My toolset for working remotely

Working remote for the past year or so, I've found a few tools that have helped with with collaboration. Most of them focus on being local to my machine, since I work for a traditionally non-remote organization.

For note taking and reference, I've found screenotate to be a wonderful tool. It does an OCR pass on all of your screenshots. This makes every screenshot you take searchable - and transcribes urls, texts, and presentations for later use. You can take a screenshot of someone else's browser, and grab a long url to check out later.

It also lets you set shortcuts - so you can copy the screenshot, or the OCR'd text to the clipboard.

For whiteboarding, excalidraw is my go-to solution. I love that it's intentionally sloppy. I don't waste any time on getting every little box to line up, and focus on getting ideas out of my head. There's no account needed to use, E2E encryption, and it's developed to provide a local-first experience. Whenever you're ready, you simply share your current URL to start a collaborative session.

Whenever you're sharing your screen, telestrator has become another must-have tool, letting me draw on my screen and guide my audience's attention. The drawings fade after a second or two, so they're never in the way. Perfect for demos, bug reports, or other presentations.

Got a great app that's helped you with remote work? Hit the link below and let me know!