Life is tough for people who have to multitask; it drains out all your energy. You keep switching from one thing to another, wasting your time and ending up all exhausted. The last thing you want is to compromise on your productivity.
Maintaining a high productivity level is not only difficult for multitaskers, but for lazybones and people who get distracted easily or just people who need a bit of a push, the tools below may increase your productivity a lot.
To make your life easier, here are ten vital productivity tools that will make help you organize yourself and increase your productivity.
1. StayFocusd
The most important thing is to get rid of all the distractions. While you are working, avoid using Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites that are not relevant to your job. Opening 10-15 tabs on your computer at a time will confuse you and most importantly, waste your time.
As you all have heard, time is money! So, save it as much as you can.
To help you stay focused on your work, Chrome Web Store offers you a productivity extension for Google Chrome known as StayFocusd.
This tool will help you pay all your attention to your job, as it restricts the amount of time you can spend on foreign sites. Through this, you can allow a particular time to different websites, once that time has finished, the sites you have put in the list are blocked for the rest of the entire day.
The best part of this tool is, it doesn't gather any of your personal information nor does it keep any sort of history about which sites you have visited.
So, all those people out there who get distracted easily, get this tool to work properly instead of stalking your high school crush.
2. Toggl
Nowadays, it feels like time is flying. An hour passes by and you are just sitting there wondering, where did all the time go? We can't stop time for you, but we can suggest a tool through which you can keep track of time.
Toggl is an efficient time tracking tool that can work on your desktop, browser, and mobile. Through its one-click time tracking feature, you can track every second of your billable hours.
Furthermore, it is an ideal tool for increasing group productivity as your entire team will be tracking time, giving you an idea of how much work every person has done.
Some other excellent features are:
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You can add an unlimited number of projects and clients - This might shock you, but it is for real! It will stay free irrespective of how many projects and customers you add.
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Offline time was tracking - It also tracks time while you're offline and then syncs it with your account once you are online again.
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You can set billable rates - The worth of all working hours is not the same, with this, you can set prices accordingly.
Get this tool to effortlessly track time!
3. Slack
Communication within teams and groups is highly important. However, it mostly becomes hectic. You get bombarded with emails, messages and meeting schedules. The most annoying thing is receiving calls when you're busy with your personal stuff. To stop yourself from getting stressed out, we suggest this handy tool for your team.
Through Slack, you can easily organize your group conversations in open channels. Set up a channel for any project, team or topic and add all the members to it. It provides a clear view of everything that is happening to everyone.
You can also set up a private channel if you wish to share sensitive information with particular people. Only the people you have invited can see the conversations, nobody else. Furthermore, you can also send a direct message to any team member, and only you two can see it.
This tool is not only limited to conversations; you can share files with anyone you like and can sync Dropbox or Google Drive with it too.
Thanks to its apps for iOS, Android, and Windows, you can use it everywhere you go as it will automatically sync everything.
4. SaneBox
Checking your emails has become incredibly annoying due to an overload of social media notifications, newsletters, and advertising email. You can't spend your precious time deleting these emails.
SaneBox can help you stay sane while checking your inbox. With the aid of filters, it cleans up your inbox by moving the unimportant emails to a separate folder, titled as "SaneLater."
It works within your existing email account, and you don't need to create a new account.
It's features include:
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Smart filtering: By using its algorithms, SaneBox can determine the importance of every email. With time it learns your preferences.
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Works everywhere: SaneBox is not limited to Hotmail or Gmail, you can use it anywhere to read emails like Apple Mail, Android, Exchange, etc. You don't need to download or install anything.
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SaneNoReplies: It is a folder which keeps all the important emails you have sent that have not been replied to yet.
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SaneDigest: You get a daily summary of all the activities you have done.
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SaneBox offers rewards to If you invite any of your friends to join SaneBox, for every friend who signs up due to your invitation, you get $5.
5. Rescue Time
Rescue Time is another tool designed to save your time and keep you away from distractions. This tool helps you to understand your daily routine, so you can learn how to be more efficient.
It tracks the amount of time you spend on different sites and applications to let you know about your productive and nonproductive hours. With this feature, you can quickly detect from where the distraction is coming from and try to avoid it.
Its notable features include, you can block distracting websites, set alerts to tell you about your time consumption, highlight your achievements, pause or quit time tracking whenever you want, it runs securely in the background of your mobile or laptop and send you detailed reports about your activities.
Limeade, a satisfied customer, has the following reviews.
"RescueTime teaches me things about my workday I would never otherwise have the time or perspective to learn it, It's a great tool for anyone who wants to be intentional about improving their productivity."
6. Producteev
Being the manager of a team is a tough job, you need to make sure that team members are properly assigned their jobs, and they are working efficiently.
Producteev through its excellent features can make things easier for you. It is a tool for task management that helps you to stay organized.
You need it for its following excellent features:
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Networks: This is your workplace, all your tasks, collaborators and projects are present in one place.
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Tasks: They are the things you need to do yourself or get them done by someone else.
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Labels: You can label all your tasks according to their importance with the help of different descriptions and colors.
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Projects: This is a collaborated to-do list of the whole company. You can share it with others.
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Deadlines: Setting deadlines helps you finish your tasks and projects before the due date.
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Filters: These make searching easier on Producteev.
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Assign: The tasks you have created can be allocated to one or more people.
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Follow: When you add followers to a task, it allows them to receive notifications about the job activities.
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Mention: You can bring someone into a conversation by saying their name.
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Notifications: This tool keeps you updated 24/7.
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Audit trails: You can view the full history of any task.
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Export: You can export your tasks from any project with such one click.
7. MiniNote
It 's hard to remember all the tasks on your to-do list. You can easily remember your business tasks, but people often forget their personal tasks. You don't need to worry anymore; MiniNote is at your service.
It is a small checklist type tool that sticks to the top right side of your screen. A perfect application for taking notes. You can sit and write all your important stuff on a note, which will always be there on your screen.
With the help of its 'lock' feature, you can ensure that your note can be seen on the side of any program.
A user's comment:
"Solid app, works well. It does not have all the capabilities of Apple Notes, but it has one that makes it worth every penny: you can sync your notes to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod (See note below) without having them erased from your device if you happen not to be connected to the cloud. With MiniNote, your data stays on your devices, connected or not. Whether your data is only in the cloud, or not, should be your decision, nobody else's."
8. Google Drive
You can judge the usefulness of this application from their slogan 'work without limit'. Google Drive is a cloud-based storage application that will highly increase your productivity level. Along with offering you an unlimited storage space, its key features include:
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A powerful business tool suite: Google's G-Suit is extremely comfortable to work with, we can tell you this from our experience. It contains Docs, forms, spreadsheets, calendars, sites, Google+, Hangouts and more. You can easily share these files with your teammates, increasing the productivity of your whole team.
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Built for teams: Elaborating on the previous ending point, Google Drive allows you and your teammates to work together on a document. You just need to share the link with them and in privacy settings enabling them to edit the document if you are the owner. It also provides you with a complete list of all the edits, and you can quickly view them.
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It is safe, secure and reliable: Google drive contains many critical security features, designed specifically to keep all your data safe, secure and in your control.
Google drive developers are 24/7 there for you in case you need any help.
9. Wunderlist
Getting flooded with notes and to-do lists is a bad idea. With the help of Wunderlist, you can bring all these things to one place and then organize them.
It not only allows you to hold work related things but also personal stuff like a grocery list, movies list or any other household list. You can set due dates, reminders or alarms so you don't miss anything.
You can share your lists and collaboratively work on projects with different people.
Some other exciting features are: you can form folders, start a conversation, add notes to express your ideas, get notifications, handle your emails, use hashtags and can easily print out any of your lists.
Download Wunderlist today to keep your personal and professional like synchronized.
This application is available on iOS. Android, Windows, etc. You can easily sync all the data too.
10. IFTTT
The name of this program would have surely confused you. 'If this then that' is a smart program which allows its users to form chains of official conditional statements, which they call the "recipes." These methods are triggered whenever there are changes in other websites like Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
You can connect your favorite applications and devices to IFTTT.
These recipes represent your daily usage of technology.
Here are some of its principal features.
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Channels: These provide the basic structure to this program. It is a series of data from individual websites.
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Triggers: These are the 'this' part of the recipes. These are the things that trigger an action.
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Actions: These are the 'that' part of the recipes. They are the result of any trigger.
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Recipes: These are the predictions or assumptions that this software forms by Triggers and Actions.
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Ingredients: They are the data given by triggers.