If you spend a lot of time online – either at the office working or on the go with your phone – time seems to get away from you. When you’re opening your laptop and decide to check Facebook quickly, but all of a sudden, 30 minutes has just flown by. And then when you’re unlocking your phone to check a text, but you get a notification from Instagram and start scrolling for an hour. These little actions add up, and you can spend hours doing nothing. To combat this loss of productivity, here are five time-saving digital tools to make sure that you don’t waste hours of your time just scrolling.
The Space app, available for Android and iPhone users, helps you set goals and become more mindful of your screen usage. When you install Space, you can fill out a short questionnaire about your phone habits and then select a user type that is your best match. Space then will set a screen unlock and time use goals, sending you notifications as phone usage increases and reward you with different achievement badges when you meet your goals.
Bookmarks Bar
We all have websites that we check on the daily, and the bookmarks bar makes it easy to make sure you get to those productive websites as fast as possible. Instead of typing the site that you need to go to on the search bar and getting side-tracked by other options, the bookmarks bar allows you to get to the websites that you need for work without the temptation of other productivity-sucking sites.
If you have a voracious appetite for reading and can get easily sidetracked by the Internet’s juicy content, the Pocket app is perfect for you. Whenever you see something that you would love to read but can’t because you have to work, you can use time savers like Pocket. With a quick click, you can save videos, articles, or anything you want to spend time on later. This way, you can spend time being productive knowing that the articles that you want to read are safely saved for later when you have some free time.
Notifications
Just because you sign up for a lot of websites doesn’t mean you want an information every time you get an email from them. Do you need to know every time you get a like on your Facebook post or a new Twitter follower? All these little alerts can add up to a huge distraction and waste of time. Instead, you can opt-out of email notifications or social media notifications altogether in your settings app, so that you don’t get distracted and can have less interruption throughout your day.
The Timyo app is great for organizing and prioritizing emails by enabling you to indicate to your recipient when you expect to receive a response, whether it’s ASAP or sometime in the future, and organize emails by the time you plan to reply to them. By assigning due dates to certain emails, Timyo reminds you when a reply is overdue or pending, so you never have to forget to reply to one again, definitely enhancing your productivity.
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