Have you ever heard someone say “there’s just not enough hours in a day.” It’s not like 24 hours in a day are any less. It’s just that we tend to lose time with things that distract us or take up too much time. I’m sure in your busy and hectic work schedule you sometimes ask yourself:
“Am I using my time wisely? How can I find the time to do more?”
It’s only natural to ask these questions as after a while you realize that to achieve more you need more time. And more often than not, it seems like we’re always chasing time while it’s running from us. If you think of it, time is the most valuable commodity!
So how do you make more time for yourself, for those side projects which you’ve been forced to put off, for the strategies that you want to initiate? Here are a few productivity tools that can help you find more time for all this and more.
1. Slack
One of the biggest challenge for a team is communication – ensuring its accuracy and promptness. It can be tough decoding lengthy emails, juggling through meetings and making sure they’re scheduled correctly and attending calls critical during times. Here’s Slack – an extraordinary team communication tool that lets you split your message board based on teams, tasks, locations and anything else that you need. This way only the relevant people get messages that pertain to them. It’s hard to remain at your desk all the time. Slack lets you communicate with your team from anywhere and also integrates over apps and programs with it. To stay on top of things and make sure you deliver, Slack is the productivity tool for your team.
2. Producteev
Micromanaging isn’t something a boss should boast about. It’s time consuming to ask each and every team member to report on their deliverables and tasks. But you still need to ensure that your team is delivering and is working as productively as they had committed to. So how do you do this without constantly asking them? Producteev is a task management tool that’s designed to help teams remain productive. It lets you manage to-do lists, assign tasks to team members and get real-time updates on projects from your mobile or desktop device. The tool allows you to break down projects into milestones so you can track progress of who it was assigned to. Let’s call this a smart and productive way to “micromanage” (get the job done).
3. Rescue Time
So once you’ve managed to get your team to be more productive, it’s your turn. To help you stay focused and less distracted there’s Rescue Time. This intelligent app learns your behavior and then helps you by blocking out distractions. Its analytics points out which programs and websites are occupying most of your time. It even goes further to tell you your most productive hours of the day and the best days of the week and month. Rescue Time is like a guardian angel watching over you and keeping you on track!
4. SaneBox
If you’re able to control your browsing habits you’ve managed to avoid one form of distraction. While emails are an essential part of our work and communication, they too can be distractions at times. And here’s where SaneBox becomes a useful productivity tool. The app analyzes your past and ongoing email activities to decipher which are important to you. It then moves the nonessential emails to a “SaneLater” folder where you can read them when you have spare time. I’m sure you can find a lot of things to do with the time you save sifting your inbox for social media notifications and newsletters.
5. Evernote
Often we face the challenge of just having too much information accessible to us. Whether it’s on our laptop, tablet or cellphones – there’re just too many documents being shared and too many things to juggle with. Evernote is a versatile and powerful app that saves audio and text notes, uploads attachments that you can share with your team, sets reminders, organizes photos, bookmark websites and articles for later reading and more. And it does all this while syncing with all your desktop and mobile devices. What’s more is that you can also communicate with your team using the app. Quite honestly, it’s my pick for a productivity tool.
Do you know of productively tools that you use to get more time for what’s important? Do share them.
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