What's up at Producteev?

Hi everyone,

Ismael here, I am very excited about a big announcement on the Producteev Android app:

- Push Notifications -

We know you all have been waiting for this feature and we proudly bring it to you today.

First of all, this feature is activated by default when you first sign-up or login into the app. You can check the status of the feature in the Account screen (open the Menu to access it).

An then, it is pretty seamless. The notifications you’ll receive are the same as the one you receive through emails:

• reminders about a task deadline
• alerts when someone completed a task you follow (if you’re not already familiar with the task following feature, check this out:http://blog.producteev.com/new-on-the-web-app-new-design-more-space-task)
• alerts when a note has been posted on a task you follow
• alerts when a task has been assigned to you

Clicking on the notification will lead you to the task details screen up to date.

We hope you are going to like this one. If you want to share your thoughts about the feature or are experiencing bugs, please feel free to contact us.

The Producteev Team.

You might want to check out this Producteev Training from VM Associates.

They organize a webinar every Thursday at 11am EDT to get the most out of Producteev, learn the basics but also how to manage workspaces, delegate tasks and “get  things done”.

For 45minutes they will go over Producteev navigation, use cases and best practises and will finish with 15minutes of Q&A. 

You can signup for the Producteev 101 webinar here for $49 USD/webinar/person. 

Summer is a challenging time for productivity in the office and in general!

You can’t deny that during summer the atmosphere at work is different: colleagues or clients go away on vacations, it’s warmer, and the office doesn’t seem to be the dream destination, but summer can be restorative and PRODUCTIVE following these few easy rules:

Plan in advance – Build a clear calendar as it will be important to organize yourself with a clear vision of when people go on vacations and make sure everyone in the teams also knows when others will be away.

Change priorities – Take advantage of this time with less people in the office to focus on projects that have been left behind and don’t require that many people. For example, business being slow might be a great opportunity to prioritize non-usual tasks: innovate, organize some brainstorming or team building sessions and get employees out of their comfort zones to do things that they wouldn’t do during the year.

Get ahead for September - Take advantage of the slower weeks to get ahead on tasks that will be difficult to schedule in the fall, for example, get the plans and schedules ready to have a clear vision of the strategy when fall starts.

Change the Schedule - Be realistic, summer is the key time to focus more on results that time spent in the office and generally it’s a good time to focus on high-energy time slots.  For some people it typically is better to get earlier to work during summer as they have more energy than later in the day when it gets warmer when the idea of getting out of work becomes overwhelming. 

Summer Hours & “Summer Fridays” 

To eradicate the long Friday afternoons when employees can’t focus and just can’t wait to get out of the office, some companies especially here in the US choose to shorten Fridays and find out that not only it increases employees’ satisfaction but it also increases productivity. Unless their workload is too heavy, employees can then manage their time during the week to be out early on Friday or finish their week on Thursday nights. Of course to be successful summer hours need to meet company’s goals and not distract teams from main task.

Avoid Distractions – It will be hard especially during this big Summer of Sports with events as Euro 2012 and the Olympics which might affect productivity on the workplace. The important part is to define time to focus and time for entertainment whether is to take some special breaks as a team or for individuals.

Take time off – It can be few days or a week but taking time to chill out and disconnect from work will make a difference when the workload is back to normal in September.

 Hi everyone,

Ilan here, I am very excited about a couple of announcements:

UPDATED DESIGN: MORE SPACE, BETTER ORGANIZED, FULL SCREEN NOTES

We’ve been trying to improve the design of our task detail (the third panel on the right) for a little while. We’ve received requests about the lack of space on the right, especially for the “Note” section. So, there you go, we made it MUCH better.

We’ve improved the layout and the way some of our features were presented, we put some in the top banner of the task detail, and the most important ones in the center of this panel, that is to say: due dates, assignation, label, priority and notes.

We’ve also added 20% more space to the task panel. But we thought we could still do better to let you enjoy collaboration around Notes in a better way.

You can now put your Notes on each task in “Full Screen”, and that’s awesome. No more explanation needed I guess, just way more space for discussions around tasks.

NEW HOT FEATURE: TASK FOLLOWERS

We had that feature baking for a while, you could already add followers to a task by mentioning people (@john for instance) in the note section, but it wasn’t enough.

Now, if anyone from your team needs to be aware of changes around a task, without being in charge of it, this feature is for you.

Example: there are five people in your team. You’re Bill, the CEO, there’s John, the manager below you, and there are 3 people, directly working with John: Sarah, Jack and Phil. If you want to assign a task to Sarah, and simply want John to be able to track that task, add him as a follower, and let the magic happen.

The follower of a task gets notified when a note is posted, there’s a change in the assignee or when the task gets checked off.

You can easily unfollow any task by mousing over the “following” button which turns into “unfollow”.

Anyone can add one of his colleagues as a follower of a task.

For many users, this feature will totally replace a “multi-assign” functionality.

We keep working on improving your experience on each of the platforms we’re supporting, hope you like this one guys!