How to Get Unstuck: Focus on the Future (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup! We took last week off from the roundup in order to bring you our April Fools prank. But the hijinks were everywhere across the web: while some people lost their jobs because of a GIF, others were wowed by imaginary products, and people all over the globe scrolled through roundups of the best pranks to laugh with the rest of us. So this week, we're giving you a double helping of links to productivity-enhancing articles and management-improving blog posts to help you bounce back from the April 1st tomfoolery and get ready to tackle this new quarter with some verve. Read on! You Need to Practice Being Your Future Self (Harvard Business Review): The reason most of us are stuck in a rut? We're focusing on what's bugging us at this present moment instead of spending time moving toward our future goals. This means doing stuff which may feel unproductive at first because there's no instant gratification of marking off a checklist, but which will eventually help us achieve an end goal. How I've Learned To Get Through A 100-Hour Workweek In One Piece (Fast Company): The first rule is: if you can avoid it, do so. But if you can't, here's a comprehensive guide to surviving a hundred-hour workweek, including a handy infographic charting what tasks to do at which time of day, written by a survivor who didn't lose his mind while going through it. What Every Entrepreneur Should Learn from GoPro Founder Nick Woodman (Fortune): Today’s answer to the question “How do you come up with a new startup idea?” is quite simple: solve an existing problem. That's how GoPro founder Nick Woodman did it. And that's how all successful startups begin. The Hidden Psychology of Failure (BBC Capital): The rapid pace of business is forcing companies to fail fast and often — in short, experiment in order to innovate. Failure then isn't something to be feared, since the lessons learned can lead to a more successful future. But is there any scientific proof that successive failure propels innovation forward? 4 Ways to Keep Mobile Tech from Hindering Productivity in the Workplace (Entrepreneur): With BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) a reality in corporate offices everywhere, there's a very real struggle to keep workers productive when distractions are just a tap away. Here are 4 guidelines for ensuring devices help, instead of harm, worker productivity. New Report Released: How Marketers Get Things Done: The State of Agile Marketing in 2016 (Wrike): Our latest report explores the world of Agile and the challenges marketers are facing today. We surveyed 800 marketers about their work management, use of digital tools, and their collaborative relationship with other departments. And the results might surprise you. Working for a workaholic? If you're ever pressured to check work emails at all hours, or respond to requests on Sunday afternoons, then use these 10 strategies for impressing your workaholic boss without becoming one yourself. Here's the full blog post on #Wrike: ----- >>>>> http://bit.ly/workaholic-no A photo posted by Wrike (@wriketeam) on Mar 25, 2016 at 2:37pm PDT More Work Management Reads Business: Audio Of The Week: Albert Wenger and Mike Masnick on Encryption, Security, and Privacy (AVC) 4 Benefits of Managing Your MarTech Stack Like an Ecosystem (Boardview.io) Who Killed Project Management? A Baker’s Dozen of Project Management Do’s and Don’ts (PM Hut) Heavy Use of Social Media Linked to Depression in Young Adults (Psych Central) Study: Customers (Especially Millennials) Hate When You Fail to Deliver Cross-Device Experiences (Adweek) Creativity/Productivity: Adam Grant: The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers (TED Talks) On Using Inspiring Locations to Inspire Deeper Work (Cal Newport's Study Hacks) OneTab - a browser extension that converts all your open tabs into a list Tutorials: How to Start a Blog in 5 Steps (ProBlogger) How to Write Email Subject Lines Like a Pro (Huffington Post) How to Start a Business With (Almost) No Money (Entrepreneur) Browse The Work Management Roundup on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your mobile device, then you can check out these links via The Work Management Roundup magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.
The Marketing Manager's Nightmare (A DroneCo Comic)
As the latest hot tech startup in the valley, things are always moving fast at DroneCo. Marketing Director Sujay and his team make a noble effort to keep up with their lovable-yet-eccentric CEO's zany ideas and half-baked instructions, but with all the late nights and hectic schedules, sometimes the inevitable happens... Click to Tweet: "The Marketing Manager's Nightmare — check out this funny comic from @Wrike!" Want to spread the fun with your friends on what does a marketing project manager do? Click the comic strip above to share it on Twitter! Don't Miss Out on Any of the Marketing Madness at DroneCo! Catch up on all the marketing department antics in the comic strip archive, or subscribe to the comic to catch every episode!
How to Use Flipboard to Stay on Top of Your Competition and Your Industry
Because we're all busy all the time, it almost becomes a chore to seek out news online. And yet it's vital that everyone — executives and managers most of all — stay on top of their industry's headlines in order to monitor the competition. Information is key. The problem is your Facebook feed is dominated by Buzzfeedy articles and clickbait. And assembling your RSS feeds in Feedly might seem like way too much of a time investment. How then does one collect relevant news and consume it in a pleasing UI? We have a suggestion: try Flipboard. What is Flipboard? Flipboard is a web-based content platform with well over 100 million users, and adding 250,000 additional readers every day. It gives users a sleek magazine interface to consume news articles in choice topic areas. Instead of venturing to individual websites and collecting RSS feeds into a feed reader such as Feedly, you can simply choose to follow generic topics such as "project management" or "marketing," specific people such as Madonna or Robert Scoble, or other user-created magazines such as Productivity Works! or Startup Spark Up. The entire user experience was designed for mobile first (they only just released the desktop/web version of Flipboard in February 2015), and is easily one of the most satisfying app experiences around. Articles are presented in a magazine-style layout, allowing you to swipe through pages. Flipboard allows you to become a magazine editor. You can "flip" content from across the web into your very own magazines by using the app, or a bookmarklet/browser extension on the web version. Your magazines can revolve around topics you enjoy, and there's no design work involved. The app automatically displays your curated content in a neat magazine layout. 5 Tips on Using Flipboard to Monitor Your Industry & Competition If you really want to make the most of Flipboard as a one-stop news reader, it is important to set it up properly. Here are five tips: 1. Follow topics, people, and magazines in your industry/niche Feel free to follow the topics/people/magazines you enjoy personally, but also find Flipboards that will inspire and inform your work. Follow your competitors. Follow your industry. The things you follow will determine what articles show up in your feed, so it's important to put thought into choosing what you follow. 2. Explore Flipboard's suggestions After Flipboard acquired Zite in 2014, it beefed up its recommendation algorithms so that people could more easily discover user-generated magazines. It now does a very good job of recommending magazines based on topics you follow, another reason why it's integral to follow stuff you actually want to read about. 3. Or... simply read the Daily Edition for Flipboard's curated news If all that still seems like way too much work, there is a final alternative: the Daily Edition, which is Flipboard's version of the daily print newspaper. A team of editors hand-picks articles for this section every morning, and just like a newspaper, there's a definite end. Unlike the regular feeds, there's no infinite scroll — there's a point where you can say "I've finished reading today's top news stories." 4. Connect a Read Later app You can't always read something as it appears on your feed. If you connect a read later app such as Instapaper, Pocket, or Readability, you can easily check out the post that caught your fancy at a more convenient time. 5. Connect your social media accounts Once you install Flipboard on your mobile device, connect your social media accounts so that you can flip anything from your social feeds straight into your magazines. Note: if you sign up for Flipboard on the desktop, you might miss out on this feature since it's only available on the mobile app. Start By Following These 4 Flipboard Magazines If you're looking for suggestions on magazines to follow, we put together four of our very own. Check them out: + Productivity Works! for tips on getting work done, to-do list strategies, productivity tech, and tips for becoming more efficient. + Social Project Management, for everything related to project management methodologies, project management tips, and articles that of interest to project managers. + Startup Spark Up for entrepreneurial advice, startup culture, growth hacking, and other emerging business articles. + Marketing Speak for content marketing, advertising, social media, and all things digital marketing. What Are Your Favorite Flipboard Magazines? There are probably thousands of magazines available on Flipboard. We'd love to hear your recommendations on what else to follow. Drop your links in our comments section!
Welcome to DroneCo — Wrike's New Weekly Comic
It’s like Big Brother but with a lot more SCRUM Welcome to DroneCo, the Valley’s latest startup darling. DroneCo is creating quite a buzz with intelligent remote delivery drones. “We make delivery drones,” says founder Miles “Dot” Commadore. “But that’s not all—we’re engaging the future with synergistic-social convergence or, as I like to call it, SynSocCon." Like any tech company experiencing massive growth against intense competition, DroneCo has more than its fair share of drama and dysfunction. Lucky for you, Dot has agreed to let us take a weekly peek behind the scenes. Starting with the Marketing department, we’ll bring you candid, uncensored moments from the conference rooms, cubicles, and brightly-colored, never-used “Creativity Pods.” Meet the Marketing Department Don't miss out on any DroneCo antics! There are several ways to stay up to date on DroneCo comics as they're released: Subscribe to the comic to catch every episode. And check back on Monday, April 6 to check out the first strip! Follow DroneCo on Twitter Follow our DroneCo Pinterest board We look forward to having you join us on this journey. Check in each week to see how DroneCo manages its way through the ups and downs of startup life!
Wrike was sold out at SFbeta
Every startup was given a table for one and a half hours to present its pet products at SFBeta. After the first one and a half hours, we continued showing our Wrike demo untill the laptop ran out of power and Andrew ran out of voice and business cards. Thanks to the SFBeta participants the evening on March, 29 at San Francisco's 111 Minna gallery became hot. By tuesday Andrew will have recovered his voice, and there is one more opportunity to learn more about Wrike first-hand. See you at the Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup on April, 3. P.S. Despite bub.blicio.us reported about the event on 1 of April, it's simple truth;)
Wrike is mixed at STIRR
Silicon Valley hosts lots of US tech events every month. The principal one – STIRR Founder's Mixer – is intended for the mixes founders, bloggers, reporters and developers and can be attended by invitation only. Andrew Filev, the founder of Wrike, was among four selected Startup invitees at Mixer 2.3. Thanks to the bub.blicio.us TV we can lift the veil from what was going on in Palo Alto on the evening of March 21. Filev is interviewed at the three and a half minute mark of this video.
How to Market Your App Successfully (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup, where we grab the week's best articles concerning work, productivity, entrepreneurship, and startups and hopefully inspire you to work smarter and be more successful. This week, we take a special look at startups in general and app developers in particular, with three meaty articles on finding app success. Read on! Life and Death in the App Store (The Verge): An eye opening story about how an app startup has to struggle not just with plummeting app sales but with customer fatigue. The average person spends 80% of their time on mobile using only 3 apps. So successfully selling a new mobile app right now is like hitting the lottery. 10 Killer App Store Marketing Tips (Slideshare): Despite the 1.5 million apps currently available to consumers, there are ways to increase customers and drive down the cost of user acquisition. This deck by StoreMaven examines a year's worth of data from leading developers worldwide such as Kabam, Zynga & Google, for these 10 solid tips on app store marketing. Facebook viral marketing: When and why do apps “jump the shark?” (Andrew Chen): Growth hacker Andrew Chen shares a technical discussion on how your app can go from success to epic failure. It delves into user acquisition, "virality," network saturation, and user retention. And it's got a downloadable spreadsheet. Motivating Millennials Takes More than Flexible Work Policies (Harvard Business Review): While having flexible work schedules is critical to attracting millennials to your organization, you have to go further to keep them engaged. Here are 5 tips to engage more with this demographic. How to Win at Medium (Medium): If you're blogging on the Medium platform, bookmark this blog post now. It presents a complete series of tips and tricks for writing your posts and making them both more readable and more visually appealing. Want to show your remote colleagues some love? Find fun ways to liven up conference calls and get to know each other. Just because you’re not all in the same physical location, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy team bonding activities. #Wrike See more tips for including your remote team in your activities in this blog post: -------->>>> http://bit.ly/RemoteTips A photo posted by Wrike (@wriketeam) on Mar 14, 2016 at 3:40pm PDT More Work Management Reads Think About This: Some of the Best Things Lazy People Do (Conversation Agent) BYOD continues to add challenges for IT leaders (Computerworld Hong Kong) The Tricky Business of Conversion Optimization (Huffpost Business) Go Try This: 5 Methods of Collecting Project Requirements (PM Tips) The 8 Slack Communities Every Marketer Must Join (Klear) Improve Your Critical Thinking With This Five-Step Process (Lifehacker) Browse Productivity Works on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your laptop or mobile, then you'll enjoy our magazine on productivity tips. Check out Productivity Works or click on the widget below: View my Flipboard Magazine.
Key Findings on How to Succeed in Managing Internet Marketing Projects
Want to know what it takes to successfully manage online marketing project? Rich Byrd, the President of Fast Forward Marketing, Wrike’s new client, and Nic Bryson, Wrike’s VP of Customer Care, are sharing their key findings and long-term expertise on how to best keep projects and your team organized: Break a project down into discrete, clearly defined tasks, instead of having one complex task. This will sharply reduce the chances of team members misunderstanding what they were supposed to do on a project. One project is to have neither too many nor too few tasks. Divide your project into subprojects with 5 to 15 tasks to detail just enough things that go into its successful completion. Put all tasks in one place. This way, you’ll make sure the areas of responsibility aren’t blurred, and two people aren’t both working on the same task on some days, while on other days, no one is. Assign tasks whenever possible to a single team member. So there will be no question as to who is responsible for it. To back the assignee up and make task completion easier, use the descriptions and comments. Request a status update on uncompleted tasks with approaching deadlines – this is a one-click action in Wrike, so it won't take long, and it will help you to avoid neglecting tasks. Set up dependencies and reasonable durations for tasks to easily see when a project is getting stuck on something. I love the ease of seeing what’s holding the project up and adjusting these things on Wrike’s timeline! Work backwards from the hard deadline. If your project has a strict due date, start from that and move back on the timeline to when various tasks must be completed in order to meet the overall deadline. Big thanks to Rich for his excellent input. Experiences are best when shared, so if you too would like to share your best project management practices and tips with other Wrike users, let us know, and together we’ll think of a creative way to feature it in our blog. ”— Rich Byrd, President of Fast Forward Marketing Boutique marketing company, specializing in websites and Internet marketing for small businesses and startups
