Working from home is a blessing for many and a nightmare for others. There’s always the benefit of organizing your schedule the way you want, but working along with others can grant you extra motivation to do your work as good as you can. Just as in many other situations, technology is also there to help us.
Data from Upwork (one of the top freelancing platforms) revealed last year that 41.8% of the workforce from the US continues to work remotely. It was estimated that about 26.7% of those people would continue to work from home throughout 2021. Furthermore, by 2025, 22% of the American workforce will be relying on remote work. While working from the comfort of your own house became so tempting, here are the top productivity tools to use in 2021 if you choose to enter the world of remote work:
Skype
You obviously need some software to use for virtually meeting up with your co-workers at least once in a while. Skype offers group video calls at no cost and good quality, and lots of other useful functionalities to keep you in touch with your team in an efficient way: file sharing, screen sharing, live subtitles, and more.
Krisp
Krisp is designed to cancel background noise in any communication app, so you can trustfully use it along with Skype. We’re all tired of those moments when you talk to someone, and you can’t hear the voice clearly because a dog barks, the vacuum cleaner is on, or you hear other people talking at the same time. Krisp solves that problem and allows you to hear only the person you’re talking to.
Sublime Text 3
Web development and programming, in general, are very widespread nowadays. Because, you know, everybody wants a website. You have tons of coding lines to learn and master if you want to work in such fields, and luckily enough, there are plenty of tools out there ready to ease your work. Sublime Text 3 is one of them – it will automatically complete some part of the coding for you, and it has a lot of useful shortcuts to ease your code writing.
The Lua app
Lua is the free online software that mainly focuses on text documents. Dealing with PDF, Word, or Excel files won’t be a problem for Lua, and the app will even do the job in literally seconds. You can use the app for converting, merging, and compressing files. You can perform complex operations such as converting Excel to PDF or PPT to PDF at ease with Lua. There’s no fee involved, and all the uploaded files will be automatically deleted shortly from the servers.
TeamViewer
Working from home will inevitably get you into plenty of technical problems with the programs you’re using or even with your own gear. That’s why you need TeamViewer, the program that will allow somebody else to take control of your PC remotely and see what’s wrong. Both you and the person you’re talking to need to have the program installed for the scheme to work, so there’s no reason to worry that anybody will sneak into your PC without you knowing it.
Of course, before trying TeamViewer, you can do some online research yourself to fix those unwanted errors, but that doesn’t work every time if you’re not skilled enough when it comes to both hardware and software. And trust us, nobody is skilled enough when it comes to hardware and software. Absolutely no one can possibly know them all when it comes to the vast world of technology!
Google Drive
Google Drive is the cloud storage app that you need when you’re working remotely with others on a project. Each of you will instantly start the work from the point it was left at by another colleague. Google’s Drive app offers 15GB of storage for the free version, and it will increase to 100GB or even more if you upgrade to Google One.
Instagantt
You obviously need to make some order through your working plan, and that’s where Instagantt comes in handy. This tool will help you control, plan, and schedule your projects. Instagantt also allows you to collaborate with your co-workers and take advantage of a long list of useful features such as the ability to create tasks and subtasks, milestones, guidelines, templates, baselines, notifications, and more.
If you also need some online tools that track your employees’ time, you can use time sheet by monday.com.
With the apps mentioned in this article, your remote work will be a lot more efficient.
