groups. However, for this post, we are centering around formal situations.

Slack is simply put, a smart group messaging application that works in the cloud, and therefore can be accessed from tablets, computers and smartphones. What sets Slack apart are two key features, first is the ability to group conversations based on ‘#titles’. This allows you to set a conversation topic for the group such as “#Upcoming Meeting” or “#Work Drinks” and then that’s the general gist what the conversation should be about. This isn’t too different from the likes of WhatsApp and other messaging apps that allow you to group message. However, with Slack it highlights all the group chats with unread information and then the other chats in a separated “read” section, similar to email.

Slack’s second great feature that takes it beyond any other group messaging application is the number of plugins and supported services it offers. For example within a chat you can send in-line Tweets, or an Evernote note and so many more. It’s worth checking out all the services included here.

Evernote

Evernote is a constant on this website as it offers up such a great array of features on so many different devices that it feels like whatever we are trying to talk about, Evernote can accomplish it in some way. Evernote, for those of you who don’t know, is a note-taking application at its core. However, Evernote has additional features that make it so much more. You can share notes to others who can view them in a browser without an account, you can chat about notes via Work Chat, you can scan in PDFs and have them then scanned for individual words when you use the search feature, you can incorporate it with IFTTT to make it even more powerful and so many more things.

For those looking to use Evernote remotely, it could be used as a family-planning application or the family shopping list app so everyone can see what needs to be bought. Or it could be used to share notes and PDFs between work colleagues to then be discussed about. What makes all these tasks ever more easy is that they are all accessible from whatever platform you choose: Mac, Windows, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android Phone, Android Tablet and even more. It’s your one-stop shop for keeping notes, checklists, PDFs and so much more safe within your company and even for your own personal use.

ToDoist

ToDoist is without a doubt one of the biggest and best to-do services on the market right now and for very good reasons. I will get the big money-winner out of the way right away: it is available on 15 different platforms. This means that no matter what device you are using, ToDoist will likely be able to synchronise all your tasks across all your devices. For most people this is key to a good ToDo app, being able to tick off a task whether it’s on their phone, watch, computer or tablet.

However, what makes ToDoist a great application to use remotely for businesses? ToDoist not only offers great platform support but it offers great collaboration tools also. At it’s simplest form you can share a task with somebody so then they can see that task on their ToDoist app. In addition, you can assign tasks to certain people so then only they can tick the task of. You can give different tasks different levels of priority, give them due dates and reminders and assign them to different projects, similar to Slack. Speaking of Slack, it works well with that too, allowing to share ToDoist projects and tasks into a Slack chat for others to see. Additionally, you can set up some clever IFTTT recipes between ToDoist and Evernote and ToDoist and many other platforms.

Transparent Business

Sometimes you have a lot of different tasks spread out to a lot of different people and as a result it can often be difficult to keep track of what everybody is doing and how they are performing. Transparent Business tries to take away the pain of this by allowing you to note down everyone’s tasks and keep a track of their performance along the way

Transparent Business allows you to really keep track of your work colleagues and members. You can track things such as work hours, what task they are currently on, see their local time and more. Using the easy-to-use interface, you can quickly call/video-chat workers, check their current progress on a task, see their hours, see if they’re currently online, filter down by either task or work hours and so much more. If you’re an entrepreneur or owner of a business that struggles to keep track of all your team’s progress, tasks and information then this is a great remote tool for you.

Google Drive

A lot of businesses and even families rely on documenting things such as a family or business expenses shared between people, written reports, evaluations or summaries and presentations to work on. Google and their suite of office apps aren’t the best out there but their sharing functionality and ease of access on all devices is unparalleled by any other office suite unless you’re 100% developed in one Eco-system (Windows Phone and Windows PCs or Macs and iOS devices).

The ability to make a document on one device, edit it an another one and then share that with as many people as you like makes it a highly accessible app. For those of you stuck in the Microsoft Office ecosystem can now edit Word documents via an extension and export the documents into Word also if needed. If you’re looking for a cloud editor for documents, spreadsheets and slides then we’d definitely recommend checking out Google Drive’s suite.