6 Tips to Improve Your Productivity

Tools That Improve My Workflow And Could Help Yours.

Time is precious, especially in the fast-paced agency life where you are juggling several tasks at once. Saving a few minutes during your day can help significantly. Working smarter, not harder, is the key. Below are some of the tools I keep handy.

Focus.fm
You need music to get you through the day-at least I do. Sometimes you need instrumental music that will allow you to think more clearly. That is where focus.fm comes in. It's a randomized list of songs that are perfect for what it's intended to do: help you focus.

Evernote
I've been using this for a long time. It has added a ton of features-some I don't care for-but the essence of the app has remained the same. I can access all my ideas and notes on all devices at a moment's notice. Between the iOS app, web, and desktop app, it's easy to start writing in one place and continue on another.

IFTTT
With the ability to link two apps via their functionality, it's amazing. It improves productivity by automating tasks. Saving even a minute or two adds up over time. IFTTT has been better for some of my social uses, posting my Instagram posts on Twitter as native Twitter posts, meaning it posts the image, not the link, to the Instagram post.

Pocket
I'm the person with 5 million tabs open in three separate windows. Pocket helps eliminate that confusion by allowing me to save the link that I find interesting while adding tags and categories. The browser add-on (desktop and mobile) is what makes it powerful. I open Pocket in the morning, at lunch, or during any down time and browse the list of things I thought were interesting initially. Yes, you can bookmark sites, but rarely do I go through bookmarks, and they're browser specific. I tried a few tools to solve this issue of reckless tabs, but Pocket has been the best solution for me.

Google Docs-all of them!
Another tool that has real time syncing and is accessible on every device is Google Docs. I've found multiple uses for each of Google's tools. They don't quite have all the capabilities of Microsoft Office, but Google has done a good job of including the most useful features, including the ability to create templates for docs you use regularly.

Grammarly
Nobody likes to send out communication with spelling and grammatical errors. This tool works as you type to highlight issues and suggest corrections. It has its own web app for writing directly in the platform, but I use it as a Gmail plugin to scan my emails as I write them.