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🧰 3 Tools to Make Remote Work Flow
Published about 5 hours ago • 4 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: helping remote teams work together without adding more meetings.
Tooltester is mostly remote: Barcelona HQ, teammates across Spain and Germany, and usually someone working somewhere else.
Today, I’m sharing three tools that help teams think, plan, and explain things more clearly.
Plus: a smarter way to share PDFs, a 30-second meeting fix, and a smart-glasses privacy story that is hard to ignore.
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Some ideas are hard to explain in a chat thread, email or Trello comment. Miro gives your team an endless whiteboard for sketching flows, clustering sticky notes, and running workshops together in real time. It comes with templates for things like business plans, mind maps, roadmaps and dozens more.
The basics are solid, but its AI is the interesting bit right now. Sidekicks are an AI assistant on the canvas, helping you cluster feedback, summarize research, or spot gaps in a flow. Then you have AI Workflows that, for example, can grab a messy discovery board, pull in Jira tickets and Slack messages, and turn it into clear output for your project.
The free plan is generous to start but caps you at three editable boards and basic collaboration features. And if you are not a “visual thinker”, the infinite canvas and zoom‑heavy navigation come with a bit of a learning curve – especially on larger, busier boards.
🛠️ Alternative to: FigJam, Mural, Lucidspark 👉 Visit:miro.com 💰 From $8/user/month | Free plan available
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If your projects live across five apps, ClickUp can handle them back into one place through tasks, docs, goals, and dashboards. It is my project manager of choice, partly because the free plan is unusually generous.
I like the flexible views, custom fields, and the fact that it looks modern next to old-school Trello (what we use at Tooltester). It also connects to Claude and other AI assistants through MCP, and I find this super useful as I don’t need to manually create tasks or move items across views.
The downside: ClickUp can feel overwhelming at first because there are so many views and options, and it sometimes feels like it is trying to be every tool at once. And because paid plans are priced per user, costs add up quickly as your team grows.
🛠️ Alternative to: Trello, Asana, Monday.com 👉 Visit:clickup.com 💰 From $7/month per user | Free plan available
Sometimes a 90-second video beats a meeting and a wall of text. Tella lets you record your screen and camera, send a link, and let people watch when it suits them.
The result looks polished with very little effort, and its AI editing can remove silences and filler words automatically. The free tier adds a small watermark, but it’s fairly generous. And paid plans start at $13 a month, way cheaper than Loom’s (from $18 a month).
Beyond quick updates, you can also use it for walkthroughs, mini tutorials, and short course content, but it stays pretty focused. You will not get the heavier, studio‑style editing features you might find in tools like Synthesia or Descript.
🛠️ Alternative to: Loom, Screen Studio, Vidyard 👉 Visit:tella.com 💰 From $13/month | Free plan available
Here is one thing I did a couple of weeks ago. We had a useful PDF resource, but it was not super exciting (just a non-interactive PDF). Flipsnack turns a flat PDF into an interactive flipbook with page turns, embedded videos, and clickable links with analytics.
The clever part for marketers: add a lead form inside the flipbook, connect it to HubSpot or Salesforce, and check which pages people actually read. It’s handy for creating interactive lead magnets (like ours), catalogs, and portfolios.
The free plan gives you a decent amount to start with, but the most interesting features, like interactive elements and detailed analytics, are reserved for paid plans. And with paid plans starting at $38 a month, it can feel pricey if you are not using it heavily.
🛠️ Alternative to: Issuu, FlippingBook, simple PDFs 👉 Visit:flipsnack.com 💰 From $38/month | Free plan available (3 flipbooks)
⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack
Most bad meetings are already bad before anyone joins: no clear goal, no owner, and no prep. That is how the first ten minutes disappear into “so… why are we here?” It is rarely a people problem; it is almost always a framing problem.
The fix takes 30 seconds. Before sending the invite, add four things to the description:
Objective: the one outcome this meeting needs to produce
Owner: who is actually running it
Time box: how long (and make sure to stick to it!)
Pre-read links: anything people should look at beforehand
If you cannot fill those in, that is a good sign this should be an email or an async update instead. Some productivity experts also recommends sharing the agenda and prep up front so your colleagues can prepare the meeting – makes sense.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
We all knew the AI-glasses era would get weird. We just did not expect it this fast. Meta is being sued over its AI smart glasses after reports that workers reviewing footage to “improve the AI” saw deeply private moments, including people in bathrooms 🤨.
Lots of us already have concerns about being recorded all the time, and with smart glasses now quietly blending in, those concerns feel even more valid.
Another issue it highlights is what we accept without thinking. If a gadget has a camera pointed at the world, check the privacy settings before you click Agree. And maybe add your own rule too: no cameras in bedrooms, bathrooms, or anywhere friends have not clearly said they are okay with it.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll check tools to turn users into qualified leads.
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