Productivity is the goal of many and thus a hot topic in business and work circles. People will use tips, tricks and hacks or whatever works to achieve high productivity. Fair enough, anything that gets the job done and best if it gets the job done well. With our lives evermore centred around the devices, we use there are productivity tools that have been developed to make being productive so much easier for you. You should give these a try as they go a long way towards helping you achieve the desired high levels of productivity.

Rescue time

I’ve mentioned rescue time before because it’s an awesome tool. You’ll be pleased to know that in addition to tracking time accurately across multiple devices and platforms and providing one combined report for all your screen time the app now has calendar integration which helps you not only keep track of what you’re doing but also look out for things coming up. You can configure it to update you on how much time you have to allocate to the current task before the next appointment. Making the move from a time tracking tool to an all-around digital assistant that works across all your devices.

IFTTT

One of the hardest things about getting your productivity right is all the administration that comes with it. An entire career, the personal assistant, was largely built on the administration needs of highly productive individuals. If like me, you cannot afford a personal assistant there’s an impressive tool that can help you get similar results. IFTTT stands for “IF This Then That” which is descriptive of what it does. You set it up[ to look for certain things happening on your device (if this) and instruct it to carry out certain instructions (then that). So you can tell it to sync events logged in your Google calendar as unavailable time in your work calendar. This is useful because once you set this up you will not have trouble making sure your administration tasks are done correctly.

Unroll.me

Unroll.me rescued my email account. Let me explain. As a citizen of the world wide web, I would go around signing up for this website and that to access content or services. It was all fun and games until they started hitting my email inbox. All of them. At once. Soon opening my email was a painful task. Opening your inbox after a few hours and seeing over 100 emails, most of them absolute nonsense will turn you away from your inbox. Unroll.me is a service that helps with all that. It checks your inbox for subscription services and gives you 1 click unsubscribing as well as an option to see all the emails you want to see in one summary.

Boomerang

If you like unroll.me then Boomerang might also appeal to you. Sometimes the problem isn’t just the email, it’s you checking it repeatedly looking for the next great distraction. Boomerang organises your email with smart filters and then allows you to nominate a time to view your email. I like this tool because this is how I work with my email and other communication, I schedule a time to view and respond to messages.  I rate this tool quite highly because we often have messages coming in when we are not in a position to do anything meaningful about them but worry.

Freedom

Sometimes all you need to do is shut things down. A lot is going on and while we celebrate the fact our wordprocessor, internet portal, communication device, media player, calculator and playground are now all rolled up in one device that may also be the downfall in these devices when it comes to us being productive. Sometimes you just need your device to do one thing. You just need freedom from everything else. That is precisely what Freedom does for you. Blocking websites and apps across your devices. You can even set this up on a schedule.

If you struggle with any of the problems these tools solve you should go ahead and give them a try. They could unlock the productivity within you that just hasn’t been able to show so far.