WFH? Try these must-have remote working tools | Economic Times

When everything that you did in the office needs to be done remotely, the challenges associated with it goes up exponentially. Most of us have relied on tech like Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams to carry on with our work, but there are now a bunch of tools that can make our lives much simpler and work more efficiently. Ayush Jaiswal, the Founder and CEO of Pesto Tech, has never had an office and his team is spread all across the world. For Jaiswal, remote working is a way of life, which means he is on top of tech that helps him get the job done.“There will always be limitations and pros and cons of different ways of working. People whose job was people centric were finding it difficult to cope up, but I think in the last six months we have seen an immense growth in solving those issues. There are a bunch of very interesting tools that have come up and are very promising. I think we have enough in terms of collaboration and communication tools today,” says Jaiswal.These are the tools, Jaiswal recommends, you try out.One of the biggest challenges that came with remote work was presentations. Finding efficient and better ways to make presentations has been a challenge. Normally most presentations have been happening when someone shares their screen, which means the presenter is then not visible. One tool that is worth trying is called ‘mmhmm’. “This tool makes use of your background to enable you to make presentations. Your own image is visible in the foreground and the coolest part is that you can then drag your image to any part of the screen or even make your image smaller or larger. This is one tool which I think helps with our presentations,” says Jaiswal. 78334203There is another tool called Pitch, which allows you to present and collaborate with your colleagues and teammates. The design is simple, and the company has done a beta launch and the public launch is awaited.One of the biggest aspects of working remotely is communications and one enormous challenge was building that social connect. “When our team was small, it was easy to connect, but as the team grew and new people joined, it became a challenge for us since we did not get to know each other at a personal level,” says Jaiswal.There are a bunch of tools that are looking to solve that. Remotion is a great tool, but it is still limited to Mac users. For everyone else, Tandem is another one in the same space. This is a tool where your team sits with you on the homescreen and you can then create rooms like you do in actual life. When it comes for collaboration, we have tools like Slack and Zoom, but Tandem is a great tool because it also caters to the social aspect of a team. “If you want to strike a conversation with people already in the room, you can jump in. No scheduling, no permissions needed. You can have rooms like ‘Good morning’ or ‘No agenda room’, where you can indulge in casual conversation with your colleagues.The other tool worth checking out is Notion, which is great in documentation and helps keep everyone aligned.The other critical part of working from home is managing your time. Motion is a useful tool that mixes your to-do list with the calendar. There is another cool tool that you can use if you are working across different time zones. It is called ‘Figure it Out’ and is available as a Chrome extension and web version. “If someone says let us set up a meeting at 11 am tomorrow, it may take a moment to figure out the exact time in India. If you have another colleague in, say Australia, it gets even trickier. This tool allows you to seamlessly figure the time out and even send out calendar invites,” says Jaiswal.In the area of design, Figma is great for teams to collaborate on new projects and the second one is called Jam . Jam helps you work with the product team to build new products and get feedback. Bubbles is something similar, and one can try that out for collaborations as well.For productivity, the three tools that can be used include Rescue Time, which is an automatic time tracking software. To manage your to-do list, you can try TickTick or Motion. A to- do list is great to fix accountability of your time by plotting it with your calendar. The third one is around emails and is called Superhuman. Superhuman can be a great productivity tool for people who get and send a lot of email.Lastly, for communication, Loom is a video messaging service especially designed for work. Monosnap is another nifty tool that can take screenshots and videos, and the last one in this category would again be Tandem.