Everybody wants to have more time. But how do you get it?
We met a person who made more time for himself and his company by using CAKE.com’s tools — the time tracker Clockify, the all-in-one collaboration app Pumble, and the project management tool Plaky.
Meet Vladimir Milić, the founder and CEO of VM Digital, a digital marketing company laser-focused on serving their clients — but also working on their own glamorous product, the scheduling tool BeBook.
Let’s explore Vladimir’s journey from a freelancer to a business owner of a 12-person company with many clients — and productivity tips for anyone who’s willing to hear.
Drum rolls, please!
Key takeaways
- VM Digital is a digital marketing company that serves many clients and is working on launching its first product — BeBook, a scheduling and CRM tool.
- Clockify gives VM Digital an overview of hours spent on projects and neatly packed descriptions for each task.
- Pumble speeds things up in their work communication — VM Digital switched to Pumble because Slack didn’t work as expected.
- Plaky saves VM Digital around one and a half hours daily per employee by increasing accountability and promoting work ethic.
- Vladimir Milić recommends the CAKE.com bundle to all his clients, interns, and employees because “it just works.”
Vladimir Milić: a super productive business owner
Abandoning his professional soccer career, as his godfather suggested, Vladimir Milić became a digital marketing enthusiast and founder of VM Digital, a Europe-based firm.
For the past 5 years, he’s been working with businesses to increase their visibility, from design and content creation to ads — and everything in between:
“I was a freelancer for 1 year, and my company is celebrating its fourth anniversary this year. So, I have 5 years of work experience in digital marketing. At VM Digital, we provide digital marketing services mostly focused on creative design, social media design, and design in general, and writing text.”
The company reshuffle at VM Digital: How they operate
Since the last time we had a chance to interview Vladimir, his company has grown:
“Our team expanded a bit. We onboarded 1 developer and 1 internal new employee. Now, the team is 12 people strong.”
VM Digital has been a proponent of the hybrid model for a while, and Vladimir explains how it has worked out for them:
“Since the 15th of January, we’ve been 3-4 days in the office and 1-2 days remote. And out of the days of working in the office, we take 1 day to have lunch and work at the restaurant. At times, it happens that I don’t see my team members for a week or so.”
Next, Vladimir talks about how he treats his young team of employees when they work outside the office:
“Most of our team is young. When they see the sun in the office, I see their faces light up. And I’m like, ‘Okay, guys, let’s go out. I’m taking you to coffee, bring your laptops, we’re gonna hijack some restaurant for 1 hour or 5 hours.”
But the hybrid work model has its intricacies, as Vladimir admits:
“Although we’re using the hybrid work model, we still need to work together to some degree because we talk a lot, with brainstorming and everything. That’s the biggest reason.”
Yet, Vladimir is a head with a modern and high-spirited mindset when it comes to how his team operates:
“As a leader, I don’t care how many hours you work as long as we get the expected results. If you can do your job for the whole week in 6 hours – do it.”
How Vladimir Milić resolved the conundrum: Product vs. services
Vladimir brings home the point of working for yourself and working for others at the same time:
“Sometimes, as a small company, you only think about providing services to others. But you forget about yourself. In that case, we saw we needed to step up.”
Besides taking care of their clients, VM Digital prioritizes working on their own product:
“We are also focused on our new product. We’re developing a small scheduling app — BeBook, an app that gravitates between an employee scheduling app and a CRM [customer relationship management] tool.”
In the end, Vladimir’s company decided to use 3 digital tools to meet both their client demands and launch their product:
“That’s where Clockify, Pumble, and Plaky helped us create a structure. To know exactly what we are doing and how much time we spend doing it.”
So, let’s explore Vladimir’s take on the delicious trio of CAKE.com next.
Further reading:
Find out how other digital marketers make more time for themselves:
How VM Digital uses CAKE.com tools to boost productivity
Vladimir stumbled on CAKE.com tools by accident when he got a recommendation to use Clockify to track his time.
Yet, he stresses that simplicity made him stick with all CAKE.com tools, freeing up his work hours at the same time:
“CAKE.com made their tools simple: Clockify is for time tracking, Pumble is for team chat, and Plaky is for project management. These tools saved me between 16 and 20 hours per week. CAKE.com’s solutions helped free up those hours for me first as a freelancer and then when I started VM Digital.”
Next, Vladimir speaks about how CAKE.com products allowed his team to go full circle and capture everything they do:
“With CAKE.com products, we’ve gone full circle, including tasks, projects, work tracking, and outsourcing work to our clients. Each tool allows me to use it as I please.”
The rewards that VM Digital reaped were huge — stress reduction included:
“Since we introduced CAKE.com products into our workflow, we have had better results with less effort invested. We also decreased our stress. We no longer have to think about whether something was done or not. Nothing falls through the cracks — it’s all there, it’s free, and it’s easy.”
—
Without further ado, let’s take a closer look at each tool, starting with Clockify.
Clockify: Time tracker as part of VM Digital’s daily work life
Clockify was the first product by CAKE.com that Vladimir Milić, and later his team, started using:
“When I took up freelancing, I wanted to check on my own time. My Israeli client back then asked me to track my time on a tool they had. I can’t remember what it was called. But they insisted on me using their tool. However, I asked them whether we could use Clockify because it’s the simplest tool I came across. Clockify saved my life.”
What came the next day was a surprise to Vladimir:
“The Israeli client contacted me tomorrow and told me: ‘Dude, where did you find this?’ I explained how I found out about Clockify and their whole company switched to it.”
Since then, Vladimir has evolved into VM Digital and says that Clockify is part of how they live and breathe:
“Clockify is in our DNA, and we’ve been using it for the past 5 years. We use it all the time.“
In the modern business landscape, it’s all about delivering high-quality results in short periods. So, Vladimir believes that Clockify brought his team a sense of owning time:
“Clockify introduced time stability to our team. We can now better assess our time and understand it.”
Further reading:
Maximize your success by learning how to track time, monitor budgets, and calculate profitability in a marketing agency:
—
Once we understood the gist, we wanted to learn more about how Vladimir’s super-productive team uses Clockify — or, more specifically, what features they’d highlight.
Clockify features VM Digital enjoys the most
Vladimir says that using Clockify is a no-brainer, as it takes no effort to learn how to track time:
“Clockify is an app that I just hand over to my employees, and I don’t have to explain anything to them. I’m like ‘Here it is,’ and at the end of the day, I want to see what you were doing. First, they think it might be hard. But as soon as they go in, they learn what to do in 3 minutes. Clockify saves me a ton of time.”
But we were curious to learn about how saving a ton of time actually worked for him.
So, we asked him about Clockify’s most prominent capabilities, and he highlighted 2 critical features:
- Pomodoro timer, and
- Reports.
Clockify feature #1: Pomodoro timer
Vladimir says he only used 2 plugins so far, and Clockify’s add-on was one of them:
“I had 2 plugins in my life, and the first one was the Clockify add-on. I like the Pomodoro timer.”
When he started using the Pomodoro timer, Vladimir flipped through Clockify’s blog to learn how to use the add-on properly:
“I got help from Clockify’s blog — it’s full of useful information, I love reading it. Reading is the most important thing, especially in business, software, and IT. You can’t watch a video for 8 seconds and think you know how to do something. Read it 5 times, just to be sure.”
Further reading:
To understand how the Pomodoro technique works, check out this guide:
According to Vladimir, the Descriptions option works perfectly inside the browser extensions. In fact, the option to describe tasks and projects is an indispensable part of how Vladimir’s team operates:
“I love descriptions in Clockify. I don’t like it when my colleagues insert vague descriptions because I need to know what a project or task is all about.”
Further reading:
Learn how another business owner uses Clockify to achieve better results:
Clockify feature #2: Reports
Vladimir simply loves Summary reports in Clockify because they let him have a better understanding of his team’s actual performance:
“I use Summary reports to get insight into where the time goes for a particular month. Also, I use Summary reports as part of our bonus system for payments in the company because I can see if employees worked more. I like giving them a bonus if they put in extra effort.”
Vladimir says Clockify allows him to get a bird’s-eye view of his team’s performance:
“We use Clockify to see how much work we got done or didn’t get done, and see who’s doing what.”
For example, Reports give VM Digital useful stats to report to their clients:
“I can’t even begin to explain how much Clockify helped our team sort out all our client work and report on what we did for them, like time statistics.”
Most importantly, Vladimir stresses how reports in Clockify help his team renegotiate terms with clients:
“For all our clients, it’s very important that we send our time reports to them. When I see where we spend our time, I can renegotiate our terms with the clients — to establish whether they need to pay us more or less. We need to check what’s taking too much of our time and effort.”
Here’s what sharing reports looks like in Clockify:
Overall, Clockify appears to Vladimir like an all-in-one tool:
“It’s more than a time tracking app or a summary report. Everything is blended in one place, and it helps me a lot because it’s connected with Pumble, the business team chat app we use.”
Since Vladimir mentioned Pumble, this was the perfect place in our conversation to move on to exploring how VM Digital uses it.
Pumble: Business chat app that speeds things up
Vladimir didn’t want to mix the messaging apps he uses in private with his work-related software:
“We didn’t want to use Viber or WhatsApp, so we started using Pumble. I hated hearing the message pings on Viber and WhatsApp. I’ve been hearing it my whole life. I’ve been hearing it on my friends’ phones, and now I have to hear it while I work!?”
But Pumble didn’t come first to his mind — Slack did as they believed it was a strong brand:
“Before Pumble, we tried Slack, but Slack didn’t work out for us. Once we tried to fix an issue with Slack’s mobile version. It took me so long to get the issue resolved that I would rather have done anything else than fix that issue on Slack.”
And there were other reasons for using Pumble as well. For one, it was the trust that CAKE.com instilled in it:
“We also switched to Pumble because I trusted CAKE.com — we were already using Clockify.”
Pumble features VM Digital enjoys the most
Next, we picked Vladimir’s brain to understand how he uses Pumble to supercharge his workday.
This segment explores the 2 most sought-after features of Pumble at VM Digital:
- Channels, and
- Video calls.
Pumble feature #1: Channels
The sheer speed of sending and receiving messages amazed Vladimir and his team, replacing the email back-and-forth nightmare:
“Pumble sped things up for us with its channels. If you have to chat with your team frequently, don’t send emails but use Pumble. That’s how we do it.”
All his team members need to do to create a channel in Pumble is:
- Click on the + sign next to the “Channels,”
- Name the channel,
- Add a description (optional),
- Make it private or public (optional), and
- Click on Create.
Here’s what channels look like in Pumble:
People use Pumble in many different ways, some of them less intuitive than others. For example, Vladimir’s crew uses the app’s channels as a base to store company processes and team knowledge:
“We often use Pumble as a knowledge base for our processes. Each Pumble channel helps us a lot to follow all guidelines in the marketing funnel. We use the channels to bookmark everything in Pumble.”
Pumble feature #2: Video calls
Although they don’t use Pumble to communicate with their clients too often, VM Digital depends on this business chat app for internal video calls:
“We use Pumble for our inner circle, internally. It’s a great tool as a video and chat app.”
In fact, Vladimir’s team can utilize Pumble’s video calls to:
- Share the screen to maximize clarity and improve collaboration,
- Blur the background to minimize visual distractions, and
- Record a meeting for later reference.
Here’s what video calls in Pumble look like in action:
Vladimir also believes that Pumble will become a more critical component of their work as their business develops:
“But if we build our internal product and can make a living out of that product, Pumble will become more mission-critical to our work — even more so than Clockify.”
Plaky: Project management tool for increased performance
Before he started speaking about Plaky, Vladimir explained how his team has an atypical policy tools-wise:
“We have a free policy that if employees think they don’t need any digital tools for work, then they can go ahead and not use them. But my team was especially grateful because I convinced them to use Plaky.”
A true game-changer, Plaky did everything Vladimir’s team ever needed, including setting tasks straight:
“Plaky helped us a lot with increasing accountability and ironing out work ethic. Plaky puts in order everything that’s important to us — the app created a structure in our work and increased performance.”
But that’s not all. Vladimir says that Plaky reduced his team’s work hours massively:
“We cut our average work hours from 8 hours to 6 and a half hours to do the same amount of work. I start at 9 a.m. and finish all our client work by around 3 p.m. With Plaky, we freed up an hour and a half per day for every person to work on something else. Of course, working with our clients is the best. But then, we have more time to work on our product.”
Further reading:
Get 10 foolproof strategies to handle multiple projects at the same time:
Plaky features VM Digital enjoys the most
Vladimir says that his team uses Plaky as both a project management tool and a source of inspiration:
“You can utilize Plaky as a project management tool to its fullest. Yet, you can also use it in many other ways — like a to-do app and a source of inspiration. When we visit a Plaky board and see comments, dates, and other data, it leads us to figure out who needs to do what. I jot down 20 ideas on a Plaky board and write what needs to be done.”
Without further ado, let’s dive into the top Plaky features VM Digital uses daily.
Plaky feature #1: Templates
If there was one tipping point in how Vladimir’s team uses Plaky, it was the introduction of templates:
“When we started using Plaky templates for marketing and product, together with to-do lists, it catapulted our productivity instantly. I know exactly what and when I need to do something.”
Below is an example of a content calendar template in Plaky that includes:
- Status (change from ‘To-do’ to ‘Doing’ to ‘Done’, etc),
- Tags,
- Links,
- Color-coded tasks, and more.
Vladimir also shares that the templates are suited for beginners but also those who need to fill out quarterly forms:
“Plaky helped us with the starting phase of our project, like roadmaps and quarterly forms. And that’s new to us. Starting our product wasn’t easy, but Plaky helped us out with their templates.”
Plaky feature #2: Boards in private view
Staying focused is one of the most important skills nowadays.
VM Digital resolves this issue by using private boards in Plaky, with dedicated notifications catered to the needs of the team:
“Private boards are very important to me. None of our team members are involved in all our projects, so they don’t need to know everything about every project. If we use ads for one of our clients, and I’m the one doing that, why would you want to get 10 notifications from me when I change the status of my tasks? ”
Simply put, Plaky sorts everything in a way that makes it easily accessible for Vladimir’s entire team:
“That’s the thing about Plaky I like the most — making things private and easier. I like that I can show the right tasks to the right people.”
Finally, Vladimir stresses the third benefit of setting Plaky boards to private:
“Plaky also helps us ward off distractions. If 5 of us are on a Plaky board and that board pings all day long, what’s the point? Can you do your job properly? Can you concentrate for 1 hour? That’s why the option to set boards as private is so important for us.”
Further reading:
Concentrate better and avoid distractions with 6 powerful tips:
Plaky feature #3: Checklists, commenting, and files section
Of all 3 CAKE.com tools his team uses, Vladimir thinks that Plaky is the one they use the most — to help them maintain a great workflow:
“We use Plaky for everything. One of my colleagues likes it so much that she also puts to-dos like ‘Feed the dog,’ ‘Eat,’ ‘Send gif’ in Plaky. We are utilizing Plaky to its core.”
To elaborate, Vladimir loves that he can add comments and files to every card in the project management tool:
“We use Plaky for all things organization. I love that Plaky has a comment and files section for our attachments. When I attach a photo or document to a Plaky card, I know it won’t lose its quality. I have everything in one place. Plaky is incredible, honestly, with unrestricted possibilities.”
Next, Vladimir explains how he managed to start 2 projects in a single month, with emphasis on the structure:
“Thanks to Plaky, I managed to jumpstart 2 projects in one month — one for our blog and the other for our product. If it weren’t for Plaky’s ability to provide a space where I could jot down my ideas at any moment to structure everything via template, I would hardly have done it.”
Further reading:
Make informed decisions about your projects with this expert-infused guide on 11 project management practices:
Plaky feature #4: Activity log
Another feature Vladimir loves is the 7-day activity log, where he can see what’s happening on each Plaky card, including changes in dates, status, and other updates.
However, the 7-day activity log is no longer enough for Vladimir’s team. He now believes that switching to a paid plan and a 6-month log could benefit his team in the near future:
“We are now considering switching to a plan that includes the 6-month activity log. That’s one of the things I need and like, to see what has happened in the past 6 months on boards and items.”
Now that we know how Vladimir and his team use CAKE.com tools, we were interested to learn whether they talk about these products with others in their business environment.
Who would Vladimir Milić recommend CAKE.com tools and why?
Vladimir says that he’s sort of a brand ambassador for CAKE.com:
“We are trying to convince our clients to switch to Pumble. I have never experienced any problems with CAKE.com products. For example, I never had to lose 3 hours on an issue or have to contact support to fix it. And I had that problem with other tools.”
So do CAKE.com tools truly fill every nook and cranny of his everyday job? Vladimir utters a resounding ‘yes’:
“In my line of work, which is digital marketing, my advice to everyone is to start using Plaky. First of all, Plaky has a large number of templates — including marketing templates — with all the relevant information. But you can make changes, customize templates, and add sections and cards to your liking.”
Vladimir also believes that Pumble and Clockify, alongside Plaky, perfectly illustrate the benefits of using tools that are simply and effective, even beyond what you first start using them for:
“A good digital tool is only a good tool if anyone can use it as they see fit, not just how the app-builders and developers intended it to be used. And Clockify, Pumble, and Plaky tick all the boxes.”
What’s next for VM Digital: Concerns and outlooks
Eyes set on the future, Vladimir Milić has lofty goals for 2024:
“We will work on our product — BeBook, a scheduling tool. And we expect to test it in the near future. The prototype should be done soon, and May will probably mark the beginning of sales.”
But VM Digital isn’t letting their current and future clients down either:
“Marketing-wise, we have low-term, medium-term, and long-term goals, which refer to the number of our clients and things like that.”
Whatever happens in the near future, Vladimir says he will definitely stay with CAKE.com products:
“In the future, we will probably use paid versions of CAKE.com apps to grow our company.”
Further reading:
Learn how other executives use CAKE.com products to make their work worth their time:
Use CAKE.com tools to enrich your work experience
VM Digital increased its productivity by using 3 simple yet powerful tools by CAKE.com.
In a short period, Vladimir Milić’s company managed to:
- Increase accountability,
- Enhance team communication, and
- Reduce the time they spend on tasks by 1 and a half hours daily.
Do you want to be as productive and well-organized as VM Digital’s team? The good news is that you can be — simply sign up for Clockify, Pumble, and Plaky for free.