“Technology is a terrible master, but a wonderful servant.”
Brian Tracy
Brian Tracy got it right in his classic time management book “Eat that frog!” We all want technology to help us get things done faster and better, but way too often, it’s a time-consuming distraction.
How time-consuming? Let’s look at some stats:
- The average iPhone user unlocks his phone 80 times a day. Assuming you sleep 8 hours, that’s checking your phone every 12 minutes. I’m afraid not many masterpieces or meaningful conversations were enabled by looking at a phone every 12 minutes.
- Digital distraction is one of the biggest hurdles to high-quality knowledge work, costing the US economy almost 1 trillion dollars annually.
- An average employee spends 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings and most employees attend 62 meetings a month. Not surprisingly, 47% of meeting goers complain that meetings are the #1 time-waster at the office.
- Knowledge workers spend 28% of their workweek on managing email (according to Adobe it’s even 4.1 hours per weekday), as the number of business emails received is somewhere between 61 to 76 per weekday. If you work 8 hours a day, that’s a new email every 7 minutes. Even less great work was accomplished by reading a new email every 7 minutes.
- Next to this, knowledge workers spend 19% of their time on searching and gathering internal information and 14% on communicating and collaborating internally (a.k.a. meetings). That leaves just 39% for doing the actual work, what McKinsey calls ‘role-specific tasks’.
That’s why you’ll find so many productivity tools aimed at increasing your focus, while reducing the most common productivity killers: emails, meetings and the time spent looking for information.
But before we dive into all those great time-saving tools, it’s important to realize that they will do you no good without the right mindset, the right priorities and an effective way of working.
To get that mindset (and a lot of practical tips as well), I’ve found these resources most useful, interesting and entertaining:
Books:
- Obviously, the productivity bible: Getting Things Done by David Allen, you could even set the GTD workflow as your wallpaper
- The 21 powerful principles (just a few pages each) from Eat that frog! by Brian Tracy.
- The free ebook How to Outsmart Your Inbox by SaneBox. In this ebook, they share 3 email commandments, 17 tricks and 5 inbox zero rules to prevent email overload. And obviously mention how SaneBox can help you with that.
Articles:
- Seth Godin’s 9 rules to solve your meeting problems. These rules make so much sense, your company should simply copy-paste them.
- Two of the many fantastic Paul Graham essays:
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. If you consider yourself a maker, then make sure you have enough long chunks of uninterrupted time (almost) every day. And even if you’re a manager, you’ll also need some focused ‘maker time’ every now and then. If you never have half a day without meetings or interruptions, you won’t create anything worthwhile.
Based on these schedules, Brad Geddes has a great practical solution that any company could easily implement: “Therefore, in the morning (most people’s most productive time) I stick to a maker’s schedule. No meetings allowed until after lunch; and often 2pm (…) However, as most people’s creativity wanes during the day; by the afternoon I’m open to meetings and phone calls.“ - Good and Bad Procrastination. So there’s good procrastination? There sure is! So if you love to procrasinate (I know I do), make sure it’s the right kind by reading this essay. Brian Tracy calls it ‘Creative Procrastination’ (principle #5).
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. If you consider yourself a maker, then make sure you have enough long chunks of uninterrupted time (almost) every day. And even if you’re a manager, you’ll also need some focused ‘maker time’ every now and then. If you never have half a day without meetings or interruptions, you won’t create anything worthwhile.
- Trello’s productivity blog posts. I’d highly recommend these posts to start with: Why Context Switching Ruins Productivity, How To Find Your Most Productive Hours, The Pomodoro Technique and The Rule Of Five.
- Harvard Business Review’s Productivity and Time Management topics, where you’ll find many high quality articles and advice based on the latest research.
- The Zen Habits archive: you’ll find a ton of wisdom over here, not just about productivity, but about life. Read the Top 10 Productivity Hacks to get started.
- 10 Mind-Blowing Tips on How to Stop Procrastinating: useful tips on how to make procrastination work for you, instead of against you.
Videos:
Two entertaining and painfully recognizable TED talks (15 minutes each):
- Why work doesn’t happen at work by Jason Fried. According to the co-founder of 37signals there are two main reasons why work doesn’t happen at work: meetings & managers (see a trend here?). It’s especially fun to forward this video to any meeting-crazed manager.
- Inside the mind of a master procrastinator by Tim Urban this is a must-watch that makes you recognize the 3 creatures in your brain involved with procrastination: the rational decision-maker, the instant gratification monkey and the panic monster.
And after watching it, read Tim’s psychological analysis and advice in How to Beat Procrastination. In this post, he introduces new useful and powerful metaphors, such as the critical entrance, the dark woods, the mixed feelings park and the happy playground.
Once you have the right mindset, priorities and way of working, the tools in today’s StackScape™ can bring your productivity to the next level. Please note that the tools in this post are mostly about personal productivity.
If you’re looking for how your team or company can be more productive, stay tuned for the next StackScape™, which will be all about collaboration tools, including messaging, project management, process management and knowledge management tools.
As you can see from the overview above (click here for a pdf download with clickable logos), I’ve categorized today’s technology as follows:
- Focus
- Email add-ons
- Calendar add-ons
- Note taking
- Task management
- RSS readers
- Read-it-later
- Screen capturing & recording
Focus
If there’s one common thread concerning productivity, it’s how our lack of focused attention is killing our productivity. We interrupt ourselves by continuously checking our phone, email and the 20 other open browser tabs. Others interrupt us with phone calls, questions, gossip, messages, emails and meetings.
So the first thing we need to do is remove all possible distractions and interruptions. To quote Brian Tracy once again, the goal here is to “concentrate single-mindedly on one thing, the most important thing and stay at it until it is 100% complete.”
That may sound daunting, but if you define that ‘one thing’ as something you can finish in 30, 60 or 90 minutes, then it’s a matter of staying fully concentrated for that amount of time before taking a break or moving on to something else.
The tools and apps below will help you focus by letting you set timers to fully focus and by removing the most common digital distractions.
Free:
Freemium:
Paid:
Email add-ons
As you’ve seen in the stats above, reducing the time you spend in your email is something we should all strive for. The tools below will help you do just that.
Free:
- Emails 2 RSS: you’d rather receive newsletters in your RSS reader rather than in your inbox? So do I! This great service makes it happen.
Freemium:
- Boomerang for Gmail and Boomerang for Outlook. One of the best email add-ons out there, it even includes ‘Respondable’: an assistant that uses AI to help you write better emails.
- Grammarly. A browser plug-in that helps you improve your writing. But as you probably write your emails in your browser, it also improves your emails.
Paid:
- SaneBox. Reach inbox zero with the smart filtering, reminder and snooze options from SaneBox.
Calendar add-ons
Scheduling meetings or events with a group of people can quickly became a time-consuming chore that takes longer than the meeting itself. The tools below will assist you to make it much faster.
Free:
- Boomerang Calendar for Gmail / Google Calendar.
- FindTime for Microsoft Office 365
Freemium:
Paid:
Note Taking
Of course, you could still use pen and paper. And if you do, be sure to check out the Bullet Journal (BuJo) system if your hip friends haven’t told you about it already. But if you’re more interested in a digital notebook that never gets lost, these are your main options:
Free:
Freemium:
Paid:
Task Management
Or ‘to do lists on steroids’. You can use these just for yourself, or together with your team to gain visibility on who’s doing what. You’ll find more on the latter in the next StackScape™.
Free:
Freemium:
Paid:
- OmniFocus (Mac / iOS only)
RSS Readers
The best way to keep up with all those interesting blogs you want to follow is by having them neatly organized in your RSS reader. And if you have an iPhone, iPad or a Mac, I’d recommend the paid Reeder app to read your feeds. But you’ll need to subscribe to them first by using one of the services below.
Free:
Freemium:
Paid:
Read-it-later
How often do you stumble on an interesting article or video that you’d like to read or watch later? If this happens to you regularly, you’ll want to consider one of the 2 tools below to easily save stuff for later.
Free:
Freemium:
Screen capturing and recording
If you want to share what’s on your screen with customers and colleagues, the tools below can help you out.
Free:
Freemium:
Paid:
I hope you’ll get much more done in less time with your selection of the resources and tools above. If you feel there’s a category or tool missing, let me know in the comments below!
And as mentioned: stay tuned for the next StackScape™ about collaboration. It will contain over 70 solutions that your team can use to improve collaboration and workflow.