A new year brings with it the chance to look at which areas of your life can be revised and improved. Common resolutions often revolve around personal goals such as health, relationships and finance. However, it’s also a great time to take stock of your work environment and look at where improvements can be made, for examples with the help of productivity tools. Many employees report a feeling of overwhelm and overload, struggling to keep on top of their workload. This can lead to working overtime, stress and dissatisfaction. And on top of that, many studies have shown that working longer hours can actually decrease productivity.
Work smarter, not harder, and reap the benefits. Instead of staying back late or logging on over the weekend just to stay on top, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite free productivity tools to help you stay focused, and fight procrastination.
Give them a try and make 2023 your most productive year yet.
Trello
When it comes to increasing productivity, Trello has to be one of our favorite productivity tools. Whether your team is remote, in-house, or a hybrid of both, by collaborating on projects within a project management tool, you will reduce email clutter, stop information loss, and streamline your workflow. It’s setup is based on the Kanban method of moving cards (tasks) from ‘To-Do’ to ‘Doing’ to ‘Done’ so you can visually see what everyone in the team is working on without needing to regularly check-in. Best of all, the highly functional free version will enable you to fully explore the features without having to upgrade.
To Do List
There’s a real sense of satisfaction that comes with ticking something off your to-do list. That’s why we’re prone to ticking off the easy jobs first, as opposed to the most urgent. A free to-do list tracker such as Tick Tick can help solve this problem, as it prioritizes tasks according to their due date. It’s free to use and the dashboard is clear and simple. Keep it open in a separate tab and you’ll never lose track of which deadlines are approaching.
Time Tracker App
If you are the King or Queen of procrastinating, give the time management method The Pomodoro Technique a try. The aim of the Pomodoro Technique is to use time as a valuable productivity tool in accomplishing what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and to enable us to improve continually the way we work or study without interruptions. Set the timer for 25 minutes of dedicated work, then enjoy five minutes off. Read some feedback from other users on this Lifehack blog.
Password Manager
How many times do you hit that ‘forgot password’ button on different websites? Stop wasting all that time, and keep things simple with a password tracker such as LastPass. It saves all your passwords and you only need to remember one master password for their site, which also makes it one of our most loved tools for productivity. Give it a try and wave goodbye to forgotten passwords.
Conceptboard as comprehensive productivity tool
Conceptboard will be your new best friend when it comes to collaborating without the hassle. It’s a giant digital whiteboard, so at its most basic it can be used for brainstorming, while the huge library of free templates will help you conduct a range of agile projects quickly and easily. Best of all, because it’s entirely online, remote workers, contractors and distributed teams now have a simple platform to collaborate on documents without the clunky back and forth emails, attachments and printing. Save time and effort and see how a free Conceptboard account can help you.
Here at Conceptboard we’re always striving to improve how teams collaborate, so whether you’re looking for advice on staying sane as a remote worker, how to successfully collaborate remotely or how to run remote whiteboarding sessions, you’ll find it all on our blog.
