From the lightbulb to the smartphone, every invention began with a new idea. Curious people across the world saw a need, and began to shape an entirely new solution from their questions, experiments, and designs. Both the world as we know it today and the future we will experience tomorrow are thanks to inventors who had ideas and acted on them. This is why Americans celebrate February 11, Thomas Edison’s birthday, as National Inventor’s Day.

But great inventions are more than just ideas. As Edison said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” To turn our new ideas into reality, we need to put in the perspiration Edison spoke of while organizing our work to maximize our efforts. Citrix Podio offers project and task management features that Edison would have loved to have while creating his more than 1,000 patents. Here’s how Citrix Podio can help you embrace your inner inventor and turn big ideas into reality.

Focus on the Idea, Not the Process with Podio

Once you come up with a great idea for your team, you need to focus all their efforts around bringing that idea to life. Project management is key to making this happen, but a common pitfall of project management is letting your processes sprawl out of control. If your team is bogged down with endless meetings and reporting, you’ve lost focus on your idea and instead are focused on micromanaging the process. That’s not how great inventions happen.

This is why Podio delivers transparent and flexible project management tools. This keeps your big idea as the team focus by using one shared page for every task, file, and project discussion. For example, a multidisciplinary design studio, Uhuru Design, uses Podio to unify its sales, project management, and internal communications networks into a shared workspace. Instead of spending hours organizing notes and reports, Podio brings together your choice of reports and overviews to visualize all the moving parts. In short, Podio adapts the app to how your team needs to work, not the other way around.

Organize Every Effort with Podio

Every great invention is the product of many small steps. From brainstorming to prototyping to reviewing, each of your team’s day-to-day tasks are crucial to progress — but they also need to be kept on track so the project stays on schedule. Because of task interdependency, it’s too easy for daily task management to become a full-time job all its own. This complexity not only sucks up energy and time, but also can slow your team’s productivity and hurt morale.

Podio was created to keep key activities moving forward so your team never misses a beat. By integrating all tasks into Podio’s workflows, you can set up automated reminders when a task is due and automatically tag other team members when their review is needed. It’s easy to view all the tasks you’re personally responsible for, add labels to help you prioritize, and set up recurring tasks for routine to-dos like sending a weekly status update. Shared tasks are visible to everyone inside a workspace so everyone can stay on the same page and resolve bottlenecks before they delay a project. The result is a simplified overview of everything that’s getting done — without tons of status emails.

Podio’s customizable calendars are another valuable tool for task management, making it easy to view only events and deadlines related to you or to oversee everything that’s happening on your team or company-wide. To suit the view of your schedule that you need, your personal Podio calendar can focus only on your upcoming meetings and tasks, or zoom out to show the projects you’re in charge of and even all the deadlines in all the workspaces of which you’re a member. You can also easily integrate Podio with external calendar services like Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar using Exchange, or iCal.

Streamline Communication and Collaboration with Podio

Great collaboration and communication are key to every great invention. This in mind, Podio integrates powerful collaboration tools inside its project management interface. To reduce time-consuming email threads, every Podio workspace has social activity streams that display the latest updates from the apps in the workspace as well as status posts from team members. Podio’s comment system enables team members to ask questions, solve problems, and share files on any activity update, which increases transparency and knowledge sharing across a workspace.

For collaboration in real time, Podio also offers integrated chat features like instant messaging and video calling. You can easily talk with anyone you’re connected to on Podio, setting up one-on-one conversations or group chat to share ideas, images, files, or links. And because Podio’s video and audio calling is seamlessly integrated into the app, you don’t need a separate video conferencing application to enable a complete, real-time collaboration experience. This helps maintain the focus and flow your team needs to invent something remarkable.

Learn more about how Citrix Podio can power your inventive ideas and find the right package for your team.