When it comes to working smarter, certain tools are like the holy grail—and once you find them, you’re never going to let them go. From tools that help automate meetings, to ones that help create design elements and even animated GIF apps, there are so many to not only make you work more efficiently, but also with a smile on your face!
We asked the Litmus team to share their favorite tools, which are essential to helping them work smarter. Here is what they said:
Charlie Cook, Senior QA Engineer
CloudApp
What is CloudApp?
CloudApp is an all-in-one screen recording software to capture and embed HD video, screen recordings, GIFs, screencasts, screenshots, and marked up images throughout business workflows.
Why is this tool your favorite?
I’m sure there are lots of tools out there that do something similar and I can’t say I’ve tried them all, but nothing about CloudApp makes me want to investigate an alternative. It’s simple to use and annotate with. I like that when I use it, it automatically copies the URL to my clipboard for fast sharing.
How does CloudApp help you with your work, day to day?
You can’t really write up bug reports and test without providing context and replicable steps. I find CloudApp easy to use and I like being able to quickly send a public URL when chatting with colleagues about an issue.
Chris Tucker Mear, Senior Technical Program Manager
Meeter
What is Meeter?
Meeter is a meeting organization tool. It collates all upcoming meetings and calls from your calendar in one place.
Why is this tool your favorite?
Put simply, Meeter helps me never miss a meeting.
How does Meeter help you with your work, day to day?
Meeter automatically pops up a one-click “join” notification one minute before every meeting I have in my calendar, which makes my life so much easier when it comes to organising my work load and meeting schedule.
James Halliday, Director of Partnerships
Followup
What is Followup?
Followup is an email productivity suite that helps to keep emails and conversations from slipping through the cracks, by allowing you to set automated reminders that arrive at the top of the inbox, cutting through the noise.
Why is this tool your favorite?
It is the easiest and fastest way to set reminders to follow up with people.
How does Followup help you with your work, day to day?
I send a lot of emails and they often require follow ups a couple of weeks later. I don’t like using fully automated email tools that send the same follow up at a set cadence, so Followup is perfect for me. All I do is drop the date for follow up in the “bcc” and on the day, it sends me an email reminding me to follow up. Fast, simple, and effective.
Brian Feucht, Engineer Manager and SW Architect
Grafana
What is Grafana?
Grafana is an open source interactive data-visualization platform, which allows you to see data via charts and graphs that are unified into one dashboard for easier interpretation and understanding.
Why is this tool your favorite?
Grafana is one of the best tools around to see what our systems are doing. It does one thing really well and sticks to it. It is easy to use and has Dark Mode support. It has become an industry standard, with most other monitoring tools building support for this tool.
How does Grafana help you with your work, day to day?
It allows me to see metrics from various systems on dashboards, so I can quickly assess the health of those systems and triage what my next investigative steps may be if things are going wrong. Grafana also provides alerts, so it will notify the team if metrics fall outside of acceptable values. When alarms do go off, I’m directed to the metrics I need to start understanding the situation.
John Billington, Director of Product Management
Giphy
What is Giphy?
Giphy is a library of animated GIFs which can be used on Slack and other social apps.
Why is this tool your favorite?
It’s fast, easy, and adds some lightness to everyone in the chat threads. Giphy always seems to come up with the perfect GIF to express the moment or sentiment.
How does Giphy help you with your work, day to day?
Delivering product improvements is highly collaborative and stressful at times. Giphy can make the process a lot more fun!
Nicole Swift, Customer Support Senior Manager
Slack
What is Slack?
Slack is a messaging app for business that connects people to the information that they need.
Why is this tool your favorite?
Hands down Slack is my favorite tool. It’s so easy to use and organize. Also, as a remote company, it’s my life line to other people and teams—both for work and social stuff! The GIFs and emoji options (especially the custom emoji ones) make my work life entertaining;I’ve bonded with so many people in our social channels and through DMs.
How does Slack help you with your work, day to day?
I’m on the Customer Support team and we are constantly sharing communications from customers with other teams (feedback, kudos, ideas, issues, etc) and also helping other teams with customer or product questions. Slack is our hub for so many of these conversations. We also have several Zapier zaps set up so we can easily get feedback or questions into other apps—plus we use so many integrations to submit team requests, record feedback, connect with other people for random chats, etc. It’s so easy to have those all in one place.
Personally, I use it to wrangle all my other tools so I’m getting all my notifications in one place. And I love using Slack to set reminders to myself. I would have a really hard time getting through my work day without Slack—and that’s including the social component too!
Aleena Khan, Senior UX Designer
MyMind
What is MyMind?
MyMind is a way of saving things to your mind without wasting time organizing and categorizing. It does it all for you. With one click, you can save text highlights, images, articles, products or other bookmarks to your mind.
Why is this tool your favorite?
MyMind is a visual organization tool for the designers who never name their layers, who have absolutely no system for tracking design inspiration and absolutely just fly by the seat of their pants. No boards to name, no cards to add descriptions to, no organization of any sort, just vibes.
How does MyMind help you with your work, day to day?
I really use this to take screenshots of experiences and micro-interactions I like, and then throw them into MyMind. It becomes a nice collection of things I find inspiring when I start a new project, and I can select all and delete off my desktop with no regrets 😌. 10/10 recommend. (Plus, signing up is just so easy. No onboarding, just begin your beautiful hoarder habit immediately.)
Hannah Tiner, Email Design and Production Specialist
Figma
What is Figma?
Figma is a collaborative web application for interface design, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications.
Why is this tool your favorite?
Figma is a browser-based vector design tool that I use to create email design compositions efficiently and consistently. I love Figma’s powerful time-saving functions like being able to batch-change colors and fonts of multiple elements at once.
Auto-layout has a bit of a learning curve but is so helpful for dynamically changing content and creating modular templates. The community has also created a ton of helpful plugins that add much-needed features.
How does Figma help you with your work, day to day?
I work in Figma every day to create email imagery or full layouts before they are handed off to our talented developer. Our email design system lives in Figma as components, color palettes and asset libraries, which speeds up the design process. All these modules and styles are mirrored in our Design Library in Litmus Builder to ensure consistency. Figma has built-in collaboration features so team members can add comments and provide helpful feedback directly on the design.
About the Author
