Life is bigger than London…
I’ve spent the last year in London working on a neat project called Tinggly, we’ve re-imagined the gift experience business. Forget about deal sites and local experiences, we’ve decided to dream a little bigger… www.tinggly.com offers the top gift experiences from every country in the world! That’s right the whole gosh darn planet, everything from underwater golf in China to flying over Mount Everest!
Given Tinggly’s global service it’s apt that our team is based in multiple timezones, we have people everywhere from Lithuania to the Philippines! To facilitate working remotely we’ve utilised the best internet based tools to manage and complete tasks, there are three internet based services that we use every day, these are Skype, Asana & Google Drive.
Skype is always open on both my laptop and my phone. It let’s the whole team get together with it’s free video conferencing, this allows up to 10 people to be in a “face to face” video conversation making communication & meetings super easy. Skype can also be used to send instant messages to each other, both to an individual and to the group. One of the really neat features of Skype’s instant messenger is that files can be dragged and dropped into the chat box and instantly sent over to the person you are speaking with. Oh yea Skype is also… FREE!
Asana is a task management service, it hands down beats rival services Basecamp and Trello. Essentially Asana is a to do list. Tasks can be assigned to different team members & have due dates scheduled. A task can be placed within a project or have a certain tag assigned to it, this makes it easy to find out what is going on in larger projects. My favourite thing about Asana is the comments feature, this enables team members to give feedback and updates on tasks within Asana, saving oodles of cc’d emails from piling up in my inbox. Files can also be attached to tasks, you can drag and drop them from your desktop or if you are using Google Drive/Dropbox/Box you can link your account directly to Asana. You guessed it... for small teams Asana is also completely FREE!
Google Drive is where we store files and collaborate. Google Drive provides a file storage service that is free for the first 15GB. It’s paid service provides 100GB of storage space and is £1.50 per month, way cheaper than it’s competitors Dropbox and Box which are both priced at £7.50 per month. The second big differentiator about Google Drive is it’s suit of collaborative work tools. These provide an online alternative to Microsoft Office. Drive has the options to create spreadsheets, documents, drawings, presentations and forms. The really awesome feature about Drive’s work spaces is the collaborative aspect. Projects can be shared with multiple people who can then view and edit a file. The mind blowing part is that people can edit something simultaneously, making it perfect for teams who want to all update a file while discussing it over skype. As it is so easy to share files, it makes reviewing, editing and approving work very simple. Keeping with the theme of this article, all of Google Drive work tools are also 100%... FREE!
So, the thought struck me... Why I am staying in London, with such a high cost of living and in many ways a low quality of life? If I am able to work productively with people in other countries, perhaps I could get out of London and explore the world, testing out Tinggly experiences along the way! So four weeks ago I packed up my life in London and hit the road. If anything i’ve managed to get more work done while also experience amazing things, from the machine gun range in Las Vegas to a Helicopter tour of the grand canyon. Welcome to the mobile world of the 21st century, what is stopping you from getting out there and having your own adventures? Because people, the world is bigger than London!
