More and more companies and organisations are turning to teleworking, mainly in response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic but also as a way of optimising time and resources. Yet working remotely also has its difficulties if communication is not good enough and workloads are not managed properly between teams.

Here are some tools which are sure to help you with everyday teleworking.

Communication and meetings

If there’s one thing we’ve discovered during lockdown it’s the various videoconferencing tools available, from the classic Skype to WhatsApp and Zoom, probably the biggest discovery of 2020. If you’re after an alternative which gets well away from large corporate options, there are a couple of free tools available to you: Jitsi, with the advantage that you don’t need to create a user account to make use of it, just create a link and share it, and Framatalk, a videoconferencing tool from the Framasoft project which also allows you to create a virtual meeting room without the need to register.

Shared files

Tools for shared files exist to avoid having multiple versions of a document, enabling users to share files in the cloud, update them and share them with various other users. The best known are Google Drive, which offers 15GB of free storage, and Dropbox, which offers 2GB of free space with the possibility of increasing this up to 16GB by inviting friends to use the service.

Other options here include Mega, with 50GB of free storage space, and Degoo, which offers 100GB, although the free version only allows users to upload files from three different devices.

Framasoft also offers various free open-source tools such as the collaborative calendar Framagenda, the collaborative spreadsheet Framacalc, the presentation software Framaslides and the meeting planning tool Framadate.

If you want to go a step further, the French collective Chatons offers a list of various open-source software alternatives to Google Drive and Dropbox.

Organisation and management of projects and tasks

One of the main difficulties with teleworking is managing tasks carried out by people participating in the same project. There are various tools available which can really help us with this and provide control and information on the tasks being done by each person.

One example is Trello, a collaborative tool for managing tasks and projects based on cards, lists and panels which allow users to organise and prioritise work right down to the last detail. Another example is Asana, a web and mobile management app which allows users to divide projects into a list of allocated task for each team member, view the status of each one and pick up on any issues which might hamper task fulfilment.

Optimisation and management of time

Anybody concerned about too many distractions working from home or who needs to organise their day to ensure it is productive also has a couple of interesting tools available to them.

TomatoTimer is a timer for applying the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest) and managing the time needed for each task. It allows users to configure the time needed for each task, along with audio tones and the volume of alerts. If you want to know how you’ve used your time you can use the Toggl app, available for web and mobile alike. This tool enables you to monitor the distribution of your working hours and generate reports which can be exported as Excel, CSV or PDF files.

Want more?

If you’re interested in finding more free open-source office automation tools, the Xarxa d’Economia Solidària (XES) has shared a repository of open-access tools where you can find browsers, mail managers and tools for editing images and video.