Weekly Round-Up #43 – Boosting Productivity, Are your Apps Making You Less Productive and 2000 Evernote Tags! Are you kidding me?
It’s almost the weekend so it’s time to sit back and enjoy the round-up I’ve put together this week for you. This week we look at how you can boost your productivity through actions, and through working at home, how to book meeting rooms if you’re a remote worker and whether 2000 Evernote tags is too many
Hello and welcome to this week’s round-up. This week on Flipping Heck saw the launch of the firt two of the Autumn Cleaning Challenges. To prove I’m not “All mouth and No Trousers” I’ve been updating my [progress on Twitter] so check out my before and after shots of Challenge 1: Organising & Tidying your Office Space Photo Here and Challenge 2: Organising and Cleaning Your Kitchen Photo here. Checkout the blog next week for the next tips and challenges and follow me on Twitter to see my progress!
Anyway, without further ado, here’s this week’s round-up of productivity and motivational news I’ve found for you from around the Internet this week.
Book Meeting Rooms Easier With DavinciMeetingRooms.com New Android App – Market Wired
Quite a lot of us are no longer tied to an office desk in a set location, we’re away from the office happy to work away in a home office or a coffee shop chatting with clients over Facetime, Googel Hangouts or Skype. Sometimes though, only a face-to-face meeting will do and it’s not always viable to have someone turn up at your home or local Starbucks. Enter Davinci, an app for Android that links you to meeting and conference rooms in your local area and can provide day offices in certain cities which may help you give off a more “professional” appearance.
3 ways you’re screwing up your productivity at work — and what to do instead – Business Insider
I wholeheartedly agree with point 2 on this list “Waiting for other people to act”. If your’e not careful you can be waiting forever for someone to do something or get back to you. What seems important to you may not even be on someone else’s radar so make sure you let the other person know how important the task is and any due date.
10 Hacks to Save Time and Boost Productivity – Entrepreneur
I agree with the majority of the “hacks” in this post. One thing I’ve started to do recently is “4. Make your to-do list before hitting the sack.” I find that writing down what I need to do tomorrow before I go to bed leaves me with a really clear head and has helped me get to sleep a lot easier.
The Ultimate Guide To Using Gmail Like A Complete Boss – Huffington Post
“Filter, filter, filter” – amen to that! If I didn’t filter my emails I’d end up with around 300 in my inbox every day, and only 10 or so of those are something that I really need to read, the rest are just information and newsletters. The tips in this post are from real-world users of Gmail so you know they’re tried and tested.
Balancing Act: Productivity can soar when working from home – The Sun Herald
According to this article, 24 million Americans work from home at least some of the time. This trend is only just catching on in the UK (the majority of people who work from home are self employed according to the Office Of National Statistics) so if you need to persuade your boss if you work from home you will actually work rather than just watching Jeremy Kyle, show them this article!
23 Time Management Tips: How to Be Productive – 99 Smart Ideas
Camilla at 99 Smart Ideas has completly revamped her post on how to be more productive, giving you concrete actions you can follow in order to make the most of your work day – there’s also a fab free 20 page workbook and checklists to keep you on the right track.
10 Productivity Apps Every Freelancer Needs – 99U
The apps in this list take the pain and guesswork out of a lot of the stuff freelancers can struggle with (or find too expensive), from contract templates to proposals you’ll find pretty much everything you need here. And if someone can let me know what the “Pink Noise” is that the Noisli provides, please let me now in the comments!
Change the way you run meetings, increase productivity – Gladstone Observer
Those of you who are regular readers will know that I think meetings are a really over-rated tool that could be handled much better (or avoided completely). The Gladstone Observer has a couple of tips to help you make your meetings more productive although I’m not sure that “Look for novelty. If you find yourself bored in a meeting, try – really try – to find something interesting going on in the room” will help you to be more productive – surely you’ll lose focus on the meeting and won’t be productive in any way, shape or form?
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Are productivity apps more hype than help? – BBC News
Do you get excited when the newest productivity app comes out, vowing it will change your life for the better only for it to fall by the wayside after a couple of months? Then you’re not alone. Smart Phones can actually make us less productive. One user referenced in the article has over 2,000 tags in Evernote. 2,000! That’s ridiculous! In fact that’s probably being the opposite of organised, I’m a firm believer that you should be able to distill an article’s content down to around 3 – 5 keywords and if you’re saving that many items you need 2,000 then I think you need a better system!
Over To You
How many tags do you have in Evernote, Pocket or Delicious? Is 2,000 an acceptable number of tags? Maybe I’m being too conservative!
How about apps – do you have a different system you use? Let us know in the comments and have a great weekend.
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