Productivity Tools

Productivity tools are just what they sounds like - tools to make you more productive. There are a variety of productivity tools, some of which are helpful and others of which are not. It is especially important to avoid productivity tools that purport to be helpful, but really just further complicate your life. This article highlights some popular categories of productivity tools that can help you cut unnecessary tasks out of your life and speed up the things you know you have to get done.

Self-imposed website blockers. How often do you procrastinate by visiting your favorite social networking site? How often do you convince yourself that you're being productive when you're really just checking the news (again) online? If you're like most internet users, you do these and similar actions often and the amount of time you waste doing things like this adds up. When you really need to get work done, there are programs you can download that will (A) either cause certain websites you designate ahead of time not to load or (B) cause those same websites to redirect to more productive pages you designate.

Task list programs. A lot of people waste a great deal of time by not having a clear direction when they sit down to work. When they are trying to figure out what to do, they venture over to other websites and waste time. With a task list, you can move fluidly from task to task, likely in order of most pressing to least pressing. There are many great task list programs available to allow you to store and prioritize your tasks in clear and concise ways.

An online stopwatch. An online stopwatch is a handy productivity tool in that it allows you to see just how much time you spend on particular tasks (and hopefully you can reduce the time per task). Not only that, an online stopwatch appeals to people's competitive nature. For instance, if you sent five emails in 10 minutes yesterday, can you send five emails in eight minutes today? If you challenge yourself to get your tasks done quicker on a daily basis using on online stopwatch, you'll start moving more fluidly and you'll find far more efficient ways of getting your tasks done.