How we got extra few hours in the 24hr day - short story of the culture and development of Colibri.IO

Karol Pokojowczyk, CEO Colibri IO

Last months we’ve been focused on the development of the new version of our app - Colibri IO. We can see the finishing line but we can’t call it a day yet. But in the meantime, I was thinking about the things I’ve learned during last months and ways I’ve discovered.

I know that most of you have certain ways of work generated and optimized - but trying out new things is always a great experience.

Here’s a few new things which we used or which helped us squeeze even more from our productivity:

1. The pomodoro technique

This is a time management solution similar to other timeboxing techniques that many programming and collaboration teams have adopted.

Basically, it’s 5 simple steps. And you need a timer, like a kitchen timer, but of course there are apps for that too.

Steps:

- Tasks identification

- Set your timer to 25-minutes (or 1 Pomodoro) and work

- When the timer ends, put a checkmark beside the completed tasks

- Take a 5-minute break before the next Pomodoro

- Repeat!

After 4 Pomodoros (120 minutes), take a longer break - 15-30 minutes. After this break, you repeat the cycle.

This technique helped us to fix bugs quicker and more effective.

2. Gmail tabs and filtering

There are two sides of the same coin with Gmail tabs. In the sea of mails, offers, requests and spam – tabs work perfectly. When you have only 30 minutes to focus on your mail – it’s super effective. But then I stumbled upon Mailchimp’s report about open rate (http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-new-inbox-is-affecting-open-rates/) and came to conclusion that what’s best for users is a problem for marketers and ecommerces.

3. Group ticketing system - i.e. Asana

Asana helped us with task management. A very simple app for teams. Plan, organize and stay in sync. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on task management, it works pretty well combined with Pomodoro technique.

4. Get early feedback on your MVP with Marketing Automation - i.e. Klaviyo

All of our work wouldn’t be worth the effort if we didn’t know our users first reactions. So we created a simple demo/tour to see what people think and emailed a link to the most active users this week by using Klaviyo, marketing automation tool.

Lively reactions and tons of feedback turn out to be a great motivation for the whole team!

Conclusions

Just a few simple things can bring fresh perspective in days filled with ordinary duties.

And what are your methods? Would you like to share?