HiveFlux Blog

Productivity tips for creative teams

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We've been hard working into a new app, with a fresh design and simple UI - Outplanr: www.outplanr.com

It's still free to try out, so why not give it a go? 😍

Of course, we will still give full support to all current Hiveflux clients. Only new registrations will be directed to Outplanr.

[hiveflux]

New: Email Your Tasks to HiveFlux

You can now quickly create a personal task by sending an email to your HiveFlux account.

Just follow these 3 simple steps:

1) Make sure you're sending the email from the email address you associated with your HiveFlux login.

2) Send your email to a specific HiveFlux email address that includes your company web address. It looks something like this:  

task+ [your-company-web-address] at hiveflux.net

To see the email address where to send your Personal Tasks to, check the Settings Panel, on the Personal Details tab.  

  3) And that's it! The email will create a personal task where the task name is the subject of the email, and the email content is the task description.  

Note: It takes up to 5 minutes for your emailed tasks to show in your Personal Tasks list.

[hiveflux]

20 Best Inspiring Quotes on Leadership

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” - Michael Jordan

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” - John Lennon

"To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things." - Ronald Reagan

"Power isn't control at all - power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn't someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own." - Beth Revis

"To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence... When the best leader's work is done, the people say, 'We did it ourselves!’" - Lao Tzu

"Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people," that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations." - Peter F. Drucker

"My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better." - Steve Jobs

“It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.” - Nelson Mandela

"The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it." - Theodore Roosevelt

"Leadership is solving problems. The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership." - Colin Powell

"There is a difference between being a leader and being a boss. Both are based on authority. A boss demands blind obedience; a leader earns his authority through understanding and trust." - Klaus Balkenhol

"The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly." - Jim Rohn

"Success at the highest level comes down to one question: 'Can you make the choice that your happiness can come from someone else's success?' No one has qualities like courage, vision, charisma, adaptability, and decisiveness in equal measure. But every great leader does make the same decision - and so can you." - Jeff Haden

"All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership." - John Kenneth Galbraith

“My own definition of leadership is this: The capacity and the will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence.” - General Montgomery

“The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born - that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.” - Warren Bennis

“A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make tough decisions, and the compassion to listen to the needs of others. He does not set out to be a leader, but becomes one by the equality of his actions and the integrity of his intent.” - Douglas MacArthur

“Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.” - Vince Lombardi

"Control is not leadership; management is not leadership; leadership is leadership. If you seek to lead, invest at least 50 percent of your time in leading yourself - your own purpose, ethics, principles, motivation, conduct. Invest at least 20 percent leading those with authority over you and 15 percent leading your peers." - Dee Hock

[hiveflux]

3 Productivity Boosters to Welcome Fall

It’s been a busy summer and we’re very excited to launch 3 new features that will greatly improve your workflow. Check them out:

1. New Recurring Tasks

You can now create long or recurring tasks with HiveFlux. When you add a task (or edit an existing one), and fill in the "Start Date" field, you'll now find new options in the "Repeat" dropdown.

You'll be able to:

Create a long task, by setting its daily length in slots, the start and the end date.

Create a recurring task, set to repeat on specific weekdays, weekly, monthly or yearly. 

Track and log the times recorded on every stage of the task, in the calendar and project views. 

This works particularly well with long tasks that spread for days or weeks.

2. New Activity Log on Projects

There's a new tab in the Project view: the Activity log. This is where you can see all the interactions within a specific Project, sorted by time and date.

If you click on one of its items, you can check task details, edit or duplicate.

3. Export Event to iCal and Outlook

By popular request, when you create or edit an Event, you can now export it into your favourite calendar app: Apple Calendar, Google Calendar our Outlook (or any other app supporting .ics files).

Just select "Export Event" on the top-right options menu and it will download your file. Just double-click it to import into your default calendar app.

Give these a go! :)

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Adding Users to HiveFlux - Updated

We’ve simplified the process of adding a new Team member to your HiveFlux account. Now, when you create a new User, you no longer need to send an email invitation to be able to assign tasks to this User.

When creating a new user, this user will automatically become a “Not Activated” user and will be visible only to Administrators and Managers. You can then assign tasks to this user, but only if you send an email invitation (and the user accepts the email invitation) the user will become visible to the rest of your Team.

This new approach allows Managers to create "dummy” Users, or to assign work to people outside their HiveFlux account, to keep track of their progress. 

Related topics:

Invite Your Team In (HiveFlux Guide)

Adding Users to your Company (HiveFlux Guide)

Adding External Users (HiveFlux Guide)

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HiveFlux is now fully mobile

HiveFlux is now fully adjusted to be used on a desktop computer, a tablet or a smartphone.

Stay on top of what's hapenning with your Team in real-time, and now everywhere. Check it out!

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HiveFlux Chrome App and Extension

Now you can quickly place a shorcut to HiveFlux login on your Chrome browser.

On the Chrome Web Store search for "HiveFlux" and you'll be able to install the Chrome app or the extension and have your HiveFlux login handy whenever you need it.

With the Chrome extension you’ll get a handy icon next to your browser search bar.

With the HiveFlux Chrome App you can add a shortcut to your Apps Dock, for easy access.

[hiveflux]

5 Tips to Get a Super Team

The secret of any successful business is fostering an united team. 

With these 5 tips and tricks, you will go beyond being a group of people that work together to become A SUPER TEAM!

1. The sound of working. Doors, heels, computers, coffee machine can be too annoying for anyone to be able to focus. So if you have at office a good, relaxing ambient music, this can help you ignore others sounds, and make your office a better place to work.

2. Have a break, get a coffee. Everyone loves a coffee break. It is great to relax for 5 minutes and talk about everything. Freshen up, your productivity will rocket.

3. Open space, talkative team. With an open space it’s easier to communicate with other coworkers. If this isn’t a option, you can have a collaborative chat to make the communication in real-time a thing at the office.

4. Lunch time, ghost office. Your coworkers and you must go out at lunchtime to relax and get inspiration. Great ideas come when you get unexpected stimulus.

5. Get a great productivity app. Yes, now everyone uses productivity tools for time management, to share files, and collaborate in projects with their teams. Get onboard and start getting things done without extra work.

[hiveflux]

Say Hi to the New HiveFlux!

HiveFlux is now easier to use! We've redesigned the whole interface and now you can add a new Task, File, Event, Project, User or Group from any screen. Just head to the big + button on the top right corner.

Quickly adding tasks is also easier in this new version. To add a new task you have 2 new options: 

Option 1: Click on the “+” button from any panel.

Option 2: On the Tasks panel, you can also quickly add a Personal Task, a Task in a Project or a Task in a Private Project. Just name the task and hit “enter”. 

You can later edit it if you wish. Just click on it and the new right-hand editing panel will be shown.

This editing panel will also show when you click a Task in any other screen. For example, if you select a task on Calendar:

Or if you select a task in the Dashboard:

The right-hand editing panel includes all the options related to each task, in the collapsible menu on the top right. Handy!

What are you waiting for? Give it a go! :)

[hiveflux]

6 Steps to Work While on Vacations

Being a manager means do not turn off from your office even thought you are on vacation. Although everything is in order at the office, there are some tasks you might still need to do, like checking the email, dealing with small crisis, making phone calls... So to help you out, we make a list with 6 steps to keep everything in order and still enjoy your time out.

1. Take a Break. First and more important, you have to take a couple of days to relax and breathe out from work. Clean your head of work problems. It’s your vacations!

2. Work just when is needed. Just do what really need to do and delegate anything you can on your team.

3. Schedule work times. Define just 2 hours to work for day at most, and try not to work everyday. Tell your team when they can contact you  during this time. After this, turn off your laptop and business phone, and enjoy your well deserved time out.

4. Check the internet connection. Yes we live in the world we can’t exist without internet. So if you need to work while on vacation, check if the place you’re going to has a good connection or get an upgrade on your mobile plan for more data. 

5. Email/ Voicemail Vacation Alert. Put an alert on your voicemail and email to let everybody know you are on vacation. And you can suggest the person leave a message, and when you can you listen/read it. Or give the instructions how to contact you or your team if the subject is *really* important.

6. Balance your work life with your family. Ensure your family is aware of your work plans during vacations. They will help you manage your time but also keep you aware of when to turn off and enjoy your holiday. 

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Transform a Task into a New Project

A quick way to create a Project with several tasks in it is to Transform a Task into a Project.

Just create a new task, add subtasks, and click on the “Turn Into Project” button.

The result will be a New Project, named with the former Task name, in which all subtasks became individual tasks that are assigned to you.

Now you can assign each task to a different user, set time slots for each task, and keep up with its progress.

[hiveflux]

6 Ways to Have Fun While Working in the Summer

You are at the office, working, and it’s your morning break and you go to your favourite social network and a thousand of photos of your friends at the beach! As a leader you must to keep motivated and more important: motivate your team. It’s a real challenge with so many temptations outside. But these tips will help you keep your and your team’s morale high:

1. Keep a beach bag in your car. If you work at somewhere near to the beach, or you have some public pool in your area, after work you can still catch up with summer with your friends or family.

2. Office beach trip? Maybe on a Friday afternoon, what about a rod trip to the nearest beach, pool or park. A different setting to strengthen team bonding.

3. Lunch at the sun. Don’t have lunch at the office. Go outside, and enjoy the sun and the warm weather. If the office has a terrace, lunch there, or pick a close restaurant with tables outside, or why not taking a sandwich to the park? 

4. Early weekend. At fridays leave everything tidy and after work go out for a weekend break. In those days you can relax and feel like on a holiday. 

5. Casual August. Offer to you team, not just a casual friday, but all August. They will feel better and more motivated to work during the summer.

6. Keep it positive. When you finally go on your deserved holiday, the beaches won’t be so crowded and you’ll be able to relax. And while you are working at the city during the summer season, you will be able to avoid all the traffic jams and you can even ride your bike to work if you feel like it.

[hiveflux]

Duplicate Projects to Create Templates

Now you can quickly duplicate any Project - active or archived, and create a new Project that includes all the tasks, sub-tasks and files that were associated with it.

This feature is particularly useful if your Team often repeats the same tasks on different projects, or if you have gathered important information that you wish to easily replicate and start working on it straight away.

To duplicate a Project, you just need to select it from the project List, and on the top right-hand menu, select the option "Duplicate Project".

You can also duplicate an archived project. This way you can create Template Projects to repeat as you wish, and keep them out of sight to use only when you need them.

To duplicate an archived project, go down on the Projects left-hand menu, and open the "Archived Projects" list, to pick the Project you wish to duplicate.

To create a Template Project, you just need to create a Project, add the tasks and assigned them, and then you can archive it, leaving it out of sight of your Team. When you need to use it, duplicate it from the archived projects list and you're ready to go.

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How to Organize your Team with Groups

We've just added a new organization system for larger Teams, or teams across different departments - Groups.

A Group in HiveFlux allows you to allocate Projects to specific team members, giving them access only to those projects. This is particularly handy if you wish to invite clients to overlook a specific Project, a Freelancer to collaborate on just a couple of Projects, or if you prefer to fine tune exactly what each user is able to see in the company, instead of giving access across all projects.

You can create a new Group when you add a new User, or when you edit an existing User. 

By default, a new User will be assigned to your Company. But if you can create a “New Group” instead, and this User will move into it.

You can then select the permission level of your User, after creating the Group. Users can be “Managers”, which means that they’ll be included in the Group but will be able to see everything else in the Company, including Projects they’re not assigned to, or they can be “Users”, who only get access to the Projects assigned to their Group and nothing else. 

If you wish to include an external guest (a Client, for example), you can assign them to a Group and set their permission level to “User”, so that they will only see the Projects linked with the Group they’re in.

Now that we’ve created a new Group, we can add the Projects that this group will get access to. 

You can also select existing Users from your User list, and move them to Groups, to organize them is structured Teams. 

This organizing system is an alternative to the flexible HiveFlux approach of creating teams automatically when users are assigned Tasks in a Project.

[hiveflux]

How To Create the Most Creative Team in 6 Simple Steps

Creativity is essential to any team that needs to get new ideas and innovate. If your workplace keeps a great environment, ideas will flow more easily.

So how to foster team creativity and get those ideas flowing?

1. Brainstorm. Is common at Design companies have brainstorming sessions, but this can be applied to any company that wishes to innovate.

2. Workplace Decor. Just grey, black and white might not be the best decor for your office, if you want to keep the creativity levels high. Bring colour to your workspace to boost your team’s mood. 

3. Be Less Competitive Sometimes competition at work isn’t the best route to follow. By creating team goals and promoting collaboration you get the best out of everyone instead of fostering rivalry and isolation amongst peers.

4. Diversity is the key. If you create an homogeneous group you’ll only get the same ideas, same strategies, same solutions. An heterogeneous group will be able to think out-of-the-box and discuss ideas.

5. Be easygoing. Every team feels better at a relaxed and flexible work environment, that increases productivity and make ideas flow.

6. “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life”. Yes! Bring on people who love what they do. People who are excited to go to work everyday are more productive and creative.

[hiveflux]

20 Truly Inspirational Productivity Quotes

“You cannot mandate productivity; you must provide the tools to let people become their best.” – Steve Jobs

“If you want to be more productive, you need to become master of your minutes.” - Crystal Paine

“You can’t try to do things, you must simply do them.” - Ray Bradbury

“In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example – and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.” – Rupert Murdock

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” ― Bruce Lee

“Focus on being productive instead of busy.” - Timothy Ferriss

“Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.” - Franz Kafka

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligence planning and focuses effort.” - Paul Meyer

“If we boost productivity, we can improve economic growth.” - Tony Abbott

“People who feel good about themselves produce good results.” - Ken Blanchard

“I have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of companies to set up, lists of people who can make things happen. Each day I work through these lists, and that sequence of calls moves me forward.” – Richard Branson

“The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity” – Tom Peters

“The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.” - Thomas Sowell

“Productivity is not just about doing more. It is about creating more impact with less work.” - Prerna Malik

“Don’t worry about breaks every 20 minutes ruining your focus on a task. Contrary to what I might have guessed, taking regular breaks from mental tasks actually improves your creativity and productivity. Skipping breaks, on the other hand, leads to stress and fatigue.” – Tom Rath

“Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.” – Albert Einstein

“Nothing will work unless you do.” - John Wooden

“Understanding your employee’s perspective can go a long way towards increasing productivity and happiness.” – Kathryn Minshew

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” – Stephen King

“If you are interested in balancing work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable.” – Donald Trump

[hiveflux]

6 Tips to Work from Home

Nowadays it is more and more usual the choice of working from home. In a first glance, it has everything to be a great idea, no more time wasting commuting from home to the office, the chance of working on your pyjamas and relax when you really need, but it can also lead to procrastination and turn out to be not as productive as it seemed. 

You need to follow some rules to avoid getting distracted and missing your deadlines. These 6 tips will help you be more productive while working from home: 

1. Designate a Workplace. If you regularly use part of your home exclusively for conducting business, it will help you step into your working mode.

2. Dress for Work. This doesn’t mean you need to put on a suit or dress, but there is a psychological benefit to wear proper clothes. Dress in a way to set clear boundaries between work and leasure.

3. Keep a Daily Work Regime. Setting boundaries is vital. You want to avoid the temptation of becoming available 24/7 to work phone calls and emails. There’s time to work, and there’s time to be home, even when sharing the same space.

4. Engage Socially. Working remotely can prevent you from building workplace relationships and reduce the chances of meeting new people at the office. Schedule occasional out-of-office meals with colleagues to keep a bond at work and stay in the loop.

5. Set Deadlines. The best strategy to structuring a day’s work at home is timing. Break up the day by setting yourself deadlines to keep things on track, then take a short comfort breaks after each work slot. Following the Pomodoro technique is a great way to keep a balance or focused work and breaks.

6. Have a To-Do List. Each morning, make a detailed list of that day’s tasks and keep track of them. Staying on track of your deadlines will also help you feel accomplished and reduce the stress of pending work.

Do you have more productivity tips to work from home? Share with us!