I’m a freelancer who works from home, a dad of young children and a forgetful socializer. This means that balancing meetings and conversations at work with my colleagues at various publications with a social life spread across my own range of chat apps can be quite difficult.
I’m not even a big social media person, but even I have to use Microsoft Teams, Slack, email and Google chat, along with Telegram, WhatsApp, text messages and Twitter. Each. Single. Day. It often feels impossible to follow, leaving me stressed, distracted and paranoid that I might be missing a very important message.
Luckily, I found one app that makes it all possible: the workplace organizer Rambox.
Work and play simplified, without stress
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I hate notifications. Constant pings and reminders that someone else needing something from me can sometimes seem like a lot. But every chat app I use requires attention at different times throughout the day, and reaching for another device because it’s started making noise or flashing at me while I’m in the middle of a stream can be incredibly distracting.
Rambox helps me solve this by allowing me to put every notification in one place. It’s a hookup tool that brings together almost every social and communication app you can think of. It supports a variety of instant messaging apps, email clients, social media accounts and more. Having them all in one place simplifies their management and means that when I’m working at my desk, I don’t have to stop what I’m doing just to respond to a message — it’s there. I also know I’m not missing anything if I haven’t looked at my phone for a while, and honestly, I can type a reply to someone on WhatsApp much faster on a desktop keyboard than I can on a touchscreen.
It also makes it easy to add new chat apps and services to my daily routine. When Digital Trends switched from Slack to Teams for our internal communications, all I had to do was add Teams to Rambox, and everything I needed was right there with every other app and tool I use on a day-to-day basis. I didn’t have to set up a completely separate app, there was no extra window I had to keep open every day, and I didn’t have to make sure to start the app in the morning — so I wouldn’t miss an important communication from the big boss.
The free tier is good enough
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Even better, Rambox is completely free. The basic version comes with support for more than 700 apps, including all the most popular and important ones. There’s also real-time syncing across my devices, so if I step away from my desk, I can use my phone or laptop and pick up where I left off. Rambox will ping you there if you don’t read the desktop message, so it’s easy to jump from one to the other. If you ever need everyone to leave you alone, you can switch to Focus mode.
The paid versions offer more, such as built-in spell-checking and premium support, but are aimed more at organizations and businesses deploying Rambox for their workers.
For me, however, the free version of Rambox is more than enough and has proven to be an absolute lifesaver that prevents me from feeling overwhelmed by an avalanche of apps, notifications and requests that would otherwise put my toddler’s endless cries of “Daddy, Daddy” to shame.
It’s not the only option
After rambling a few hundred words about Rambox, I have to admit that until recently I was using an extremely outdated pre-1.0 edition of Rambox. Newer versions kept crashing, failed to install, and wouldn’t log into my accounts; it was a mess. That all seems to have been fixed in the latest release, so I went back to a safe and up-to-date version of the app, but I shouldn’t have been so stubborn. There are many alternative umbrella messaging apps like this.
If you want a slightly different set of features and price levels, other popular options include Franz, which has a free spell checker included; All-in-One Messenger, which is completely free; the versatile Apptorium Workspaces, which lets you create custom collections of apps, files, and folders for specific projects; internet-focused station; or the fully open source Hamsket.
I don’t know which one would be right for you, and it’s possible that one of these would be better for me. But for now, Rambox does the trick. Until it breaks or I start feeling overwhelmed again, it will remain my go-to for saving time and staying in touch with people. Now I just need to get better at actually answering.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn