I’m a work-from-home freelancer, father of young children, and forgetful socializer. This means it can be quite difficult to balance meetings and work chats with my colleagues from various publications with a social life spread across its own range of chat apps.
I’m not even a big social media person, but even I have to use Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google email and chat, as well as Telegram, WhatsApp, SMS and Twitter. All. Only. Day. It can often seem impossible to follow, leaving me stressed, distracted, and paranoid that I might miss a very important message.
Luckily, I found an app that makes it all possible: the Rambox workplace organization tool.
Work and play simplified, de-stressed
I hate notifications. The constant pings and reminders that someone else needs something from me can seem like a lot sometimes. But each chat app I use demands attention at different times of the day, and searching for a different device because it started making noise or flashing when I’m halfway through can be incredibly disturbing.
Rambox helps me work around this problem by allowing me to place each notification in the same place. It’s a merging tool that brings together just about every social and communicative app you can think of. It supports a range of instant messaging apps, email clients, social media accounts, and more. Having them all in one place makes it easier to manage them 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 right there. I also know I don’t miss anything if I haven’t looked at my phone in a while, and frankly, I can type a reply to someone on WhatsApp much faster on my desktop keyboard than on a touchscreen.
It also makes it easier to add new apps and chat services to my daily routine. When Digital Trends moved from Slack to Teams for our internal communications, all I had to do was add Teams to Rambox, and everything I needed was there, along with all the other apps and tools. that I use every day. I didn’t need to set up an entirely separate app, there wasn’t an extra window I had to open every day, nor did I need to make sure I didn’t forget to start the app. application in the morning – for fear of missing an important communication from a big boss.
The free tier is pretty good
Even better, Rambox is completely free. The basic version supports more than 700 applications, including all the most popular and important ones. There’s also real-time sync between my devices, so if I step away from the office, I can use my phone or laptop and pick up where I left off. Rambox will ping you if you don’t read a message on your desktop, so it’s easy to switch between them. If you ever need everyone to leave you alone for a bit, you can switch to Focus mode.
The paid versions offer more, like a built-in spell checker and premium support, but they’re more targeted towards organizations and businesses setting up Rambox for their employees.
For me, however, the free version of Rambox is more than enough, and it has proven to be an absolute saving grace that keeps me from feeling buried under 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
Having gushed about Rambox for a few hundred words, I must confess that until very recently I was using an extremely outdated pre-1.0 version of Rambox. Newer versions kept crashing on me, failing to install, and not logging into my accounts; It was a mess. This all seems to have been fixed in the latest release, so I’m back on a secure and up-to-date version of the app, but I shouldn’t have been so stubborn. There are many alternative messaging umbrella apps like this.
If you want a slightly different set of features and pricing tiers, other popular options include Franz, which includes a free spell checker; All-in-One Messenger, which is completely free; the versatile Apptorium workspaces, which let you create custom collections of apps, files, and folders for certain projects; the Online Station; or the fully open source Hamsket.
I don’t know which one would be better for you, and it’s possible that one of them is even better for me. But for now, Rambox does the trick. Until it breaks or I start to feel overwhelmed again, it will remain my go-to for saving time and keeping in touch with people. Now I just need to get better at answering.
Editors’ Recommendations