Some (Free or Cheap) Cool Tools to Pump Up Your Productivity and Declutter Your Mind in 2019
5 minute read
Busy is the disease of the day. There are a million things that we all, always, need to be doing, and often when we’re in the middle of doing one thing we’re already thinking about doing the next thing. If our minds were Google Chrome, there would probably be 50 tabs open at any one point in time.
The fact is, busy and productive are not synonymous, as much as some of your busy-competing friends may think otherwise*. We don’t only want to be busy. We want to be productive. We want to be efficient. We want to make shit happen. Time is a limited resource – you can’t buy more of it, and you can’t get it back. So you want to make sure you’re utilising it in the best possible way – and these little tools can make a big difference.
So, a quick listicle today, off the back of a conversation I had with a friend who was asking me about productivity tools and systems. These are mostly online tools, they’re my go-to’s for productivity and I swear by them:
1. Rescuetime
Rescuetime measures how you’re spending your time on your computer each day. You can allocate different tasks to different levels of productivity: Microsoft excel, for example, might be very productive, and Facebook might be very distracting. At the end of each day, you get a nice little report that tells you how you did:
As someone who is competitive, I find this tool particularly motivating because you can set daily goals, and essentially compete against yourself to maximise your time. It can also be a reality-check about how much time you are actually spending on productive things, as opposed to just hanging around on your computer.
I use the free extension and find it does what I need it to do, but if you get really into it you could upgrade to a premium version.
2. Brain.fm
Being able to step into some deep focus while working is more challenging than ever. Brain.fm is a tool that plays music designed to help you focus while you work. You can set a timer for how long you want your focusing session to go, and then let the music help you move into some deep flow. I jumped on a lifetime deal for this one when it was in it’s early stages, but these days it’s a pretty reasonable monthly fee when you consider the value of focus.
3. Toby
Toby is a free chrome extension that helps you organise all your most-used tabs into convenient categories; making it easy to get straight into what you need. It’s also cool because you can open a whole category at once if you have a common bundle of tabs that you always have open at the same time. Mostly, though, I love feeling the zen of organisation.
4. The Stephen Covey Quadrant Model for to-do lists
The traditional to-do list can be deceptive. You could have completed half your to-do list in a day, but really not gotten many important things done. This is why the Stephen Covey model works well.
Stephen Covey wrote the classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In it, he talks about the prioritisation of tasks. Each task can be put into one of four categories:
- Important and Urgent
- Important but Not Urgent
- Urgent but Not Important
- Neither Important nor Urgent
By adjusting your to do list by placing each task into one of the four the quadrants (A page split into four squares does the trick), you can make sure you’re ticking off what you want to tick off in a day. Importantly, the first two boxes should be the highest priority for you – Covey points out that often the Important but Not Urgent tasks are left by the wayside in favour of those seemingly urgent things that pop up during the day.
There are apps where you can get the Covey quadrant into a to-do form, but I tend to go old school with pen and paper for this one. (Mostly because the joy of highlighting completed tasks isn’t quite lost on me yet.)
Also, write your to-do list the day before. It’s the best way to declutter your mind when you stop working – so you’re not going to be eating dinner and exclaiming to your family, ‘Oh! I must remember to send that email to John tomorrow!’ at 8pm.
5. Buddhify
This one is for mind decluttering. Buddhify is one of many cheap, cool meditation tools that can ease you into guided meditation. It has a variety of categories that you can choose from, and the meditations are usually under ten minutes long. These presencing meditations are a great way to take a step back and breathe throughout the day. I’m also a fan of the ‘going to sleep’ meditation right before bed. (Yes, to my dear friend William, I do maintain my argument that they still count as meditating, and not just going to sleep more peacefully than usual.)
6. Audible
For anyone who ever asks me how I manage to read so many books, this is one of the key answers I give. Audible is about $15AU per month, and comes with a monthly credit for a new book to listen to. If you spend a lot of your time on trains, buses, or sitting in traffic in your car, it’s a fantastic way to continue personal development in times where you probably wouldn’t be doing anything else anyway.
7. Nanowrimo
This one is for budding writers and content makers, so I get that it’s niche. I discovered NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, last year, and loved it. It involves a month-long challenge of writing 50,000 words in November. You have a daily word goal of 1,667 words, and you get all sorts of cool graphs on your progress and a community of hundreds or even thousands of others around the world all egging each other on. I didn’t use it for fiction (you don’t have to), and it’s a great challenge to get into the habit of writing. Plus, with a free price tag, if you’re wanting to create a lot in 2019 I’d definitely recommend it. You can take the daily goals and habits into the months outside the challenge to be able to create and produce more in the long term.
Cheers to a super productive 2019! If you work for yourself or run a small business, I’d also highly recommend getting a good project management system, and a nice social media scheduler to save a bucketload of time. If you have any other awesome tools that you’re using that have had an impact on your productivity, please let me know in the comments!
Have you used any of these tools before? What are your go-to productivity hacks?
Make Today the Day,
Sonia
This blog post was originally posted on my training website, Statusone.com.au, on Jan 9, 2019. I have since been moving some of my favourite blog posts from there over to here, as this is now my ‘content hub’ and I want you to have access to some of the cool stuff I’ve written about before. You can still check out the Status One site if you’re interested in corporate training if you want. Also, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter below for updates and weekly exclusive content.
* By the by, a busy-competing friend is the one who is always throwing out a busy-challenge when the topic comes up. Someone will say, ‘oh, I’ve been really busy today, I had to work 12 hours.’ Busy-competer will reply with something like, ‘you think that’sbusy?! Well I had to work fifteen hours!’. They do this for every busy-related comment. You will never beat them. They win the busy game.