October 2018 Summaries

Sommer Cronck, a real estate agent and founder of Best Bellington Homes, used app automation tool Zapier to automate her leads and contacts management processes, saving her at least 30-40% of time previously spent on manual data entry. By connecting Office 365 and LionDesk with Zaps, she can now focus on growing her business and giving clients an unforgettable experience during a life-changing moment. With these automated workflows, Sommer can manage her contacts and leads in one spot, track conversations, and save time to grow her business.

The 10 developer tools mentioned in this article are designed to help maximize productivity across various aspects of a developer's job, from writing code to managing project workflows and checking backend website functionality. These tools include GitHub for social coding and collaboration, Bitbucket for team collaboration and workflow management, GitLab for streamlined development using Auto DevOps, Jenkins.io for open-source automation and building at scale, Sifter for bug and issue tracking, Asana for small teams looking for simple collaborative task management, Bootstrap for building responsive mobile-first sites, Chrome DevTools for plugin-based debugging and visual confirmation, The Noun Project for sourcing icons, Stack Overflow for learning and advancing a career in development. These tools cater to different needs and skill levels, providing a comprehensive solution for developers to improve their workflow and efficiency.

Pranav Vora, founder and CEO of Hugh & Crye, a men's fashion brand, was looking for a way to automate manual processes in his business, particularly when it came to managing customer email campaigns. He discovered Zapier, an app automator that allows users to integrate disparate apps and create custom workflows. With Zapier, Pranav and his team were able to seamlessly integrate their eCommerce platform with their email marketing tool, Mailchimp, creating a more streamlined process for tracking customer purchases and sending targeted email campaigns. By using Zapier's filters and conditional logic tools, such as Paths, the team was able to automate tasks that previously required manual data export and segmentation. This newfound automation has allowed Pranav and his team to focus on improving their product and customer experience, rather than spending time on tedious administrative tasks.

"Collaboration" is a hot word in the business world, but it may not always be beneficial. Organizations often focus on its benefits without considering the risks, such as reduced focused work time due to increased interactions and meetings, lopsided contributions from team members, top performer burnout, and bottlenecks that stall work. To encourage collaboration while avoiding these pitfalls, organizations can reduce interactions required for collaborative efforts, set boundaries to protect individual time and energy, spread out decision-making to others in the organization, and balance their reward system to praise both individual achievements and teamwork. By understanding these common problems and implementing strategies to prevent them, teams can stay productive and reap the benefits of collaboration.

Cognitive biases are common thinking errors that hinder rational decision-making, affecting everything around us, including our work. To overcome these biases, one must acknowledge their existence and utilize tools to balance out irrational tendencies. Optimism bias leads to overestimating success odds, while negativity bias causes an excessive focus on negative aspects. Confirmation bias involves prioritizing confirming information over contradictory facts, the sunk cost fallacy results from investing too much time and resources into a failing proposition, anchoring effect influences emphasis on specific metrics, and the IKEA effect applies when creating or contributing to something. The goal gradient effect inspires progress toward goals as they near completion, while cognitive miser theory suggests minimizing effort in problem-solving to conserve mental energy. By recognizing and leveraging these biases, individuals can make more informed decisions and improve their professional outcomes.

You can create a unique online shopping experience for your customers by personalizing every aspect of your Shopify store. Start by adding a custom domain to your store, which will make it instantly recognizable as yours. Next, choose a theme that aligns with your brand and customize its design using the Sections tab. You can add or remove sections, change their order, and even upload custom graphics to enhance the look of your store. Additionally, you can tweak your store's colors, typography, social media, and checkout experience to create a cohesive brand identity. If you're feeling adventurous, you can also edit your store's code using Shopify's Code page to make it truly unique. Furthermore, personalizing your shipping labels and creating customized receipts with Zapier can help reinforce your brand's image. By taking the time to customize these elements, you can turn your Shopify store into a memorable and engaging online shopping experience that will keep customers coming back for more.

A well-documented process is essential to avoid roadblocks and ensure the success of a team. Without clear guidelines, teams can spend eight hours per week searching for information or reworking inefficient processes. To steer around common project management roadblocks, it's crucial to document processes, establish dependencies with other teams and departments, define roles and responsibilities, create formal request forms, and refine processes over time. By doing so, teams can remove headaches, turn out awesome projects without unnecessary hassle and stress, and reap the benefits of a reliable process.

Disasters can have unpredictable consequences and can affect remote employees in unique ways. Businesses should create an emergency preparedness plan that accounts for remote workers, including how to keep the business operating, accounting for employees, and succession planning. The plan should also consider how to leverage remote workers for business continuity if there is a disaster at the physical location. Many organizations with remote workers lack plans for accounting for their employees, despite having resources available on creating emergency preparedness plans. A well-thought-out plan can help businesses respond effectively in an emergency, including knowing who needs to know and distributing the plan to relevant team members. Regularly updating employee information and identifying single points of failure are also crucial components of a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan.

Don't Repeat Yourself' (DRY) is a concept in software engineering that aims to reduce repetition in code by referring back to a single source of reusable code whenever possible. The principle can be applied to daily tasks beyond coding, such as work productivity and routine activities, to save time and reduce human error. To identify areas for DRY, log daily activities for at least a week, including routine tasks, unplanned tasks, annual tasks, and ask others about their routine tasks. Categorize tasks into pain points, bottlenecks, time-consuming tasks, and repetitive tasks to prioritize those that benefit from DRY. Create templates for frequently used documents or processes, find the right apps to automate repetition, and use automation tools like Zapier to streamline workflows and outsource repetitive tasks to machines. By implementing DRY principles in work life, individuals can save time, reduce stress, and focus on high-priority tasks that require human expertise.

This Zap allows you to create a pull request from your chat room of choice, making it easier to collaborate with team members. It also enables the creation of GitHub issues from new Slack channel messages and connects Gmail with GitHub to notify the team when new commits happen. Additionally, Zaps can be used to get features, stories, and issues into your preferred tool, such as creating a Sprint.ly defect from a GitHub issue or adding new Pivotal Tracker stories to GitHub as new issues. The platform's webhooks feature allows users to hook up any site or API without writing much code, making it easy to set up email alerts for activity in an app or site. Furthermore, Zaps can be used to track and monitor site uptime by connecting Pingdom to Campfire, which will post to your Campfire room when a Pingdom alert goes off about your site.

Facebook lead ads have revolutionized the way real estate agents collect leads, providing a quick and painless process that eliminates manual segmenting and reduces drop-offs. Agents can target specific demographics, such as first-time homebuyers or people who've recently moved, and use custom audiences to keep marketing to existing leads. Timing is also crucial, with research showing that responding within five minutes of initial contact increases conversion rates. A lead nurturing system can help agents stay top of mind with potential leads, while experimenting with different ad styles and tapping into natural human curiosity can increase engagement. By leveraging current events and automating workflows using tools like Zapier, real estate agents can generate high-quality leads and transform their business.