The new year is often a time for reflection — a time to think about what we’ve accomplished and what we can do better next year. To help you have an even greater impact in 2018, we wanted share five of the best new features in Smartsheet that came out in the last year and review best practices on how to use them to effectively manage team work.  

Here are five pro tips to help drive your success with Smartsheet in 2018.

Pro Tip 1: Card View
Card View gives teams a more visual way to communicate, collaborate, prioritize and organize work. Not familiar with Card View? Card View is inspired by Kanban boards - a work visualization style designed to let teams easily manage their work. Using Card View, the columns and rows in Smartsheet are replaced by lanes of cards that let you visually track the flow of your work from start to finish. 
 
To find out the latest tips and tricks for using Card View, watch the webinar below. You can also learn more about what you can do with Card View from our help article here, or access the card view templates in the template gallery here.
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Shipping a minimum viable product is a great way for businesses to innovate quickly and rush to market. Startups are focused on developing their products fast and shouldn’t want to slow down to address technical debt. At the same time, building on poorly written code is like building on a Jenga® tower. The longer you leave it alone the sooner you are headed for the whole thing to collapse.

Making the Case For Paying Back Technical Debt
Paying back technical debt can be a difficult task to get to when the business needs new features to feed the pipeline. But technical debt isn’t all or nothing. You can account for it after shipping minimum viable product, not just when the tower has become wobbly. 

I make sure that a percentage of all the work we do at Smartsheet is spent in modernizing and maintaining the platform. We have a product prioritization framework that lets us allocate developers, QA, and operations folks at a fixed rate based on the work that has to be done. 

Business support for this type of allocation isn’t the norm. For many engineering teams, the biggest challenge with technical debt is helping the rest of the business understand the value of paying it down. As a longtime advocate for reducing technical debt, I have tried a number of different strategies to articulate the value of writing code to reduce technical debt and keep my teams happy. In general, I like to look at three dimensions to make my case: scale, developer productivity (happiness), and reliability.   
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Businesses are continually asking information workers to do more with less in order to maintain a competitive edge. In his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport argues that the ability to focus without distraction is becoming an increasingly valuable skill for workers, as it helps them produce improved results in a shorter amount time. 

According to Newport, deep work is “the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.” Yet with the prevalence of distractions in today’s workplace, focused work can be a difficult skill to cultivate.