Do you find yourself flicking between Google calendar, Slack, Teams and Zoom lately? Consolidating all your business platforms into one easy-to-use/real-time collaboration tool could optimise your company’s workflow. German outfit Shinefour may have the answer with their new service - Productivity Lab. The website as you might expect, is in German. So unless sie sprechen die Deutsch, auto-translate is probably required. The website’s base is an online workspace, consisting of a whiteboard (editable in real-time), time-tracking which includes a reporting service, invoicing, administrative tools and various other intriguing features. 

Before you can access Productivity Lab, you need to sign up for the service, inputting quite a lot of your details and company information. Finding your county might be difficult as some are missing (South Yorkshire for us, for example) but we could use Sheffield as the county, so just keep this in mind. You then need to select your package, we’ve opted for the free 30-day trial (which we would recommend) but there are two options, Essential - £4.31 per month, or Professional - £10.36 per month. Both these options seem to offer the same perks (see image below), so Productivity Lab may need to offer more explanation to this section. Once you’re in, you’re greeted with a white, clean workspace to build your business upon. On the left are tools the website provides, such as Time Tracking for logging hours to certain projects, Reporting, Holidays, Imports, Invoicing and Administration - which is a superb breakdown of time allocation, and the most thorough we’ve seen. Invoicing in particular impressed, automatically creating excel spreadsheets and just requiring a title and dates ‘from’ and ‘to’. 

Then we come to the Whiteboards feature, which like Google sheets/slides/documents etc., can be edited in real-time - there are nine templates to choose from that cover everything from Calendars to SWOT analysis. All of which can be broken down further to incorporate Workflows, Product Development, Strategy & Planning and more. An entire business can be run from these templates, and when linked to the rest of Productivity Lab’s features, it makes for a symbiance we haven’t seen before. 

It’s not to say this tool doesn’t have its flaws, it does, some aspects such as the packages you sign up for are confusing. Also the Time Tracking feature, as thorough as it is, could be customisable to add more bespoke areas of different businesses, maybe this is something we’ll see in the future? We hope so!

All in all, Productivity Lab is a robust and detailed all-in-one business management tool that is cheap (albeit vague in this area) and easy to use. I wouldn’t say its appearance is particularly exciting but it’s purpose-built and functional and that's all you need from this type of tool. Some areas could do with more explanation and signing up could be simpler, but these are minor criticisms.

Productivity Lab, you get 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼/5!