While technology’s omnipresence in our lives affords us the opportunity to get work done from anywhere at any time, being on devices all the time can lead us down time-wasting tunnels, making us less productive.
Thankfully most of the smartphones and computers we use now also have built-in settings or additional apps that can help you reclaim your productivity so you can get back to using your devices for work.
Here are six tech hacks to make you more productive.
Find out how you’re really spending your time online
A little while ago I spent a week tracking how I spent every hour of my day. I was surprised to find that I was spending five times more time on some tasks than I thought, and not spending as much time on other tasks as I assumed. But at the end of the experiment, I at least had data I could use to help enact change.
There are a host of time-tracking apps that give us insight into just how many hours we’re spending surfing the web and using various apps. The best thing about these time-tracking apps is that they run in the background and automatically log your usage. After running the apps for at least a week, you’ll have a good idea of whether you are truly being productive on your devices, or if you are using them to procrastinate more than you thought.
One of the most robust is ManicTime, which not only tracks how much time you spend in each app, but in each document you open. This means you can see if you are giving one project more time than another and can decide whether that project actually deserves the additional time. ManicTime also tracks which websites you visited and how long you spent on each. It even tracks the time you spent away from your computer. It’s available for PC, Mac, Android, and even Linux.
