10 Apps We Can’t Live Without While Working From Home

1. Slack – We love this app for many reasons including its great user experience. We use Slack for many business applications including video calls, sharing files and announcements. However, Slack is also a great way to reduce the feeling of isolation while at home. We use Slack to connect with our teammates through activities such as virtual happy hours, sharing photos of pets and recommending our favorite products.
2. Audible – While we no longer have long commutes to worry about, listening to a book or podcast is a great way to break up the day and learn new things. Audible’s selection of books is incredible and there is always something new to listen to.
3. 1Password – Security is so important at home and at the office. We use 1Password to secure our passwords for different sites. 1Password makes managing all of your passwords simple and it can also generate passwords for you as well as notify you if a site you are using was compromised so you know when you need to change your password. 
4. WhatsApp – In order to communicate with family and friends overseas, this app is a must-have! With air travel restricted, WhatsApp makes it easy to chat with family, friends or coworkers outside the US for free. It also utilizes secure end-to-end encryption so everything is safe and secure. It works over wifi so you don’t have to have a cellular connection in order to make a call or text.
5. Uber Eats – With so many small businesses and restaurants seeing the effects of the virus, it is important to shop local when ordering food for delivery. Many Uber Eats locations offer free delivery and allow you to stay in the safety of your own home but still enjoying food from your favorite restaurant.    
6. Spotify – Spotify features another excellent user interface. It’s simple to use and easy to navigate. The music selection is fantastic and the use of personalization to build custom mixes is spot on. We love to have music playing throughout the office and Spotify allows us to recreate this at home.
7. Nine – We use Office 360 at work and find the Nine integration with personal Google calendars to be a must-have feature. Combining the two calendars in one place allows for a single source of truth to find out if you’re free for a call or virtual meeting.
8. Otter – We recently discovered this app and have quickly become dependent on it. It generates rich notes from meetings, interviews, lectures or just a conversation.  Just hit play and it instantly starts transcribing.  Later you can search for specific parts of a conversation and replay it.  
9. Zoom – Zoom has been a great tool to communicate to the company as a whole. This week, we held an all company meeting with over 250 of us all joining via video from different locations. The platform preformed great the entire time with no glitches and people were also able to have discussion in the chat area of the app.
10. Twitter – Twitter has been indispensable for learning the latest breaking news. We follow verified sources on Twitter closely to see how we can respond to new developments and hear breaking news as it happens.

At Bottle Rocket, we completely retuned our operations for 100% remote work both internally and with our clients and partners. If you’d like to learn more about how we’ve done this and get actionable advice on how your teams can maintain connections and productivity in these trying times, just let us know. We’d be happy to share our tried and true tips for staying connected. Let’s connect!