4 top tools for telecommuters

My business partner Heather Anderson and I both live in the San Diego area. She lives about an hour north of town and I live about 20 minutes east of town. Yes, we can meet with relative ease when we need to, but we very seldom need to. Thanks to technology, we can both work from virtually anywhere in the world with no dip in productivity. Here are some of the tools that make our remote lifestyle possible.

Email. Email is so obvious, it may seem like I don’t need to even mention it. Except for one thing. Make sure you set up and use email accounts that use your organization’s domain name. Heather and I both have Gmail accounts, but we don’t use them to communicate with each other. Our emails almost always relate to our business, so we want them all captured on our omnichannelcommunications.com business accounts.

Messaging. It seems like most discussion topics fall into the “not urgent enough to pick up the phone, but more urgent than email” category. Thus, instant messaging is invaluable. Heather and I both run on Macs and iPhones, so iMessage, Apple’s free messaging product, serves us quite well. You might be able to get by with simple text messaging, but if you’re a Windows/Android user, I’d suggest something more robust.

Cloud software. Heather and I both have subscriptions to Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office365. Cost, of course, is a big benefit of cloud-based software deployment. However, the thing I find most valuable is the fact that we never have to upgrade our software – at least, not manually – and we’re both always on the same version. Sure, we might get Word docs and InDesign files from external people who are on earlier versions, but we never have an internal compatibility problem – at least not one that relates to software. 🙂

Cloud-based file sharing. I simply cannot imagine our lives without Dropbox. Imho, it’s the most important software we license. The way Dropbox works is that when you save a file in the Dropbox folder on your local computer, that files gets automatically replicated to the cloud. And with a business account on Dropbox, multiple users from the same company have access to a shared folder. The net result is that when I save a file to a client folder on my computer, I can ask Heather to take a look at it seconds later and she can open it like it was any other file on her local computer.

As an added benefit, thanks to Dropbox mobile apps, I can easily access client files from my iPhone or iPad. This means, for example, that if I’m out smoking cigars with my buddies and I get an email from a client requesting a file, I can send it to them without ever missing a puff.

Do you have some favorite telecommuting tools? Please tell us all about them in the comments section below.

John San Filippo

John San Filippo

John is the co-founder of OmniChannel Communications, Inc., a company that specializes in B2B marketing to community financial institutions. He started out in the savings and loan industry, but wisely ... Web: www.omnichannelcommunications.com Details