Amid novel Coronavirus concerns and an increasingly technological network, online activity grows as an alternative medium of communication for coworkers and students to increase productivity. Several websites and applications have grown in popularity to facilitate more efficient forms of communication and discussion both in and out of the workplace.
Let’s take a look at Gmail and Slack, two applications, which when used productively, can be largely beneficial for workplace use.
Productivity Hacks for Gmail
Gmail functions as an email service run by Google. Through the application, people send and receive emails, documents, photos, videos, and sometimes even classroom notifications. Gmail allows coworkers, educators, and people in general to contact each other for various reasons with many different attachments. While it’s been established that Gmail is a helpful application, here are several additional ways to enhance your Gmail productivity:
1. Apps and Notifications
Download Gmail for your smartphone from the App Store or Google Play Store. Bookmark it on your laptop. Assuming you own a Gmail account and check your emails to communicate with others, doing these things makes it easier for you to access your account and therefore become more responsive and proactive when it comes to staying on top of productive communication. Every time you receive an email, you can turn on notifications so that you can reply and remain up to date very quickly for the ones which are very important.
2. Email Lists
Send group emails with email lists. If you are a director or a club leader and want to send a mass email to multiple people about meetings, it would be helpful to create groups and send the email to a group, rather than typing the individual email of each recipient for each individual email. To do this, use Google Contacts, accessible from the nine dots in the top right hand corner on gmail.com. Select the contacts for whom you wish to create a group, and use the bookmarking tab in the row directly below the search bar to name the group. When composing an email in Gmail, you may now type the name of the group rather than the name of each individual you are attempting to email. This will inevitably save you a lot of time.
3. Schedule Email
When it’s 3:37AM on Sunday night / Monday morning, you might suddenly realize that you forgot to email someone with important information, but also don’t want to send it at a strange hour. To avoid forgetting to send the email at a later time, you can draft the email and click the triangle to the right of the send button, and then choose schedule send. You can auto-send this email at a later time so that the people who receive it don’t question your sleeping schedule or forgetfulness.
Productivity Hacks for Slack
Slack functions as an alternative, more collaborative software. It is more similar to texting than it is to email. Slack places an emphasis on teamwork and integration through more immediate communication. Slack is also a very useful application, but here are some more methods of enhancing your slack productivity:
1. Apps and Alerts
Similar to Gmail, making Slack more accessible is a key way to increase your productivity through the software. Download the application on your phone, and it is also available as an application or online link for desktops/laptops. Every time someone sends a message, you can then make sure that you’re getting notifications and staying up to date with important information.
2. Star Channels
If you have lots of different channels and sometimes have difficulty finding the right one, it can be helpful to star important channels. This way, the important channels appear at the very top of the left-hand column on Slack and allow for easy access. If you are flooded with messages from Slack and don’t necessarily consider all of them to be relevant, you can change notification settings within notification preferences for a channel. By doing this, you can focus on prioritizing important work and checking Slack from the crucial updates which you truly need.
3. Search Conversations
If there’s something really important mentioned previously in the channel, you can easily look for it through the search bar in the top right. Just type in keywords and you have easy access to a file you once uploaded or important information that someone once sent.
Overall, these two applications are incredible usages of technology for increasing workplace productivity. Through Gmail and Slack, it becomes so much easier for people to interact with each other across different platforms and to share important information across a large network. Using some of these tips listed above will help you become even more savvy with the usage of these applications and your productivity as a working student, educator, director, and technologically-connected human being will only increase.
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