Best Practices: Tips and Tricks for Ruling Work

Even the smallest work item has a proper place and its own space to share, connect and collaborate. Below is an item-specific stream. In one view you can see all data, discussions and activity for that item, and collaborate right from there. If you collaborate around a task, your discussions will flow from the task’s stream to its milestone’s stream to its project’s stream…and all the way up into the main stream. Know where everything goes and let your work flow.

Let Rule organize your discussions for you by referencing items (projects, tasks, documents, accounts, etc.) that pertain to your discussion when you post to the stream. When you reference your work items from the main stream, your discussions will be automatically organized for you within your referenced items’ streams. You never have to dig through an inbox again.

You can find your drop email address in Settings > Email Notifications. Save this as a contact in your email client and name it something like “Rule Stream.” When you send emails to this address it will post to the stream and notify everyone in your parent user group. They can reply from Rule or from email— either way, everything will be tracked in Rule.

Whether you are focused on project management, CRM deals, sharing documents or collaborating in the stream, just click the “My Tasks” icon in the bottom right from wherever you are in Rule, and this handy little gadget makes it easy to scroll through your task timeline to see what’s due today, this week, overdue etc.  Add, edit and check off personal, project and CRM tasks as you go.

Do you want to share something with another user or group? Click the share button.

In work and life, everything depends on something else. Do you want to connect a document to a project? A wiki checklist to a task? A contact to a deal? Click the connect button to create a relationship between what your viewing and anything to which it pertains.

Project Templates are easy and useful. You can choose one of your Rule projects from a list and you’ll be able to create a new project with the same tasks, milestones and a timeline matched up with your new project’s due date. Project templates save time, money and manual labor.

You can easily manage the flow from Contacts to Leads, Leads to Customers and Customers to Projects. So go makes some connections and collaborate with your team in Rule to track and win some deals. Then when that customer flows into a Rule Project and you collaborate with your team and customer to deliver the goods, you’ll get that repeat business and you’ll be Ruling.

Create WorkGroups to quickly share items and communicate with multiple people at once.

Mass Communicate Notify groups and/or individuals of your stream posts. Your parent user group is the default group to be notified whenever you post from the main stream. Those notified can reply from any email client, and your conversations will be tracked as if everyone had been in Rule all along.

Documents: Uploading, Sharing and Connecting is One Easy Process You can upload multiple documents at once to how ever many folders you want. When you upload documents to a folder, they are shared with all users who have access to that folder. Uploading to Project and CRM folders also connects them.

Use The Universal Actions Menu It’s on the top right, and it’s your best friend in Rule. If you’re working on something, but realize you need to do something else, use the Universal Actions Menu to create anything from where you are without being distracted. Add tasks, upload documents, create notes, and more— all on the fly from wherever you are in Rule.

Embrace that saucy minx called “accountability.” No one wants a “Big Brother” looking over their shoulder. At the same time, managers need to be able to see the who, what, when, where, why and how in order to make important decisions in the now, and make strategic ones for the future. Our team started to embrace the productivity stream when it became their friend; an objective reporter on all of the great work and conversation surrounding getting things done. On the flip side, when you filter a date range in the activity Stream it’s clear who’s been slacking off. It’s astonishing to us how many customers report that they originally came to Rule looking for a project management or CRM alternative, and that, in the end, the Productivity Stream became an even greater solution for a problem that they didn’t even know they had.

Here’s the “Rule Big 10″ that have helped our team get the most out of our product:

1. Check your task list first thing in the morning.
2. Post a stream status when you begin to work, summarizing what you plan on doing for the day.
3. Mark things as complete (or, if using task statuses, “Waiting for Approval”) immediately when done.
4. If you spend more than 30 min working on something that is not on your task list, add it to your task list so it’s tracked.
5. If you are working on something that takes more than one day to complete, quote and track actual hours worked and use the task status feature when it makes sense (ie: awaiting approval).
6. Post a status update when you leave and return from breaks and/or lunch.
7. Post/notify when you have a question for any/all team members.
8. Post a status update when you run into a wall that may cause you to deviate from your planned work load for the day.
9. Post/notify when you need to manage expectations of team members due to any unforeseen change.
10. Post a stream status at the end of the day summarizing what you actually did and/or learned.

Now you know how to Rule…