By Georgia Hart.

Technology has made the world such a small place. If COVID has taught us anything in tech, it’s that work CAN be done from anywhere in the world – as long as you have the right tech tools for the job.

But with so many options to choose from, where to start?!

As a product and tech recruitment specialist I have daily conversations with tech leaders and tech professionals about their preferred tools that make remote working a breeze. So I’ve reached out to my tech and product network, and conducted some of my own research to come up with a recommended list of tech apps to make your remote work life simpler. 

Here are a few favourites to check out…

Tech for everyday communication: 

Slack is the obvious one but here are some other alternatives: 

Glip – allows screen sharing; 

Fleep – offers the ability to assign and track tasks; 

Flock – offers a whole bunch of different features and my personal favourite for engineering teams;

MatterMost – great for enterprise companies; 

RocketChat – has a real-time translation feature; 

TandemChat – has 40+ integrations!

Tech to help recreate ‘small talk’ in the office: 

Brightful – featured on Product Hunt as the top remote working tool;

Donut (Slack plug-in) – tour virtual watercooler!

Tech to help replace meeting-boards: 

Miro – an online whiteboard platform for ideation, brainstorming, strategy, planning, agile workflows, as well as meetings & workshops; 

Stormboard – helps teams collaborate to solve problems and ideas together;

Explain Everything – great for teaching;

Join.me – a video tool with a cool feature called ‘whiteboarding’  which allows teams to doodle ideas on a shared document during chats.

Tech to help recreate the code cross-editing process: 

GitDuck – talk while you are pair programming through their video app tool;

JSFiddle – great for Javascript;

Live Share for VS – for all your Microsoft lovers.

Tech to increase productivity and time keeping: 

Toast Ninja (Slack add on) – has real-time updates;

Focusmate – for all those procrastinators out there, this will help to keep you and your colleagues accountable!;

Clockwise – will help you organise “focus time”;

Timely – booking software; 

Toggl or Time Doctor – has a Time Tracking application with a reporting service.

Tech to make meetings more efficient:

Macro (Zoom add-on) – makes collaboration easy; 

Stand-ups – a mobile application which is great for when you’re on the move. 

Tech for notes and tasks:

Notion – helps you get organised with all your tasks, keeping notes and docs in one place; 

Evernote – an easy way to remember everything important from wherever you are.

What other tech platforms and apps would you recommend? Join the conversation and add your comments below.

Interested in ‘all things tech’? 

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