How To Collaborate Like A Pro

Whether your team is office based or distributed across the world, you need to have a space where you can communicate and collaborate effectively.

If everyone in your business works from the same office, you might have daily meetings to facilitate team briefings and brainstorming. However, numerous studies have shown that too many meetings can create a serious dent in your overall productivity. A study by Verizon Conferencing revealed that busy professionals attend an average of 60 meetings a month and 91% of attendees admit to daydreaming during those meetings, whilst 39% have actually dozed off!

Cal Newport places great emphasis on deep work, which is the ability to focus without any distractions, but it’s not so easy to get back “in the zone” when your workflow is constantly disrupted with meeting preparation and attendance.

“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time as it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy” — Cal Newport

So how do we collaborate with each other and manage projects without these daily interruptions? This is where Buckets comes in.

Onboarding Your Team

Using Buckets to manage your Projects, you can limit the amount of unnecessary meetings in your schedule and direct your focus where it’s needed. Buckets is a task management and collaboration platform that can be utilized in a numbers of ways to meet the needs of your organization.

If you’re managing a specific Project that you want to get your team on board with, you can add them as members to the Project once it’s been set up. If a team member hasn’t joined Buckets yet, just insert their email address and we’ll send them an invite. For more info on setting up your first Project and onboarding your team, click here.

Update: We’ve now rolled out new privacy settings packed with improved sharing features that reduce the privacy wall dramatically, without reducing security. Learn more about them here: “Introducing: New and Improved Public Projects!”.

Creating Your Community

Once your team members have joined you in Buckets, you can centralize all of your work within the platform and manage all of your communications in same place. Your Buckets community will continue to grow as you introduce new Projects and users over time. Each Buckets user can create their own personalized profile and upload a custom avatar, which we highly encourage you to do as it facilitates familiarity in your team and it’s a great way for users to introduce themselves within the Buckets community.

Key Collaboration Features

We have a few key features in Buckets that are designed to make collaborating with your team even easier:

Cards

Cards represent tasks in Buckets. They contain all of the important information associated with each task and you can organize this information using features such as; Notes, Checklists, Attachments, Reminders, and Labels.

The comments section in each Card is a great space for brainstorming ideas and collaborating on tasks. If you need an update on the progress of a task, you can check in with the assigned team members in the comments section of the Card and/or individual Checklist items using @username mentions which will show up in their feed/s.

When you click on a Connection in Buckets, all of your Shared Cards will appear. Your Shared Cards view contains all of the Projects and tasks and you’re working on together. This is super useful when you’re managing multiple people in a team because you can get an instant view of the tasks you’ve assigned to each individual team member and review the status of each task.

Buckets Tip: Created a Card that can be reused in another Project? Use the Move Card option to reassign it to that Project. Or, if you want to use the Card in multiple Projects, use the Duplicate option to create copies of the Card.

Notes

Notes are one of the most important collaboration features in Buckets. This is where you can set instructions/guidelines for other team members and store important information regarding each task. If you want to provide extra clarity to your content, it’s easy to do so by applying simple Markdown to create lists or emphasize text.

You can add multiple Notes to a Card as a task progresses, which can be organized and rearranged at any time using the drag-drop tool. This is really useful when you want to create an organized process within a Card that’s easy for other team members to follow, especially when you’re onboarding new project members.

Checklists

Not many of us like to be micromanaged. However, in Buckets, our team members are definitely more efficient when provided with straightforward guides to start and finish each task. Adding Checklists to our Buckets Cards helps to give clarity to what needs to be done.

Multiple Checklists can be added to each Card and moved/duplicated as needed. When collaborating with a team, multiple Checklists can be used to represent specific parts of a Project, or to assign tasks to individual team members.

If you want to leave further notes on a Checklist item, for yourself or another Project member, you can leave a comment on that specific item and tag the user to notify them of your remarks. This also comes in useful for assigning tasks to members in your team. To ensure that the Project hits deadline, users can apply Reminders to a Checklist by adding a Reminder to a Card and drag-dropping it into the entire Checklist, or the Checklist item of your choosing.

Labels can be added to individual Checklist items to further organize tasks; for example, you might assign a blue Label to all marketing related tasks in your Checklist.

Collaborate From Anywhere

The Buckets iOS app has recently been upgraded with an even more intuitive UI with features such as the Buckets Sandbox, which acts as a virtual memory bank when you’re on the go. For example, if a Project idea comes to you on a Sunday evening when you’re having some downtime, you can whip out your mobile, add it to the Sandbox, and come back to it later when you’re free to discuss it with your team.

When you manage your work in Buckets, you can collaborate on Projects from absolutely anywhere that has a wifi connection. And from any device, which comes in handy if you need to use an alternate device for quick access. Traveling? No problem. Working remotely? We’ve got your back. Once you’re set up, Buckets becomes your digital office and you can access it from anywhere in the world.

Thanks For Reading!

Buckets helps to supercharge collaboration and organization needs across the world. If you enjoyed reading this post, please let us know by clicking and holding down the 👏 button!

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