30 productivity and collaboration tools we use at Actiondesk

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Here are ~30 tools I use personally or with @actiondesk.

You'll find the usual suspects alongside less known tools and a few gems, and also some tips on how to make the most of these tools. Let's go

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1. Todoist

‍@todoist This my personal operating system. Anything I need to do is in Todoist. A key feature is the "Quick add task" shortcut. I can be on another app, type Cmd + J and add a new task which will go to my inbox. The gmail addon that turns an email into a task is great too

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2. Pomodoro

I use the Be Focused Pro pomodoro timer for Mac. Very simple app to time your slots of full focus.

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3. Momentum Dash

I use the beautiful chrome extension http://momentumdash.com to have my main todo items displayed every time I open a chrome tab with a beautiful picture as a background

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4. Get Commande

@getcommande is very helpful to find documents quickly. I type Cmd + E, type whatever keyword I know is in the doc, and I'll get to it. Particularly useful for drive docs. Probably 4-5x faster than doing to http://drive.google.com and then search it there

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5. Alfred

@alfredapp is worth the money only for the clipboard history feature. In one shortcut, access everything you've pasted. Snippets are also great.

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6. Contexts

. http://contexts.co is reproducing the alt tab in Mac. I've gone back and forth between Mac and Windows. The alt tab in Mac always pissed me off. Contexts solves this. You can also search within your apps / tabs openedI first heard about it thanks to a tweet from @Altimor

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7. Loom

@loom is one of the apps I use the most. To report bugs to the team, explain features to users, show use cases. I don't know what I'd do without it.

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8. CloudApp

8. I also use @cloudapp which is similar, but enables gifs and also saves me when loom is down (which it's been a lot in the past few months for me)

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9. Superhuman

‍@superhuman deserves all the hype it gets in my opinion. They reused all the gmail shortcuts, and added way more, and made the app extremely fast.

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10. Inbox When Ready

What I miss the most in Superhuman is the @InboxWhenReady extension. Seeing new emails is distracting (which is why I have 0 notifications on), but I still need to write emails during the day and access old emails. This extension does exactly this

11. Notion

I use @NotionHQ for my personal knowledge management. I use their web clipper to add to a notion table any article / tweet / videos I stumble upon that is interesting. I can then sort these ressources and write notes. This completely replaced Pocket for me.

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12. Kindle

Related to reading, I use the send to kindle chrome extension to add any longer form article or pdf that I want to read on my Kindle rather than on my phone / laptop. It's great, reading on Kindle is such a different experience.

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13. Goodreads

Third on reading, I use @goodreads to browse books, list the ones I want to read, etc

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14. Readwise

Fourth, I've been using @readwiseio and love their mission of helping us retain what we read better. The main feature surfacing random highlights every day doesn't really do it for me though. I'm looking forward to what they'll build next.

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15.a Roam Research

I've been playing with @RoamResearch (actually writing this thread from there), and find the two way links concept very interesting. It would solve some problems I have with my current Knowledge management system.

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15.b

Eg when referring to a concept in a book summary, the two way links would be extremely helpful. You could also see where else this concept is used. Status: still exploring

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All right small break. These were the mostly personal tools. Let's get to the more professional tools (although the border is less and less clear)👇

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16. Slack

I've never been a fan of @SlackHQ but we do use it and is our main way of communicatingI like their new release with ways of navigating between messages with keyboard arrows (Preferences / accessibility to activate it)I turn off notifications and use the "all unreads" inbox

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17. Tandem

We use @Tandem_HQ for our internal calls (standups, retros, one off calls). The key feature for us is how fast it is to set up a random call. Doing that with zoom is very painful. With Tandem, it's a few secs.

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18. Airtable

We built a lightweight CRM using @airtable to centralize, view and edit the data, @typeform to handle signups, and @zapier + @mailshakeapp to handle emailing. It's great overall, my only problem is that it can be a bit fragile and prone to "bugs" when we change things.

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19. Jira

‍@Jira for software development. We don't love it but it's much better than we initially expected. Powerful and not as clunky as you might think.

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20. Figma

We switched from @sketch to @figma and couldn't go back.

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21. Notion

‍@NotionHQ is our central knowledge management system. We love Notion, it makes it easier to write documentation. Our main problem was the search which didn't work well previously, it's been greatly improved recently

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22. Super.so

We also have our helpdesk content on Notion, which is embedded on our website thanks to http://super.so It's great to be able to so easily edit content or create new content for our users

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23. Webflow

Our website including our blog is built on @webflow. You have to spend a bit of time learning webflow (their university is great) but once you understand how it works, you have full control over the design and I see very few reasons to write code to build simple website

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24. Stripe, Webflow, Calendely

Our private beta is now paid with 2 weeks free trial. We ask users to enter their credit card before scheduling an onboarding call. I did the page, scheduling and payment workflow in @stripe + @webflow + @calendly without writing code

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25. VS Code

Our team have been blown away recently by the live sharing plugin of VS code. It's amazing to do peer coding remotely.

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26. Zapier

‍@zapier powers a lot of our user related workflow. We pay ~$200 / month of Zapier and are getting immense value from it.

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27. Dashlane

‍@dashlane is our team password manager. The UX is clunky and there are many things to be improved but it does the work

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28. Lempod

We are part of a few pods on lempod. When posting things on Linkedin, it enables us to have people within our team, investors, larger community automatically like that post to increase visibility

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29. Actiondesk

Finally, we obviously use @actiondesk for our spreadsheet and data analytics needs.

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Any cool tools I should know about? Please let me know on twitter.

Also, if you liked this, I just started a newsletter to share how is it to run @actiondesk as well as tools and productivity tips. It's called "Deep in the trenches" and you'll find it here