We’re 13 days into the new year. How are your resolutions coming? To make it easier and do it one step at a time, we’re offering a tip a day to help improve your productivity.
So far, we’ve offered suggestions for manging your time and your mobile devices. Now you’ve got to straighten up your ‘stuff’. It might be more than your desk that needs a good cleaning—so start out the new year with a tidy approach to all your ‘overwhelming’ tasks.
Productivity Tip #3. Declutter Your Existence
Is email overwhelming you? Especially if you’re on an iPhone, consider a little restructuring. A lot of us are guilty of using the pre-installed iOS system. Surprisingly, though, it’s Outlook that tops the iPhone chart. In late 2014, Microsoft Outlook acquired Acompli—and they’ve made the most of it. Today’s fully compatible and refreshed platform gives you the flexibility to bundle, highlight, set reminders, snooze and search.
If you’re frequently confused by never-ending email back and forth with colleagues, maybe you need a total overhaul to your work approach. In that case, Slack has revolutionized team communication by shedding clunky email threads entirely and shifting work to feature-rich chat rooms.
If notebooks and Post-its® are taking on lives of their own, Evernote offers a comprehensive note-taking alternative that syncs across all of your devices. You can label photos, record voice notes and enter text to create notes.
For those who can’t seem to stay on top of business expenses, Expensify is a seamless way to manage a budget minus the envelope stuffed with crinkled receipts. It can be as simple or as detailed as you like, so feel free to track spending in the format that best works for you.
And if you’re dealing with trying to keep all the people in your life straight, Humin and CamCard are both ready to pin down and search your ever-growing network.
CamCard helps you manage and exchange business cards, an ideal fit for sales people, entrepreneurs, business developers or marketing experts. Features include exchanging e-cards when you run out of paper cards and a way to add notes and reminders to contacts.
Now that you’ve got your inbox under control, expense reports filed, notes organized and business cards converted, you can think about moving forward and improving communication. Our next post will help you with ways to save time and money while staying in touch with colleagues and customers.