Productivity Challenge: Best Tools and Tricks

Technology makes our lives more productive! We are able to do massive amounts more than we ever have in the past. But do you know all of the cool tips and tricks in technology right now?

If not, read below for some of the top tips and tricks in productivity.

Do you know what you are doing every day? How much are you on Facebook? How much are you doing email? These things may astound you!

RescueTime

RescueTime.com – This tracks how productive I am every week. My average time on the computer is 33 hours per week, and I can break it down to how much of it is actual productive time. It’s extremely helpful to know. (Especially since I saw I spent over 7 hours per week just on email!) Here is my weekly report so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

StayFocusd

Does Facebook make you lose track of time, too? Even when I am on for business I tend to wander, and it becomes a time suck. That’s why months ago I installed this Chrome Extension. It limits my time every day on FB or any website that you don’t want to be on much. I set my timer to 15 minutes a day which is plenty of time to post my status updates on the Eventual Millionaire Page!

Download?StayFocusd

Canned Responses

Did you notice how much time I spend on email? Well one tip that helps me save time on that is?Textexpander (for Mac) Though Google has a great way of doing this too using Canned Responses. Basically, both of these tools allow you to create templates for emails that you send often.

For example, I request a lot of interviews with people. With these programs I can actually just hit a button and have the template pop up. I just customize it, instead of writing a new email every single time.

It just makes sense! 🙂

Make Email Even Faster

Use voice to text to make email even faster.

For a mac just hit the function key twice. (you can use this in email, or in writing a blog post like I did for this section)

For windows,

1. Open Speech Recognition by clicking the Start button, clicking All Programs, clicking Accessories, clicking Ease of Access, and then clicking Windows Speech Recognition.
2. Say “start listening” or click the Microphone button to start the listening mode.
3. Open the program you want to use or select the text box you want to dictate text into.
4. Say the text that you want dictate.

Collecting App

David Allen talks about collecting.

I use one specific to-do list app to do all of my collecting. You can use any app, but the one that I found is the best (and most fun!) is Carrot for the iPhone. It acts like a person that gets mad at you for not checking it, and turns black when you haven’t been crossing off enough things off of your list. It has a great sense of humor too!

Action Item:

Pick one of these, and implement it NOW. If you are reading this, it will take you only a few minutes to visit the website and download something that could really help your productivity. You also need to commit to using it for the next week. (because downloading alone doesn’t save you any time!)

Now tell me.. What are your favorite productivity tools?

I need new ones in my arsenal, tell me all about what saves you time!

Tags: productivity, productivity challenge

Categories: All, Business, Productivity

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