Work From Home: 5 Tools for Staying Productive During This Quarantine

The coronavirus pandemic has converted many homes into offices. Many of us have the privilege of working from home, unlike doctors, bankers, police officers and service staff, who are bravely stepping out of their houses to help fight the coronavirus outbreak. Many of you might not like working from home, as it blurs that boundary between your office work and family. You might not be able to give your best while working from home, as there might be too many distractions or simply because you do not get those ‘work vibes’. These are desperate times, but, you do not need to take desperate measures to work from home. We have collated here, a list of 5 tools that can help you to be productive during this quarantine:

1. Dropbox Paper: It is a document editing service developed by Dropbox. With this tool, you and your team can create, review and organize your official documents with ease. It is flexible to allow multiple people to edit the same document as the same time. You can plan your projects, brainstorm ideas and hold meetings conveniently with this collaborative service.
2. Microsoft Teams: It is a communication and collaboration platform that allows you to chat, conduct video meetings and share files with your team mates. As their tagline says “work remotely without feeling remote”, use this tool to be with your team virtually and feel at home, we mean office.
3. Daywise: This app will let you stay focused at work and help you to get a goodnight’s sleep. This tool helps you to work for long period of time without any interruptions from your mobile notifications. You get to choose who can interrupt you and when. You can set a schedule for all your notifications to be delivered to you on your smartphone.
4. Toggl: It is a time tracking tool that keeps record of every minute of your day-to-day activities. You and your team members can use this tool to plan your tasks and also allocate time for each task. The time allocation ensures that you complete the task within a set time frame and avoids any project delays. This tool is very efficient to enhance your productivity.
5. Jira: It is a project management tool/platform that allows you to track the issues that you face in your agile project development. You can also use this tool to plan, track and review your work on daily, weekly and project basis.

We recommend that you use these tools after having a discussion with your team and after getting all the required permissions. Please make sure that you download the authentic tools on your system and not become a victim of any cyber-attack. Make sure to have a cyber insurance policy, so that you are safeguarded from the financial burden that cyber-attacks usually cause. We hope that everything goes back to normal as soon as possible and all who wish to work from office get to go to office. But, till then hang in there, stay indoors, use these tools and be productive and safe.