What Are Your Productivity Tools For Work?

To increase our productivity in the workplace, there are benefits to exploring innovative ways of doing our work more efficiently. In your work ‘toolbox’, consider adding new tools that can help contribute towards increasing your overall productivity. Because there is a plethora of tools available, I will touch on 3 main categories for top productivity tools to consider: information-organizing, note-taking, and task-managing.  

Note-Taking

Depending on your industry, you might find yourself in meetings a good amount of your time. When you are participating in dialog in these meetings, you might find it hard to keep up with taking notes while staying within the meeting time limit. However, if your notes could type themself then you would be able to be more productive by focusing your attention to the discussion. 

One great example of a tool available for this is: tl;dv.io. This tool is particularly useful when you have online meetings as it automatically records and transcribes the audio. It also has some neat features like providing insights and even clipping parts of the recording. For offline meetings, you should use an online document where you can type in your meeting notes by using a self-crafted code that helps you keep your note-taking to a minimum and that you would understand post-meeting.  

Information-Organizing

As we are not machines, we may not remember every last detail of information that we may need at one point in our work to do our job. However, it is more productive to be able to locate the information when you need it. In order to do this, you will need to be able to have the information organized as you intake it so you can pull it up later when you really do need it. 

One great example of a tool available for this is: Microsoft OneNote. This tool allows you to have separate Notebooks that have Sections, which you can use as your main categories for grouping, and Pages within each section, which you can use to store the actual job knowledge under. With its search function, you are able to easily pull what you’re looking for. Its online cloud-base storage makes it great to access from anywhere!

Task-Managing

One more productivity tool category you should consider is task-management. Keeping track of all the work tasks we have to accomplish can actual take up more time than completing the tasks themselves, rendering us with unproductive use of our time. To remedy this, look at using a tool that makes it easy to track your tasks and their current statuses. 

One great example of this type of tool is: Microsoft 365 ‘To-Do’. This is particularly useful when your work has adopted the Microsoft ecosystem. This built in feature allows you to enter your tasks, make tasks from your work emails in Outlook, organize your tasks into boards that reflect their current status (e.g. not started, in progress, etc.), and many other neat features. 

Overall, having tools that work for you in each of these 3 main categories can help you increase your productivity at work. Work smarter, not harder. Let me know in the comments if you have any favorite tools within each of these 3 main categories.