Productivity Tools for OD Professionals

Sharpening your tools for 2023

For OD practitioners, 2023 is a tiny crevasse to review and sharpen their own productivity tools. The right and updated tools can make a big difference in your OD practice.

For this issue, we assembled a slew of online tools for the independent OD practitioners. This is not a definitive set. Read more reviews if needed. Check with co-practitioners for their own experiences. Use the “free to try” offers before suggesting, using or deploying in real-clients’ organizations.

OD Project Management

Apply a project management and collaboration platform that provides a user-friendly interface to manage your OD projects and your client teams. Aspire for both visibility and transparency with your clients in mind. Moving to online project management software for the first time? Start with Trello, a Kanban-style list-making software that's widely used across the freelancing community to manage engagements. Those with more experience can continue or try either: ClickUp, Asana, and Monday.

Collaboration and Document Management

Still so challenging in this digital age, best way to enhance organization’s productivity and performance is for the teams to collaborate in working with documents online. Joining the stalwarts: Word and GoogleDocs, 2023 will have the design-centric platform, CanvaDocs in this productivity space. CanvaDocs is enhanced by AI. Microsoft and Google will also add AI this year.

PandaDoc is an all-in-one document automation software that streamlines the process of creating, approving, and eSigning proposals, quotes, contracts, and more. DocuSign for digital signature and Bonsai are both integrating and automating every step of your OD practice (and business!) from proposal to engagement completion.

Accounting, Invoicing and Time Tracking

Shifting your accounting and invoicing online? Wait no longer. 2023 will favour the time- and battle-tested accounting, invoicing and even time tracking apps. These are: Zoho Books, FreshBooks, Xero and Wave for accounting and invoicing software for freelancers. If you need a separate time tracking app, try the customizable tools to monitor your client engagements: Toggl or Harvest.

Whiteboards

Virtual whiteboards enable you to work together with your team, digitally. They offer unlimited space for collaborative discussions, problem solving, learning journeys, and basically an upgrade of what traditional whiteboard is all about: teaching, communicating, learning, illustrating and working together. This space will still be dominated by MIRO in 2023 with its lite and free version. Alternatively, you can also try Mural, Limnu, ConceptBoard, and Explain Everything. Note that more are expected during the year. But wait, the video conferencing apps have also added whiteboarding services too.

VideoCons

The pandemic ushered the rise of video conference tools. Zoom led the pack followed by MsTeam and GoogleMeet. All now offers whiteboard and online presentations to the delight of some users. Last year, Whereby joined in and offered integrations with the popular video cons including MIRO and allowing better breakout groups, virtual classes, events, and workshops experience with ease.

Note Taking

Despite many newcomers, the note taking apps for 2023 will still be led by the standard bearers. Evernote will still lead together with Microsoft’s OneNote, and Google Keep. Others have also gained significant traction among young practitioners. Popular among writers and researchers, Notion offers a wide range of organizational tools, such as task management, calendars, and databases, and Obsidian, which is billed as “second brains” and Roam Research.

AI

The generative AI will gain the most traction as productivity tool. Note that ChatGPT hit 1.0 Million users in its first five days. A feat like no other today. We have selected a guide for the Productivity AI hosted by Francesco D'Alessio. In this 7-minute video, he explained where is generative AI now and how it will progress in the year like organizing your content and getting something for you. It’s like having a full-time research assistant at your beck and call. A Beginner's Guide to Productivity Al.

NOTES

Since the previous #22 OD Play Notes issue, the abbreviation “AI” will now mean Artificial Intelligence while our Appreciative Inquiry tool will always be spelled out or noted in full.

The previous issue got a lot of comments and requests for more AI information.

(a) One asked how old is AI. Historically, AI development can be traced as early as 1950’s with Alan Turing and his band of code breakers.

(b) Another asked: What competencies should OD professionals develop? Some early testers noted that being a human-to-computer conversation platform, ChatGPT may need competencies about “prompting,” “contextualizing,” and human-like conversations much akin to how we learned searching in Google over the years.

(c) Another asked: Will OD practitioners need to learn AI? Definitely. The big tech, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are all busy incorporating AI with their traditional products. This year, ChatGPT 4 will be introduced. It will be “relatively more human, faster and will not avoid specific questions.” Interestingly, some AI detector apps are being developed and tested.