Top 5 Tech Tips to Help You Do Your Job Better

We’re blogging from the Next Generation of Government Training Summit. Follow along @NextGenGov and read more blog posts here.

Prezi as an alternative to PowerPoint. Google Drive as a means to collaborate on documents in realtime. GitHub as a way to share your code with the world. Know that person in the office who always has the best tech tips?

In a recent NextGen breakout session, Isaiah Joo of the State Department revealed different ways to be more effective at work with tech tips, websites, and shortcuts to get the job done and better accomplish your agency’s mission.

“It’s a huge stereotpye that millenials are always connected and cannot get rid of technology,” Joo said. “I think this is actually advantageous but it can also be a negative stereotype. lets see if we can take this stereotype and use it to our advantage.”

Joo went through over a dozen helpful tech tips, tricks and sites to help you do your job better, faster and more efficiently. Below are our top five of his favorite tools.

#1:Prezi &Bunker

Joo explained that these two tools are presentation software for the 21st century. You can manipulate images on top of each other or inside of each other or embed rich media, and put videos into your presentation. They also offer up slick templates to make your presentations more visually exciting. “They’re the opposite of ‘death by Powerpoint’,” Joo laughed.

#2:MediaWiki

MediaWiki helps you create your own internal Wikipedia database for your agency. “The State Department has done this withDiplopedia,” Joo explained. “It’s officially our internal encyclopedia. Plus, every action you take on Diplopedia is tied to your professional account so you always know who is editing and contributing.”

#3:Buffer

If social media is part of your job, or if it’s just a big part of your personal life, you should be using Buffer for scheduling and content, Joo said. Buffer lets you compose tweets and status updates—which can be posted across multiple networks at once—and helps you decide when to post them. You can post them immediately, or choose the “Add to Buffer” option, which lets Buffer decide when to post it. So even if you only check in on social media once a day for 20 minutes, you can be scheduling across several networks all day long.

#4: IFTTT

IFTTT stands for ‘if this, then that.’ It creates automation for you amongst tasks when you create what are called personal ‘recipes’ for the app. If you find yourself wasting a lot of time with repetitive internet tasks this is a time saving app for you. Say every time you post a photo to Facebook, you also want to save it to Dropbox (which is a file storage app). That’s two separate actions and it takes up your time. But if you create a recipe on IFTTT that says, ‘every time I post a photo to Facebook, also upload it to Dropbox,’ it’s all done automatically for you. As you can imagine there are countless uses for this sort of service that could save you time.

#5:Trello

Have too much going on at work with big teams? Hard to keep track of multiple projects? Joo suggests using Trello as a project management tool. It helps manage internal workflow, and offers task assignments and a calendar view.

What are your favorite tech tips and tools?

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