The holidays are coming to an end and we need to get back into a work rhythm. I want to make 2022 on my blog more productive and much more effective for my readers.

I’m going to experiment a lot with formats and try to give relevant and useful content in a style that’s not as familiar to professional blogs. I want to make the most of a strong tool like stories. I’m just learning for now, but I’ll be releasing my first experimental piece soon.

Okay, well enough about what’s to come in the future. In this article, I’d like to talk about the most essential tools for work that make my work faster, more efficient, and more productive.

These are tools I use every day and I want to share scenarios for using them amongst each other and individually. I hope that this article will help you change your ideas about the possibilities of using the tools and you will begin to use them to the maximum if you haven’t already.

Notion

This is one of the key tools I use. It’s an amazing tool that has a myriad of use cases. In fact, I’m writing the current article in it. I use this tool for:

1. Scheduling publication release content on the calendar across the board;
2. Storing, conducting, and reusing research data (guides, results, respondent data);
3. Writing documentation of projects and formulating hypotheses for stakeholders;
4. Brief notes on articles/courses and other educational materials;
5. Forming personal and work goals for the year/quarter/month.

And much more. In fact, I use this tool almost whenever I need to write something down or mark something up. The ease of use and page system that Notion has — it becomes an indispensable aid in documenting all processes.

Below I’ll attach some examples of my pages in Notion to show illustrative usage scenarios:

A visual design tool. I use it very often because even though I love to document and write out all the processes — some colleagues in the company like a more visual representation of the data. And, in fact, visual design of various processes, from internal workflows, to CJM users, to full analysis of competitors’ interfaces.

Miro has a very cool and clear UX. I’ve always liked to express my thoughts with blocks, diagrams — because it’s easier to project thoughts so they can be structured quite easily later, but I often did it on paper.

When I discovered Miro, which has the ability to do the same thing, but in an interface and has the ability to simply shear for the team — it has greatly expanded the boundaries and possibilities of use.

Also, something I’m very happy with is that Miro has added the ability to write documentation and project descriptions.

In any case, the combination of documentation in Notion and then visualization in Miro is a strong synergy that makes communication within the team easier, processes more efficient and implementation easier and faster.

Todoist

I think the strongest UX is in the Todoist app. It’s so simple and user-friendly that I feel a kind of euphoria every time I interact with their app. Everything there is so simple, clear and intuitive. It’s very cool.

I use this tool to decompose work tasks and create a list of some personal tasks.

Internally, we plan all the tasks in Jira, but then I transfer it all to Todoist for me and tag it.

I have, as it seems to me, a very convenient tagging system, which makes it very easy to distribute and work with tasks.

I have 2 main tags, a personal task and a work task.

When I add a work task, I have 3 more tags — current sprint (implementation this week), next sprint (implementation next week), and backlog (task pending or implementation not yet needed).

This allows me to plan my time very clearly and allocate it between personal and work tasks. The most important benefit I see for me in this system is simplicity. It is very easy to add everything, distribute and decompose tasks to work with later.

Conclusion.

I haven’t gone a day without using one of the tools I listed above. A lot of things I’ve tried, tested, and tried to maximize and find the right system to maximize my efficiency. And I found it. And I tried to describe to you how I use it and how it can help you in your activity.

I hope you enjoyed this article. You can subscribe to me, I release new material often enough. Give me likes and feedback in the comments.