Are You a Collaboration Hacker?

When I was growing up, you didn't want to be called a hack. It meant you were a bad writer or athlete. Now everybody wants to be a hack – it's a good thing. We have BioHackers (food & athletic experts), GrowthHackers (revenue generating experts), LifeHackers (efficiency experts) and many many more. Might I suggest a new type of hacker – at least according to a rudimentary Google search – that doesn't exist yet? The Collaboration Hacker.

Rise of the Modern Distributed Workforce:
We live in an interconnected world. When I was young and my father travelled overseas for work, he would always send me a postcard from his journey. Now he just hops on Skype from some far flung corner of the world and shows me what he sees out his hotel window. The same is true of the workplace. No longer must all employees be on the same floor in the same building. They don't even need to be in the same time zone or country. But what they do need to be is collaborating, both internally and with customers, preferably online. And that's where Collaborating Hacking comes in. It's all about escaping the rigid, VPN-driven world of the intranet. It's about creating WorkSpaces, and apps within those workspaces, and managing projects and documents together. And making all of that accessible from anywhere.

Collaborating From 3000 Miles Away:
Just to give you one example - I have a creative writing partner in Los Angeles. We used to email drafts back and forth. There's nothing scarier than logging into Gmail and seeing a thread with 100+ messages. How are you going to find the previous draft with that oh-so-brilliant snippet of dialogue that was cut out that you now want back in? But by using WorkSmart, we're able to efficiently collaborate without using Gmail. We still talk on the phone occasionally – it's good to hear your collaborator's voice sometimes – but the cloud has really changed our processes. We are, for lack of a better term, amateur Collaboration Hackers. So what activities in your life are streamlined through cloud WorkSpaces? What are your favorite Collaboration Hacks?

Tweet us @worksmartapps and we'll share your ideas with the rest of our customers.