Tools to help supercharge your productivity
In our short series on personal productivity we’ve shared some thoughts on daily stress busting tips and habits to help improve your Project Management skills. Although many of these ideas should be easy to try out in your day-to-day lives, it’s also just as easy to slip back into bad habits and old routines as the daily grind of work gets on top of us. But don’t be downhearted — these days we are fortunate to have access to many fantastic time saving and productivity tools, that can help to declutter your inbox, track your to-do’s, organise your research and ensure you keep on schedule and on time.
In this post we’ve steered clear of the well-known project management tools (think Basecamp, Asana etc.) and instead explored tools that focus on a specific productivity challenge or need: time-tracking, list making, scheduling, capturing ideas and organising information.
Here are our top five suggested tools to supercharge your productivity — happy testing!
Pocket
https://getpocket.com/
No more wading through bookmarks or emailing links to yourself on the train. Pocket lets you quickly and easily save articles, posts or website pages, from your desktop or mobile, direct to ‘My List’. You’ve then got access to a visual display of all your saved articles and research. Use the Chrome Extension to quickly add pages and also add tags, so it’s super-fast to search and find what you’re looking for.
Productivity rating: 9/10
Why: A great visual representation of all my bookmarks — easy to use (via the Chrome extension or app) and easy to find what I’m looking for (if you tag things correctly).
Unroll.me
https://unroll.me/
Want a cleaner inbox and better way to manage the hundreds of email newsletters and notifications you’ve signed up to? Well Unroll.me is your answer. Simple to sign-up and set-up — unroll.me scans your email account (e.g. Gmail) and presents a list of all your subscriptions. Then for each subscription you choose one of three options — Unsubscribe, Leave in Your Inbox, or ‘Add to Rollup’. Add to Rollup creates a daily Rollup e-mail digest of your subscriptions. So you’ll still receive all of your e-mail subscriptions but in a much more digestible form.
Productivity rating: 8/10
Why: Very easy to set-up and let run — saving you the hassle of scanning and deleting dozens of emails every day.
Mailtoself
http://mailtoself.com/
A great little app if you don’t want to use a bookmark service like Pocket. Download the ‘Mailtoself’ app, enter your email address and you’re ready to go — it’s that simple. It’s then easy to mail notes, links, websites to yourself, direct form the sharing menu on your mobile. No more copy and pasting links into emails.
Productivity rating: 6/10
Why: A great app that I personally love and use daily as I commute. Not sure how much time it saves me — but I think what’s more important is getting into the habit of capturing content that I find interesting or want to read later.
Wunderlust
https://www.wunderlist.com/
If like me you’re forever writing to-do lists and drowning in bits of paper and post-it notes, then Wunderlist is for you. Whether you’re planning a party, writing a shopping list or managing multiple work projects, Wunderlist enables you to write super-fast to-do lists, set reminders and then share it with people, so you can all keep track of what has or hasn’t been done.
Productivity rating: 8/10
Why: As with the other tools Wunderlist is very easy to set-up and use. The mobile app enables easy creation and sharing of tasks and to-dos and has enabled me to cut down on continuously writing down lists — so there’s no excuses now!
Toggl
https://toggl.com/
If you or your team has to keep time-sheets or if you are charging clients per the hour, then Toggl is a fantastically simple and effective tool, that you should start using now! Sign-up — say ‘What you’re working on’ — then start tracking time. Create projects, track your team, mark time as billable and view the data in easy to read reports and charts.
Productivity rating: 8/10
Why: A no brainer if you keep time sheets or bill by the hour. We don’t use time-sheets at dyzio, but Toggl would have saved me many hours in the past.
Bonus: Here’s a new product we’ve not tested yet — but worth keeping an eye on.
Amy from X.ai
https://x.ai/
This is a hard one for me to review, as I missed out on getting onto the free trial — but it looks like a great AI productivity tool. X.ai (aka Amy) is a personal assistant who schedules meetings for you, by managing the email back and forth that goes with setting up any meeting. No sign-in, no password, no download, all you do is cc: amy@x.ai.
Productivity rating: tbc
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