This is part of the Question of the Month series in which we highlight the many ways Atlassians use Confluence Questions. Read on for insight into Atlassian’s culture, values, and our newest collaboration tool, Confluence Questions.

Keeping your New Year’s resolutions is about as hard as keeping up with your email, which is to say, nearly impossible. What makes it so difficult? The next pressing thing usually takes precedence, and life – with all of its distractions, temptations, and excitement – gets in the way of your resolutions as much as your email

For the second installment of the Question of the Month, I wanted to highlight a question on the topic of productivity as it was very popular, and solicited some great answers and opinions.

The question comes from Carilu Dietrich, Atlassian’s head of brand and communications.

carilu

 

Crowdsourcing advice

As a relatively new hire at Atlassian, Carilu has had to adjust to a new team and a new way of working and collaborating, which provided an opportunity to examine her own working habits. She turned to the internal Atlassian community for help with managing her email and tasks with this question on Atlassian’s internal instance of Confluence Questions:

question

 

Since Atlassian builds products that empower teams to work more efficiently, collaborate better, and enhance overall productivity, it is no surprise that Atlassians are passionate about this topic. Carilu received 16 answers with a variety of suggestions for managing email, staying organized, and keeping track of tasks, and even more people contributed to the question by voting on the answers.

Rich content means better answers

The top-voted answer to date came from Confluence group product marketing manager and resident productivity guru, Matt Hodges. You may have seen his mug around this blog on occasion.

Matt was not the first person to answer. In fact, he answered after it had accumulated over 10 responses already, yet his answer still received the most votes. Matt’s answer does stand out from the rest, however, because Matt took full advantage of the Confluence editor to add images and videos:

answer

 

Not only did he provide Carilu with visual examples to back up his suggestions, he added links for her to learn more, and formatted his answer with numbered sections and highlighted “pro tips” with the information icon and bold  text. The end result? Advice that is easy to read and act on because anyone can quickly scan it and find what is most relevant to him or her. Compare the formatting on Matt’s detailed answer to another answer to the same question without any rich content:

comparison

 

The Confluence editor gives you the capability to ask and answer questions with all the context you need to get your point across. Add images, videos, code snippets, links to the web or Confluence pages, and format it to keep it organized. Matt had great advice, but he made it even more effective with the way he presented it.

Learn more about Confluence Questions today and tap into the knowledge of your organization with internal Q&A. 

January Question of the Month: Productivity