Everyone wants to do more in less time. Sometimes we overburden ourselves to get up the productivity levels and end up being stressed and as a result even less productive in the long run.
We shouldn’t forget that we live in the age of technology and numerous talented developers have already created solutions for many of our problems, motivation and productivity booståing included.
The following applications and services will save your time on doing similar tasks, keep you on track and overall improve your life.
Starting your day the right way
The first hour of your day sets the tone to the entire day and the way it starts depends on many factors, including substantial, nutritious breakfast and having a good night’s sleep.
Waking up easy and feeling refreshed is all about timing. We go through sequential light sleep and deep sleep cycles, and while waking up between the cycles results in getting up effortlessly, being awakened during one of the cycles, especially the deep one, means leaving the dream world through long, desperate fight with the alarm clock.
The applications below will help you schedule your sleep correctly and make sure you get up on time even if you are a devoted deep sleeper.
Sleepytime Sleep Scheduler
Alarmy Alarm Clock
Alarmy is an alarm that makes sure you wake up and don’t go back to back against all odds.
Hitting the snooze is a real challenge that drives the sleep away. You can set different tasks to turn the alarm off, such as moving to a specific location of your house to take a picture (make sure to not pick the bedroom!), shaking the phone particular number of times to exert yourself physically, or solving math problems to get your brain going.
Basically, all you need to wake your brain and body up is to just get up and/or do something. It could be anything, going to the bathroom, drinking a glass of water, focusing on some kind of mental or physical task. In case your willpower to get out of bed like this is not that strong, get Alarmy, it won’t let you be lazy in the morning.
Getting up after the first alarm is only half of the task - in order to get to the office in time you have to avoid traffic jams at all costs and find the shortcut way. In case Google Maps and standard applications don’t always prove to be reliable, consider the following alternatives.
Please remember to never actively use such application while being behind the wheel, drive safely!
Waze
Waze is a GPS navigation application that ensures you get to the places you have to be right in time, avoiding traffic jams, construction and even police in real-time. The application provides information about your arrival time based on live traffic data, changes the routing instantly to ensure the shortest and fastest way. Moreover, it shows gas stations with cheapest gas along your route and finds vacant parking places.
INRIX Traffic
INRIX is a navigation, traffic and parking app that uses crowd-sourced data from over 300 million devices to give the most up-to-date maps and traffic information. INRIX reports accidents, police activity and road hazards, has calendar integration for automatic driving directions to the scheduled appointments and events. The application provides availability and pricing of not only on-street parking spaces, lots and garages of all major US cities. INRIX determines the best time to leave and the optimal route based not only on real-time traffic, but also a driver’s personal preferences.
Prioritize and focus
One of the major keys to productivity is creating a to-do list, separating tasks by different priority levels and doing the biggest tasks first. It’s also recommended to prioritize creative work for the morning - even if you are not exactly a morning person, creative work surprisingly proved to be going much more smoothly in the morning than in after lunch time.
As much as 28% of each day are spent on distractions and an average office worker spends about 13 hours per week just checking and organizing email. The following applications will help raising self-awareness regarding your productivity, save time and boost your work effectiveness.
Evernote
Evernote is probably the most used organizer/planner application and its popularity is well-deserved - it has all features needed for keeping notes, creating to-do lists and checklists, synchronizing them between phone, tablet, computer and easily sharing with friends and colleagues. With Evernote you can set reminders, capture and store important thoughts and ideas either through text, sketches, screenshots, photos or even audio. It’s a go-to application for getting organized.
RescueTime
RescueTime tracks the time you spend in your browser to give you a picture of what you are actually doing all day and ranks sites by different productivity rate, from very distracting to very productive and displays the infographics of your activity. The ranks are given by the service and can be changed accordingly to your work specificity. You don’t have to wonder where you entire day went anymore and how to become more productive - just open the RescueTime dashboard and check your daily, weekly and monthly stats, set productivity goals, temporary block the diverting sites.
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