The 5 Best Management Apps for the Innovative Workplace

By: Marija Kojic

Businesses are always on the lookout for the next best idea that will help skyrocket them to success – but, once you’ve found this new idea, how do you put it into motion?

To make sure innovation and creativity lead to success, streamlining your work routine, as well as properly managing your team, assignments, and resources is key.

You’ll have to:

• devise a business plan
• compile to-do lists with manageable tasks and sub-tasks
• communicate the idea to the team, while ensuring you all collaborate efficiently

And all this while making sure you manage the time you spend on the idea in the best possible way.

This is a challenge, because you essentially have to juggle and manage a lot of different elements and parameters at once – so, to help you do just that, here are 5 best management apps you can try:

Task Management – Google Tasks

When creativity strikes, your team’s brainstorming sessions likely produce 10+ exciting and thought-provoking ideas.

But, these sessions won’t amount to anything if you don’t break the ideas down into tangible, concrete steps and tasks, meant to lead you to your goals within set deadlines. And Google Tasks can help you with that.

With this latest addition to the Google apps family, you’ll be able to:

• create task lists and single out your priority to-dos
• parse tasks into smaller, more manageable sub-tasks
• add clarifying notes and details to tasks
• set due dates, which help organize and prioritize tasks according to these deadlines

The app has also recently become an integral part of Gmail – once you enter your inbox, you’ll be able to access, add and edit your tasks by clicking on the icon in the sidebar.

You’ll also be able to make your conversations into tasks – just drag an email you’ll want to tackle later, to Google Tasks, and it will immediately turn into a to-do item.

Time Management – Clockify

Knowing how much time you spend on activities is guaranteed to improve your scheduling and streamline your work routine – and Clockify is a time management app meant to help you do just that.

With this app, you’ll be able to:

• track the time you spend on various activities in real-time, or add it manually
• enter individual projects and tasks, and then track time specifically for them
• organize and sort time entries by tags describing your activities
• filter, group and easily search for time entries by various parameters

And all this across all your devices, considering they sync your time data together automatically.

Later on, you’ll be able to generate Summary, Detailed or Weekly Reports based on your time results – this way, you’ll know exactly how much time you’ve spent on all activities, so you’ll learn:

• how long you’ve been productive on priority tasks
• how much time you’ve wasted on trivial activities
• how much time you can save, and allocate to your priority tasks in the future

With Clockify, you’ll also be able to set reminders and targets, track project progress, indicate task and project estimates, assign tasks to team members, and more.

Project Management – Trello

Collaboration is key when you want to make sure your projects and tasks are perfectly managed – and Trello is the perfect collaboration, communication, and organizational tool meant to help make this happen.

This project management tool allows you to group everything related to one project in one board. Once you’ve created a board for each project, you can add tasks, and then assign the people who’ll work on them.

Trello also allows you to:

• keep track of project progress through the Kanban approach – just drag & drop assigned tasks across columns, depending on their status (“Backlog” – ideas, “To-do” – pending tasks, “In Progress” – tasks you’re currently working on, “Done” – finished assignments)
• share files with team members
• add comments and notes to cards
• create checklists within cards, and then keep track of your to-do items
• archive finished tasks

You’ll be able to quickly access all context, content, comments and conversations associated to one project, and then further manage and organize them.

Team Management – SyncSpace

A well-coordinated team is the main precondition for a successful project – and SyncSpace offers a unique approach to team management.

This app provides you with a whiteboard where you can visualize your ideas, save drafts, as well as edit them – and everyone in your team can chime in. You can invite people to collaborate or view via email, as well as prompt them to take part through a shared link.

The first time you enter the app, you’re presented with a white canvas where you can draw everything you picture in your head – the best part is that you can maximally zoom in to capture all the minute details of your designs and concepts.

You can also add text, which can serve as a part of your designs, or as notes and comments about your or other people’s ideas.

Once you’re done, you can save your work as an image, export it as a PDF, as well as share it on Twitter, Facebook and Photo Library. Or, you can secure it with a password, so only select people can enter.

Inbox Management – Boomerang

A cluttered inbox filled with irrelevant emails, ads and promotions is not likely to help the team be productive – it usually takes hours to reply to all emails and wrestle your way out of your inbox in order to find quality time for your priority tasks.

But, Boomerang for Gmail can help you cut down on the time you waste on inbox management, as it:

• allows you to schedule when you want to send your emails
• helps you write better and faster responses
• reminds you of your priority conversations

You’ll be able to write your emails now, and then schedule them to be sent out later – the system will provide you with a calendar where you can pick the exact dates and times for this.

You’ll also no longer waste time devising the perfect responses – the Respondable feature provides you with an AI assistant that helps you write fast and effective emails in real time.

When you receive dozens of emails a day, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters – but this app’s Inbox Pause feature provides you with notifications to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

You just need to identify and mark priority emails you currently have no time to answer, and they’ll appear again at a better time – hence the app’s name “Boomerang”.

By Marija Kojic