Productivity Tools —Bite-Sized Edition 🛠
Time is a precious resource and every little second saved is a second earned. As the oft-quoted businessman Paul J Meyer once said,
Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.
As a team, we use Slack for pretty much everything (love you, Slack ❤) and we have plenty of streamlined channels, with each channel having a well-defined purpose for its use. It’s us asking that channel, “Why do you exist?”
Here’s the purpose for the existence of one of our internal Slack channels, #topic-productivity:
What’s a #Vitamin, #Painkiller and #Candy, you ask?
Let’s just say vitamins are daily productivity supplements that help every day in a small way 💊
Pain killers are for big problems to be solved once 💉
And candies are, well, floss and fluff material 🍬 No practical use case but good to be friends with…like unicorns 🦄
I thought I’d farm our #topic-productivity channel on Slack and share some of the Vitamins, Painkillers, Candies we use at Crowdfire. While we’ll keep adding more to the list, here’s our Top 3 —
1. Hemingway
#Vitamin
Writing something and not sure how to improve it? Drop it in Hemingway! To start with, it gives a readability grade. Next, it highlights the parts you can change to make it even better.
While not perfect, it’s helpful when writing pretty much anything.
I personally love using Hemingway because I have a tendency to ramble on and on (like this) and Hemingway helps me cut out the fluff and bring me back to the point I’m trying to make.
2. The Great Suspender
#PainKiller
A lot of us are guilty of multi-tabbing through the day. My browser used to look like an endless flip-book of tabs. At one point, I realised I had 117 (that’s right, one hundred and seventeen) tabs. Don’t ask me how my computer ran 🙈 I remain blissfully unaware.
Now, not only do so many tabs slow your computer down, it slows you down. Having more than 3 tabs open at a time is a sign that your attention is all over the place, you’re procrastinating and you’re lacking focus on completing singular tasks. So, how much are you really getting done?
The Great Suspender is a free Chrome extension that automatically suspends tabs after a configurable period of time. What I love about TGS is that it’s so lightweight. And I can whitelist tabs that I don’t want to suspend at all. Pretty sweet Chrome extension. Also, props to the majestic sounding name 😁👏
3. LiveChat’s Typing Speed Test
#Candy
A typing test? To increase productivity? Whaaa?
Bear with me here, this makes sense. This typing speed test is a great way to improve typing speed and accuracy (or just a stress buster in my case!)
Why does it matter? LiveChat answers that better than I can:
To help calibrate this information and for reference — anything above a 40 wpm is above average, professional typists are around 65–75wpm, and above 100 is considered high. Look around you — some of the most productive people you know probably type like a speeding train. Focused honing of typing skills can drive fevered productivity over the years. 🤓
Any tools you’d like to add as #Vitamin, #Painkiller and #Candy? What tools do you use to help you organize your day? Go on and share them in the comments ⤵️
*This post is part of an ongoing series about Bite-sized Productivity
