Tech-Assisted Time Management
One of the great promises of technology is that it can save us time. But it also can be good at helping us manage our time.
Some of the ways technology helps us manage time are obvious: online calendars and mobile to-do lists, for example. But a number of high-tech tools go beyond those basics to take a more strategic approach to making your days more productive and efficient. Following are some popular options.
Time audits. Managing time is kind of like taking a trip. You can’t really plan your route unless you know where you are. Or, as Forbes contributor John Rampton put it, “When it comes to time management, the first step you need to take is finding out where your time actually goes.” A number of apps – such as RescueTime, Toggl or Calendar – will help you track your daily activities so you can, at the end of the day, see how you really spent your time. This can give you a great starting point for improving your time management.
To-do lists. No matter how sophisticated a person might get, in one or another, the to-do list remains the foundation of daily productivity. The key is recognizing that your to-do list needs to be more than a checklist, and a number of apps can help you create to-do lists that boost time management rather than simply track work. Consider apps like Todoist, Any.do, Google Keep, MyLifeOrganized and Remember the Milk.
Catch-all apps. Some apps simply offer to pull everything into one place. Google offers a number of tools that can organize your life, as does Evernote.
DO-all apps. Do you spend time working among different devices or applications because they won’t speak to each other? IFTTT acts as a bridge among tech tools to allow you to, in a way, say something once and have it heard by all of your tools.
Focus tools. Sometimes it’s not that we have limited time, it’s that we waste time, usually because brief distractions turn into long distractions. A number of apps will help you avoid those long lapses by protecting you against short lapses. For example, with Freedom, you can set time windows in which you can’t access distracting sites or social media, and it will also supply you with white noise to block out distracting sounds, and RescueTime (mentioned above) is a time tracker that includes a distraction-blocking feature in its premium version.
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Tags: Technology, time management