Are you trying to be more productive at home and the office? We all are busy these days with so many distractions and needs competing for our limited time. But you can use technology in several ways to boost your productivity, whether it’s in your kitchen, living room, or office.
Try Anti-Distraction Apps
You may not be aware of it, but it’s easy for social media apps to drain hours of your time per day. Some sources suggest that people at home and work lose up to two hours per day on Facebook, Tik Tok, and Twitter. It seems that people who specialize in software development for social media sites have learned how to create apps that make us never want to log off!
It can be difficult to stay away from social media entirely, but you can still recover a lot of lost time by downloading a variety of anti-distraction software. There are many you can install on your iPhone or Android device and most of them don’t cost anything.
Some of the most popular anti-distraction apps are StayFocusd, Freedom, and SelfControl. After you select the app that works for you, choose a time limit for every day of the week and during work hours. For example, you might allow yourself 15 minutes to look at Facebook during your lunch hour. After that, the anti-distraction app will block those social media sites until the next day.
Backup All Work In The Cloud
You can increase your productivity at home and work if you save your data in the cloud. For most of us, that means using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. If you use spreadsheets, try to use Google Spreadsheets instead of Excel.
All of your data will be stored in the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere, including on the beach on your cell phone!
If you wonder if the cloud is for you, think about what could happen if you have all of your critical files stored on your PC and it crashes or is stolen. Think about how many hours you would waste having to rebuild all of those critical files.
Having your documents and spreadsheets in the cloud also allows for easy collaboration in real time. So, you can have your project team access the same document in the cloud and there’s no more confusion about emailing old document versions.
Use Virtual To-Do Lists
When you work from the house, it can be more challenging to manage your team projects. But there are many apps you can choose to make this process easier.
Asana is a fantastic tool that keeps careful track of projects and allows you to delegate tasks to team members.
Track Your Work Time With Time Tracking Tools
If you cannot measure how much time you spend on this or that task, it’s difficult to improve your efficiency. To boost performance, you need to understand what you spend your time on every day. For example, how much time do you waste browsing the news during your work day? What are the hours when you get the most work done?
There are several time tracking tools that you can rely on to figure out how productive you are. These tools can be especially important if you work out of the home; it’s so easy to get distracted by family-related tasks when you work from a home office.
Some of the most popular time tracking tools out there are Toggl, TimeBoy, RescueTime, and TimeCamp.
Technology can be used to make us more productive at home and work. Hopefully, you’ll try some of these time management tools and soon find you have more time to get your essentials done.
