Navigating Daily Life at NFN Labs
Our Remote Work Setup, Tools, and Challenges
DEC 06 2022 • Sonaal Bangera
THE TOOLS THE TEAM USES EVERYDAY
Having seen the communication tools, let’s jump straight to the applications we use on a daily basis to keep shipping things.
Productivity tools: Here are some of our favourite utility / productivity tools that we swear by. We believe these to be great suggestions for your business as well!
TickTick: With Calendar, Reminder, Focus Timer, Habit tracker and several more features, TickTick is really a one stop shop for managing daily tasks efficiently.
Cron: This is the next-generation calendar app for professionals and teams, making modern work more efficient and joyful. You can integrate Cron with other tools as well for doubled-up productivity!
Notion: For note-taking, idea-organising, creating mood boards and progress tracking.
Scrcpy / Vysor - For displaying and controlling Android devices through USB connection.
AText: Cross-platform text expander tool which lets us utilise short codes or keywords to lazily quickly write a piece of text.
Scribe: This chrome extension helps cut down the time spent switching between browser windows or word documents thereby streamlining process capturing and documentation.
Colorzilla: To easily pick a colour from any part of the screen and use them for our own programs!
Operations: Bills, bank statements, accounting and all financial transactions - Zoho Books and Payroll are where we go!
Design: Figma!! The design-team uses Figma to make designs for web and mobile interfaces and the rest of us follow it to proceed with development.
Mind maps: Are your ideas all over the place? Channelize them through tools like Miro, MindMeister, Whimsical and FigJam! Create and collab with their user flow, architecture diagrams and more.
Jira: Last but not least, the one single tool that all of us undoubtedly use is Jira. Right from setting product vision, roadmap making, gathering feature requirements, managing stakeholders and budgets, tracking every day processes, logging in work, assigning tasks, adding and tracking bugs - Jira basically does everything!
CHALLENGES WHILE WORKING REMOTE
Network and power issues are obviously the biggest culprits here. The last thing we want is to suddenly turn magician and vanish during important client calls! Remote meetings must ideally be the most efficient way to catch-up but ironically a lot of time gets wasted as we keep asking others if we are audible / have slow internet connection. Why, reports even say that the most used business phrase in 2020 was - “I think you’re on mute”!
Another issue is us not feeling ‘connected enough’ with our colleagues. Say what you may about the perks of WFH, but nothing beats face-face convos. Some also feel more productive when they are present at the office.
But hey, these are issues the entire world is facing and the way to go about it is to make the best use of the situation! 82% of the employees in the world prefer WFH, says study. I mean, who doesn’t like working while snacking with PJs on!
For more team bonding we are planning meet ups with team members across the state and beyond. We also believe that keeping things flexible and fun paves the way for focused work and are constantly looking for solutions to make work culture better!
If you want to learn more about why we transitioned to a Remote first company - Click here
