Have you ever wondered how you can up your daily outputs, simply by installing a few lifesaving pieces of software on your desktop device? Look no further, as we offer our take on the most helpful productivity programs and browser extensions of the moment to help you tip the balance between the ‘to-do’ list and ‘done’ pile.
Also see – Best Productivity Apps
1: Browser Add On
We’ve written before about how Chrome users can make the most of their browser with efficient add-ons such as Evernote Web Clipper and Google Readability. With the other browser systems, there are a multitude of extensions out there to help you streamline and reduce the number of tabs you have to have lying open at any one time for a clearer workspace, such as RescueTime. This is a program designed to help you self-police your time by monitoring how long you spend on any particular sites and programs to give you a visual breakdown of your procrastination-to-working time ratio.
2: Go Remote
The access and retrieval of your emails can be streamlined too. Invest in an email solution such as Microsoft Exchange to store your emails and calendar appointments remotely on a server (rather than on an individual machine). By doing this, you can assist the flow of interchange between you and your colleagues when it comes to data sharing or calendar appointments. Perfect if you find yourself working in different locations which require remote access.
3: Strategize
For those who find writing a good old-fashioned checklist is the best way to visually prioritize the tasks ahead, save yourself the paper waste and check out a project management platform such as Plan. This tool brings together all necessary project management tools and planning facets of your system (including working integration with GitHub, JIRA, Zendesk and Salesforce) into one command center, allowing you and your associates to collaborate as harmoniously as possible. Plan claims to help users “spend less time managing work,” and focus on actually working. Best of all, it’s free to sign up.
4: Have a Clean Sweep
For most of us, the Microsoft Office suite on our computers is a labyrinth of incorrectly titled, out of date texts and old presentations which have since been replaced by newer versions (despite our still not knowing which is which). Thankfully, you can buy software to help you organize your saved files such as PaperPort Document Manager, which scans through any format file saved on your computer to pull out a specific item you’re looking for and centrally saves it all into one place.