6 Ways to Maximize and Manage Notification Alerts
Notifications are certainly the most important feature of a good project management system. And the bigger the project, the more vital the notifications become. We all need to be notified if a co-worker completes a task we were working on or if someone adds a comment. On the other hand, there are a lot of things we don’t need or want to be notified of. This is why Producteev provides smart notifications on Android, Mac, iPhone and Web. Here are seven best practices to be more efficient with notifications:
1/ Be selective. We give you the choice not to overload your mailbox. Go to your settings and set the events you want to receive notifications for.
2/ Pick and choose workspaces. Not all projects are of equal importance. Choose the workspaces that are highest priority to be notified about via email.
3/ Select the right email. We all have multiple emails addresses (personal and work). Choose the appropriate email for the project notifications in your settings.
4/ Unfollow tasks you are not interested in anymore. Notifications are sent for tasks you are involved in. If you are the creator or the assignee of a task, your will receive all the notifications. To stop those click on “unfollow” in the task detail panel.
5/ Follow priority tasks. An easy way to stay up-to-date on an important task is to follow it.
6/ Download the apps! Get notifications on your iPhone, Android, and/or Mac so you are always in the loop.
Have a Producteev week!
Prioritize Your Tasks: Don’t Get Lost in the List
Task lists are great but can be overwhelming when it comes to prioritization. If you write down all your tasks, odds are you have a very long list! Luckily, Producteev provides a range to ways to prioritize your tasks from the bigg (the workspaces) to the small (the subtasks). Here is a review of all the layers you can use to keep the control on your projects and priorities.
1/ The workspaces
A workspace is the place where you can create your tasks and invite people. Depending on your activity, a workspace may be a project or a client case. To deal with daily tasks you can also create and share a workspace with your whole company.
2/ The labels
Some call it tags, we call it labels. In any case, the labels are really useful to order the tasks by stage, work area or client case. This is a convenient way of organizing tasks because you are able to filter by label. You can also assign several workspaces to a task to visualize the dependencies at a glance.
3/ The tasks
Our advice about the task is pretty simple: if you think it should take more than a couple of hours to complete a task, split it in two or more tasks. Completing a several of the tasks is more encouraging than working on the same one for days!
4/ The subtasks
Subtasks are the best way to keep track of individual steps for a task. You can use the substasks as reminders of the process to complete the main task or as little personal reminders.
Once you complete the basic prioritization of your tasks, you will ready to hit the ground running on any project!
How-to deal with your people on Producteev?
Teams are change. Employees are leaving, new employees are being hired… Regardless of what type of business you are running, it is inevitable that you will need to adjust teams, reassign tasks, and sadly, make sure that former employees are unable to access sensitive information. Luckily, there are a few simple steps to follow to complete all of these actions in Producteev. Let’s review a few important scenarios:
1/ Onboard a new member in a workspace
Let’s say you just hired the perfect assistant. Now you need to provide access for this person to manage your tasks. All you need to do is login to your Producteev account, open the workspace, and to click on the green “+” located in the left sidebar. Then, just type the email address of your employee and Producteev will send the person an email invitation. This is also where you can check your pending invitations and even revoke an invitation if you change your mind or misspell an address.
2/ Give administrative powers to someone else
An important element of success is the ability to effectively delegate tasks. As an example, user authorizations is a task that may be better suited for your wonderful new assistant. To give your assistant access, you would open your settings and to go in the workspace panel. Do you see the link “change administrator” option located beneath each workspace? Simply click on this option and to chose your new administrator. Note that this setting will not change anything about your current subscriptions.
3/ Remove someone from a workspace
With any business, employees will come and go. It is important that former employees do not have access to the company projects or tasks. To do remove those people from your workspaces you first go to the settings panel. It takes one click on an user avatar to delete this person from the workspace. What happens with the tasks? All the tasks will be reassigned to the creator of each task, or to the workspace administrator if the creator was the person you just removed.
Have a Producteev week!
Stop Using Emails and Take Action
Take just a minute to think about it: of the last 10 emails you received, how many helped you to complete a project? Not a lot right…
A recent study from the McKinsey Institute showed that the average worker spends 28 hrs per week looking for information to help get the job done, including more that 8 hrs per week just looking through old emails thread. We could all use that extra time.
In an effort to reduce the noise of emails you receive and to keep the conversation in the right place, you can use Producteev to turn talk into action items within the tasks and notes. Not only you can discuss and store information with your action items, you can also collaborate on documents and attach any type of files!
Have a Producteev week!
6 Tips for a Better Sales Management with Producteev
From the classic notepad and paper client folders to professional CRM software, there are many ways you can manage your sales process and leads. Simplify your process with Producteev. Whether you are using regular or Pro workspaces, you can use Producteev to better organize your sales team. Here are six best practices we have heard from customers when using Producteev as a sales management tool.
- Make clients tasks. Just like a task, a client may be active or “done.” Each client should be represented by a task.
- Use Labels to identify the stage of the funnel of the contact. The labels act as step-indicators for prospects. You can easily create a label for each stage, and change it when something changes with the contact.
- Remember to assign the responsible party! Assign the task to the sales representative. This contact then becomes a member of that person’s portfolio.
- Utilize Deadlines. Timing matters when you’re trying to convert a prospect.
- Don’t count to much on your memory, use the notes!
- Use Stars to indicate size or value. There’s always a potential value behind a prospect. The stars help you identify which one is the most important in a blink of an eye.
With a little extra setup, you can optimize your tool through creating macros. For example, one of our customers combined the power of the Mail2Task with a rudimentary contact HTML form on their website to automatically turn emails into potential leads… Stay tuned: this tip will be the subject of a future blog post.
Vines + Producteev = the perfect mix for a great vintage
With a part of the Producteev team born and raised in France and our new headquarters located in California, we have two good reasons to be like wine. When we heard that a little wine producer from the Napa Valley uses Producteev to monitor his vines and sell his bottles, we could not pas up the opportunity to discuss our two passions: wine and productivity!
Hello Greg Scheinfeld, could you tell us a little more about your company?
Uproot Wines is a small producer of high quality wines in the Napa Valley. We are currently making a Sauvignon Blanc and a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Napa Valley, as well as a Grenache Blanc and Grenache from the Central Coast. All four wines are produced and bottled in Napa.
One of the more interesting things about our company is that we have designed a front label that has what we call a tasting color palette. This means that the color bars on the label correspond to how strong the wine is. We started our company about a year and a half ago and are growing.
What is your role at Uproot Wines?
As the founder of Uproot Wines, my role includes everything from paying the bills to selling the wine. The team is still quite small: Jay (my associate), his two assistants, and myself. Jay and I work closely on the phone and through Producteev to keep track of the different tasks that need to be done. Email, texts, and phone calls can only be so helpful. The Producteev dashboard has everything in the pipelines clearly laid out and is easy to keep updated.
How do you use Producteev?
Most of my work is done through the desktop application. I hardly use the website dashboard since the app is suited perfectly for what we need at Uproot. I actually think we under utilize the potential of the product. As Uproot grows, we will have the opportunity to utilize Producteev further.
What feature do you use the most?
We primarily use the deadline and the multi-channel notification features. We also use notes and the task list helps us to keep a running list of all the things in the pipeline that we need to accomplish. It also helps keep us stay accountable.
How did you manage your tasks before Producteev?
Managing our company has mostly been done through email and phone calls. It was difficult because employees lived in separate time zones. Thus far, Producteev has really helped us to stay on track.
Help us to learn to Producteev how to speak your language
When is the best time to learn new languages for a child? A hotly debated issue. The choice is ultimately up to the parents. Here at Producteev, we discussed the future of our baby task manager and concluded that it is time to say yes to one of the biggest request from our users!
Based on your requests, we would love to make Producteev available in the following languages. If you are fluent in any of the following languages, we want to hear from you! And if you speak a language that is not listed below (lolcats anyone?) and want to help us to translate Producteev, please contact us too!
How to help Producteev to speak your language?
The answer is pretty simple, contact us! Tweet, Facebook, email, comment on this blog post, telegraph…Regardless of how you communicate, please include your email address so we can get back to you. Bruno (bc@producteev.com) will be fully dedicated to our international helpers over the coming weeks, let us know that you’re alive and he will get back to you.
So, what’s in it for you (besides our gratitude)? You will enjoy early access to Producteev 4, free PRO subscriptions, your name on our website, and our eternal gratitude (which is worth its weight in gold 
).
Thank you for your support over the last 4 years!
Turn your emails into action!
Whether you use Outlook or a trendy mail client like Sparrow or directly Gmail, the statement holds true: emails are overwhelming. It results in a critical loss of productivity for employees and managers alike. What would happen if you turn this old tool into the most actionable piece of work? A task. Give it a try by starting to forward your actionable emails to task@producteev.com. This will help you will keep the conversation with your team in the right place, out of your email inbox.
From an email to a task, in a single forward
If you want to create a new task from scratch or to transform an existing email into a task the process is always the same: you send an email to task@producteev.com. You can send from your main address (the one you used to register on Producteev) and from any email address you own, as long as you register those in your account’s settings.
By default the title of your email will become the title of your task. Producteev will help you to go further into the action, by using the Natural Language Processing in the subject field you’re able to create a deadline and name the person who is responsible.
The actionable conversation
Once you have set the title of your future task and its assets, it’s time to edit your first note. The body of your email will be considered as the first note, including the attachments (remember all you can do with your docs on Producteev?). The icing on the cake is that you can also mention members of your team using the @ in the body of your email so they will be added as followers to the new task, and notified that they have a role to play! Now you only need to move the conversation in the right place and to let your collaborators move forward.
Turn the good emails into actionable tasks to create a better way to communicate and get things done.
They use Producteev to sublimate their commercials
M /studio is one of the most well known post-production facilities in Chile and a reference for commercials in the Latin American World. When we heard that they use Producteev to manage their projects, we couldn’t resist asking a few questions.
Hòlà compañeros, tell us a little you and your company.
My name is Fernando and I’m partner and general manager of M /studio, a video post production company. We mainly do advertising and we work with some prestigious clients like Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, Colgate, Palmolive… I run the company on a daily basis when Guayi Mas our art director, is on the field trying to create spectacular effects for our client’s commercials.
How does Producteev help you to get those projects done? How do you use it on a daily basis?
We use Producteev to coordinate the process of post-production. Since the plans change every minute we need to keep everyone updated and to share information in real-time. A client changed his mind, a last minute revision… They’re always unexpected challenges in this business and Producteev has been really good to keep everyone updated with what they have to do in order to make the commercial great and the customer happier.
Give us your secret, what does your Producteev board looks like?
We use Producteev in a very special way. We only have a few projects running in the meantime and each project is short (5 days on average) and intense. So we use a common workspace for all the employees where we represent each client as a label and each project as task. Then, we use the notes to keep everyone updated on the next steps to follow. Using the notes allows us to send a notification by email to each employee as soon as something is moving on the project!
What feature do you use most in Producteev?
We mainly use the web app since we are always in the studio and we stay behind our computers for days when it is time to finish big projects. The feature we use the most is definitely the emails and the notifications by this channel.
How did you manage your tasks before you use Producteev?
I just put everything I could think about on a calendar or on my agenda and then I had to manually send emails to everyone to notify them. Finally, each employee had to recreate their own task-list on a piece of paper. Now with Producteev I can share all the information with the entire company, which is much more powerful and productive. I don’t have any doubt on the quality of our work, but this kind of tool helps us to be more organized and efficient.
Thank you for your time and stay Producteev!
How to Deal with Privacy in Producteev
The idea driving innovation at Producteev is that we break all the barriers between your tasks and your team. However, we understand that there is the need for secrecy. That’s why we offer a couple of options that could even help 007 to save the world, in a total privacy.
To lock or unlock your workspace? It’s all about your collaboration philosophy
The first privacy setting we provide in Producteev is the ability to lock or unlock your workspaces. An unlocked workspace is the most open collaboration mode you can imagine: every user on your workspace can see, create and edit any task (except the hidden ones as we’ll see later). A perfect mode for small and highly collaborative teams. If your team is a little bigger and every user has a well-defined role you may find the locked mode useful. The locked mode only allows three people to edit a task: the creator of the task, the assignee, and the workspace administrator.
To access this setting you can use the network drop down menu on the top of your main screen (as shown on the screenshot below).
Only the chosen ones can know about the existence of a private task
When you work on a highly sensitive project, you want to have control over who can see the tasks. This is exactly why we designed the private tasks. Every time you open the details panel of a task, you can set the privacy settings by clicking on the lock followed by the words “All workspace member.” One click on this button and you can select who has the right to see the task, and who will never be aware of its existence. This is an easy way to keep your plan to take the control of the world totally secret.
Stay productive!
