The Way I Manage My Projects with brightpod
We focus on market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Ultimately, we strive to improve businesses’ understanding of market opportunity, their strengths and weaknesses at a company or product level, and where the competition is outperforming them or has a vulnerability.
We’re a mix of virtual and in-office employees, so on any given day 2/3rd of our employees are in the office. We’re connected, but not robotically, which means we allow everyone to keep in touch in the way they like best, whether that’s Slack, Email, Phone, Video Calls, etc. Or even if that means we leave each other alone for a while to work in a single threaded way on a research effort. That said, we are very creative in the research approaches we develop for our clients, hence there is a lot of back and forth about what’s the best way to handle a client problem or need.
I start with coffee, exercise on most days, start answering email by 7 am or 7:30, have my first call or meeting by 8 am, and I usually wrap up my day at 5:30 or so. I don’t answer emails much at night. I found that I’m going to be more productive if I put in a long day and then give myself time to use my brain in other ways for a dedicated stretch of time, plus that ensures I get to spend plenty of solid time with my wife and kids.
Owning a MAC vs. a Windows machine. Even today with the improvements Microsoft has made in Windows over the last few years, it’s still more productive to be on a Mac. Having a standing desk, as it makes you more productive, so you aren’t slouched over all day, and I apply a lot of keyboard or trackpad shortcuts. For example, when using a Mac, I tell folks all the time they need to be using Three Finger Drag (an Accessibility settings option), because really do you want to click and hold the track pad, every single time you want to highlight a piece of text you’re going to copy? Especially if you might do that tens or hundreds of times a day? But that’s just one example.
Another one is CTRL + SHIFT followed by Greater or Less than in Word or PowerPoint. That keyboard shortcut lowers the font size or raises it for a selected piece of text. They key thing is that it keeps all the relative sizing you have. So, a doc with 14-point headers and a 10-point body is going to move down to 12-point headers and an 8-point body, with the use of CTRL + SHIFT +
4 team members. We manage all our marketing deliverables, our podcast, social media and marketing strategy in Brightpod, but in our case, all of the projects are internal.
We were using Google Sheets and Todoist.
We predominately use it for managing marketing projects.
No, not really. Outside of the fact that whatever project management/workflow you use we had to adapt somewhat to the tool you’re going to use, but overall Brightpod is very easy to use.
The Google Calendar sync feature.
It would be great to have ways to more easily change who a task is assigned to, and to correct it when you accidentally mark something as done.