It’s April, it’s National Stress Awareness month and we are probably all experiencing the most stressful time we’ve ever had!

Many of you like us, will be working from home and juggling children and spouses! Home educating and trying to keep your jobs. It’s not an ideal situation and if you’ve never worked from home before it’s an adjustment even without the current circumstances.

Businesses during lockdown are trying to keep afloat, many moving their operations online for the first time which all present huge challenges.

Luckily I have been working from home for a few years now so apart from having children not in school, it hasn’t been such a big change. During that time I’ve come across many tools and tips which make your life easier and your day more productive.

That satisfying feeling of actually managing to complete your work, communicating with your teams or automating things which suck up time, is in itself stress relieving. Having achieved what you set out to do each day makes a huge difference in how you feel.

So what have I learned in the last 4 years and what would I recommend?

Stay in touch

Slack is a bit like being in a chat room with your colleagues. It’s designed to replace email as your primary method of communication and sharing. It allows you to organise communications by topic and project for group discussions and allows for private messages to share information, files, and more all in one place.

The instant messaging feature is one of the most useful so you can get an answer straight away to your most pressing queries without any delays.

Maintain high standards

If you need design work done and can’t start outsourcing big expensive projects at this time; Design Bundles, the craft and design marketplace have a vast selection of affordable digital products to help.

Keeping presentations and other areas of your work professional, consistent and needing as few edits as possible is important and saves you time.

Design Bundles is a UK company where all 30 of the company’s employees work remotely and are based in over 10 different countries around the world.

So they are used to figuring out what is useful to businesses who have to work remotely.

One of their most popular pages is the font marketplace where you can buy bundles of fonts to suit your company branding, colours and tone of voice.

Keep your team organised

Trello is a wonderful tool where you can organise all of your company’s and your personal activity. From managing projects and goals. Then breaking each of these down into the set tasks needed to be undertaken to achieve them. Following this you can assign a colleague to each task. A whole team can access a project or you can just share the parts which are relevant to a particular person.

This is a brilliant tool for small companies as it’s FREE for teams of 10 people.

Show them how it’s done

Another of my best discoveries is Loom. This is a video tool which allows you to create footage of your screen as you complete a task. It will record your voice with the video and your own camera showing you talking if you wish.

I use this to give people very clear instructions on how to complete a task and it’s a brilliant training resource. It’s always easier to show someone how to do something and this is harder in self-isolation!

Once you’ve recorded it, you can share with any team members you have registered on Loom or share a link to the video.

I hope you found these tools useful and a great addition to your working routine. Think of them next time you are wondering if there is a better way.