If you’re a digital marketer or managing a team of remote digital marketers, it may very well mean that you are constantly overwhelmed with tasks, projects, and constant back-and-forth communication. Utilizing live website feedback tools can help alleviate some of this stress.
We gathered a list of the top productivity hints, including the use of live website feedback tools, that you can use to minimize that stress and improve how much you get done.
Eliminate Distractions
If you’re a digital marketer or managing a team of remote digital marketers may very well mean that you are constantly overwhelmed with tasks, projects, and constant back-and-forth communication. When you need to be involved in multiple processes all at the same time, it’s so easy to lose focus and get distracted.
When working with a bunch of different freelancers or distributed teams, sometimes we end up using a number of different tools and communication channels. Jumping between different communication channels can seriously harm your productivity and waste a lot of time.
More so, if you rely on phone calls and text messages to communicate with your team. Researches show that an unplanned call or text message pulls you away from what you‘ve been doing, and it can take a full 23 minutes to recover from. Every time you and your employee discuss some edits and changes over the phone or text message, you’re actually causing them to stop whatever task they’re on and it takes them longer to get back to work.
With the endless emails and screenshots, valuable information and discussions get buried into long threads, and managing feedback on the live website becomes a nightmare for the design and dev teams.
A website review platform is a great choice for distributed teams of freelancers in digital marketing and web development. Combining everything you need for productive work in the same interface, website review platforms allows teams to focus on their actual craft, and exchange live website real-time feedback, track and assign tasks, attach files, and exchange comments and messages about the project — all in the same tab.
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Prioritize & Delegate As Much As You Can
Delegating is probably one of the most important things that you and your team should do to boost your productivity. And it’s also the quickest most simple way for someone to scale and turn from a solo digital marketing professional, working as a freelancer, into a marketing agency business owner.
If you want to move on, scale your expertise and your income — the earlier you will start fighting the urge to do everything yourself — the better.
The ability to delegate to someone who can do the same better, and/or faster, and/or cheaper, and knowing which tasks to prioritize and which you’re able to delegate to colleagues is important for maximizing your productivity. Luckily, there’s a very simple matrix you can use to help manage your workload, dubbed the “Eisenhower matrix“, which defines tasks in four categories:
- Urgent and important
- Important but not urgent
- Urgent but not important
- Not urgent and not important
So do the homework, and start with mapping out all the tasks you and your team need to perform, and goals you need to achieve. Then range those tasks and subtasks by priority and set deadlines for each. Continue with defining the sources you need to make it happen most optimally, combining quality, speed, and cost. Finally, distribute the scope of work between the most relevant people, and no, it shouldn’t be you every time. Let professionals and craftsmen work their magic, and focus on running the project, growing your business, and winning new customers. A good way to look at it is pretty simple: every hour that you save for yourself by delegating work to other people — can help you grow the business and make more money.
Website feedback platforms like Webvizio will save you a lot of time and effort on planning and project management. Invite collaborators and experts and assign them different roles in the project. Then create custom tasks and assign them to the relevant team members with different priority, status, and deadlines.
Minimize Errors & Confusion
The best way to avoid most mistakes and misunderstandings with your customers or teammates is to provide as much clarity and transparency as possible. Clear project goals, frequent updates, and detailed instructions are the way to go if you want to save time and effort for yourself and your team.
Create detailed tasks with descriptions, references, examples, and attachments. Combined with thought-through project management it tasks assignments and tracking progress – it leaves little to no place for errors.
Smooth targeted communication is another key element to avoid errors and confusion. When communicating over the project, keep all the unrelated chatter aside and keep focused targeted discussions separated by the team, project, or task.
And finally, a great way to minimize errors & confusion is by providing your team & partners with as specific and easy-to-understand feedback as you can. And no feedback is more specific than a visual canvas with comments and ideas pinned to the exact elements you are discussing.
With annotation websites, you can pin your comment on any element of a live website or an image, so your real-time feedback exchange is very specific. You can seamlessly collaborate with multiple teams at the same time by commenting on and reviewing different projects within seconds. You can also invite your consultants or customers to comment directly on the website, without any hassles of logging in.
Organize & Optimize the Process
One of the most important tips that almost all highly successful and productive people usually share is: that there is a team behind any great project and any great achievement. And more often than not, the team IS the reason for the success.
So choosing the right people for your team and organizing your workflow might be critical for your project results.
Match your team structure and task allocation based on the project needs, and deadlines, and set distinctive roles and responsibilities upfront.
Of course, when you are working alone, or just with a couple of other people, it’s all very clear and easy to control, but when you are managing a digital marketing agency and may have multiple teams working on multiple projects at the same time, it’s much harder to oversee.
So instead of trying to communicate with everyone and collect information piece by piece, it would be a great idea to have defined roles in the team, such as team leads and project managers, that will provide you with a summarized and filtered update regarding their team’s part. But even if you don’t have a hierarchy of roles, you can still assign task owners and responsible people, coordinating their teammates, and making sure the progress is done.
With a website feedback platform like Webvizio you can assign different roles and permissions to users, tag people to assign them tasks, set priority and deadlines, and leave personal comments, right on the website or images that are in the works
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Stop Multitasking
It’s time to face it, multitasking is a myth. Yep, we said it.
Multiple studies confirmed that. People who think they can split their attention between multiple tasks at once aren’t getting more done. In fact, they’re doing less, getting more stressed out, and performing worse than those who single-task.
Research in neuroscience shows that the brain can’t do multiple tasks simultaneously, as we think it can. It just switches back and forth between tasks quickly. Each time we move from hearing music to writing a text or talking to someone, there is a stop/start process that goes on in the brain.
That start/stop/start process is a distraction that costs us extra time and energy and causes a drop in performance and fatigue.
So if you want to boost your and your team’s productivity it’s time to stop multitasking.
Instead — some planning at the beginning of a new project can save you a lot of time and stress along the road:
- Evaluate the full scope of work you and your mates need to do
- Define the final and the mid-term deadlines and split the project duration in intervals
- Prioritize
the work and tasks you need to do - Define an owner and/or executor for each task
- Think which tasks can be done in parallel (by different people) and what can only be done in sequence
It may sound like a lot of work initially, but historically it ALWAYS beats multitasking attempts in productivity, accuracy, and speed.
Website review platforms won’t do the planning part for you, but once it’s over, they offer all the functionality you need to organize your team’s productive work: assign different roles and responsibilities to your teammates, make different people responsible for different pages or parts of the project, prioritize the tasks and overview the progress with task status updates.
Chunk Down Your Project Goals
This rule is based on the previous one and originates from basic psychology, which proved time and time again that the same amount of work and effort, but broken down into clear and “attainable” small tasks is much easier for the human brain to process and conquer, it causes less resistance, so piece by piece the results are much quicker and better than if you set a massive, and important goal. So break your big project goals and tasks into small steps.
And to do that, planning is our best friend yet again.
Split your project goals into tiers or sprints and create to-do lists for each. Define the most relevant or qualified to perform each task and start assigning.
Live website feedback tools like Webvizio allow you to break your whole website project into different tabs by page, create sets of tasks for each of those pages, and assign different people to perform those tasks .
Track Your Progress With Live Website Feedback Tools
When the pace is high, and the funnel of incoming tasks is full, it’s easy to lose track of the progress we make, so it’s important to have it all registered somewhere and get back to review it regularly to make sure you are making progress toward your goals.
Efficiency is the measure of your team’s overall performance level, which assumes the minimum amount of time needed to generate maximum output.
So tracking the output, measuring your performance and productivity, and adjusting as you go — is a key element of any successful project.
To stay productive and on track, and more importantly, to make sure your team is on the same page — the more frequently and transparently you exchange updates and progress statuses, the better.
With an online annotation tool you and your team can set and update task statuses as you progress, mark comments on the website as resolved, or let your teammates do that once the assigned task is done. All the assigned and completed tasks can be reviewed at any time, so you have a secure logbook to go back to.
Conclusion On How Live Website Feedback Tools Can Help Digital Marketers
With millions of people all over the work working full-time or as a side hustle on online website projects and digital marketing, it’s only natural all those people are looking for ways to optimize and improve their work, and increase productivity. So it’s no wonder website feedback tools continue to grow in popularity and become more and more advanced.
With an increasing number of parallel projects running, web design and dev teams need solid and capable live website feedback collaboration tools, but they should be also affordable and friendly, or even free, like Webvizio, for those who are only in the beginning of their way.
Live website collaboration tools help promote and simplify teamwork. When your team can work together in real time, they build chemistry and relationships, allowing for frictionless creative flow and higher productivity levels.