5 of our Favourite Tools to Boost Productivity

Helping you work smarter and thrive on the job

As we savour the last few weeks of summer, let’s face it - maintaining peak productivity through the work week while squeezing in outdoor time, all while juggling team vacations can pose quite a challenge. Thankfully, we're living in an era where an array of productivity hacks and tools can lend a hand in boosting our efficiency, leading to a smoother and more disciplined workflow. Having the right tools that work best for your team can help improve efficiency, organization, collaboration, hybrid working, creativity, time management and the list goes on!

We tapped into the Sidekick team to tell us their ultimate favourite productivity tools. After all, even we need sidekicks to help us conquer our workday 😉. Here are 5 of our favourite gems:

Rosie’s pick: Miro

Miro is an online whiteboard and workspace for innovation that helps teams of any size brainstorm in a virtual environment and supports a wide variety of tasks that require collaboration. Whether it’s workshopping, strategy mapping, research and designing, or process visualization, Miro provides a flexible platform that lets you create notes and move things around, along with easy-to-use tools such as sticky notes, voting tools, timers, and more to enable teams to collaborate swiftly and effectively.

Rosie loves Miro for its ability to replicate an in-person brainstorm online – not to mention its library of user-submitted templates that we’ve found relevant and easy to repurpose for team working sessions.

Nithya’s pick: Sunsama Sunsama is a digital daily planner that is designed to help you feel calm and stay focused. It is an all-in-one daily task manager that organizes all tasks, meetings, emails, and more in one place. It provides guided daily planning to help you be intentional about you spend your time, pulls in tasks from integrated apps such as Trello, Asana, Gmail, Outlook etc to produce a unified daily view, and allows you to timebox each task so that you can set realistic daily goals.

Nithya loves Sunsama for its ability to organize all of your tasks across different platforms into one place, its ability to help set a daily planning workflow, and its mission to make work-life balance a reality.

Nora’s pick: Sticky Notes

Call us old fashioned, but anyone who’s attended a workshop with us, knows we love sticky notes. A small yet mighty ally, sticky notes are a great way to make brief notes on things you are working on, and even organize to do lists to help you channel your focus on accomplishing the most important things you need to get done in a day (and for turbocharging productivity, try the sticky focus game). And in a collaborative environment, they are a great tool for organizing information, as they are easy to move and reorganize. Catch us in a live workshop prompting ideas to be written on sticky notes, and as the group discusses its shared thoughts, we organize similar thoughts into “clumps” of ideas that inform our solution-building.

Nora loves sticky notes for its ability to capture short concise ideas and thoughts, and their ability to help organize ideas and processes in simple, easy to understand ways.

Giuliana’s pick: Monday.com

monday.com is a powerful project management system and a complete work OS to help teams complete projects efficiently, collaborate, and stay on track. It consists of modular building blocks like items, columns, views, automations, and widgets that allow users to create work management tools that fit their own use case and needs. Monday.com allows users to create “boards” to house critical workflows, activities, and ideas for projects, departments, or new products, and comes equipped with customizable templates that can help produce to assist with tasks such as content calendar management, project workbacks, resource planning and more.

Giuliana loves Monday.com for its ability to function as a ‘second brain’ for capturing and organizing important tasks and initiatives, its collaborative features, and its role as a source of truth for capturing plans and tasks for teams.

Karen’s pick: Sharepoint

SharePoint is cloud-based service and collaborative platform for businesses of all sizes that integrates natively with Microsoft 365 applications. SharePoint is a great option for storing information and working on project management as a team because of its collaborative features, as users are able to contribute to shared documents and work simultaneously in the same files. Organizations can also use Microsoft SharePoint to build intranet sites for team and departments, and use it as a secure place to store, organize, share, and access internal documents from any device.

Karen loves Sharepoint for its ability to allow teams, regardless of where they are located, to collaborate and work on files through a variety of Microsoft Word applications (Powerpoint, Word, Excel etc) and ultimately produce documents in a quicker, easier fashion.

With so many productivity tools out there, it’s important to find and adopt the tools that work best for your own working style and habits. While some tools may require you and your colleagues to adopt together as a team, consider personal tools and tricks (whether they’re old school or new finds) that can help you organize your individual tasks to help you accomplish more through your work week. What tools do you like to use to elevate your productivity? We’re all ears and would love to learn from you!