OFW Speak

Working online, like working in a traditional office, requires focus and attention to details. These minute details, when ignored could mean a client’s signing up or detachment from your contract. You see, these tiny details are very difficult to manage if you only consider using your brain juice and your local hard drive to remember all the tasks, files, and conversations you ever had with your boss or client.

Basically, as an essential part of my in-house office, I use a collaboration tool not only to increase productivity but to have a strong foothold of all the things going on may it be progressive or excessive on our part as online workers.

Below are the 5 reasons why I decided to use a collaboration tool for my job that you might have overheard but didn’t pay attention much to it:

Calendar makes everything scheduled. Collaboration tools with calendars are perfect. It gets me aligned to my deadlines and schedules and emails me when I am already behind. Very essential tool when you have tons at hand.

Progress tool saves you EOD or End of Day Report. Progress tools are like updated-to-the-minute report of everything that was done and has happened. May it be a new task has been added or done, a new conversation was started or a new file has been uploaded. It’s a very important tool to list everything down. It is like a security guard’s log book.

Files are safe and secured. Need a fail proof for accidental deletion of files in your hard drive? Well you need to start uploading stuff in your collaboration tool. Need privacy? Some collaboration tool gives you the capability to hide particular files to specific member of the team, so you get to have your discretion secured.

A daily recap email for a summary. This particular feature of some collaboration tools gives you the summary of things that happened all throughout the day. It is like the Progress tool, but its already the summary. It will help you track everything down.

Open communication is priceless. When it comes to finishing a project, open communication is the key for its successful completion. And collaboration tools often have this conversation feature that lets you add your comment or have a conversation on a particular topic. No more “what are you talking about” lines to your boss.

For the record, I use Basecamp as our collaboration tool. We had used Outveo and MyProjectPlans but I personally prefer and recommend Basecamp as your team's collaboration tool.