Save Time and Increase Your Productivity in These 4 Simple Steps

Time management and productivity hacks are hot topics these days, especially with so many of us working from home and trying to balance everything that comes along with that.

Staying organized and on top of all your schedules and tasks doesn’t have to be complicated. By following the easy steps outlined below, you can save tons of time and boost your productivity in ways that are immediately noticeable.

4 Small Steps To Save You Time and Hack Your Productivity

Step 1: Sync multiple email accounts and calendars with Spike

Staying on top of your calendar events when you have 2-3 different personal and professional email accounts or use different calendar apps can be time consuming and counterproductive.

Fortunately, you can solve this by using an app called Spike to deal with all your emails, calendars, and more in a single unified workspace.

Spike is the first collaborative conversational email and consolidated calendar app designed to help teams of all sizes connect, create, and collaborate in order to accomplish more.

Sync all your personal and professional email accounts to Spike to receive all your messages and view all your calendars in one place.

The platform’s unique conversational email functionality lets you view and reply to emails as if they’re chat messages (think Facebook messenger style).

This feature gets rid of all the clutter in your email threads, including repetitive subject lines, email body content, and signatures, making it a much faster and more natural feeling way to deal with your day-to-day work and personal emailing.

The bottom line is that the fewer different apps you use to manage your schedule and communications, the less time you waste switching from app to app throughout the day.

Spike does a very good job of providing you with all the tools and features you need to optimize your workflows and get more done, in less time. Once you try it out, you’ll want to get your whole team on board!

Step 2: Organize your tasks into to-do lists ahead of time

To-do lists are an incredibly simple way to plan out your time visually and ensure you prioritize tasks efficiently to meet important deadlines.

To make sure you’re ready to go on the most important tasks when you sit down and start working for the day, make a to-do list the night before or at the beginning of each week.

That way, you know exactly what you need to work on and when it’s due and don’t waste time trying to plan out your day at the last minute.

Plus, breaking up more complex projects into smaller tasks and to-dos makes them feel much more manageable.

When you work with a team, you can also delegate out certain tasks on your to-do list as needed. This is when having a collaborative workspace app, such as Spike, really comes in handy.

Being able to see what everyone on your team’s tasks are, including yours, helps keep everyone in the loop and hold individuals accountable for their work.

Tasks can be updated and reassigned as needed, and to-do lists function as a sort of project management tool that allow you to see a project’s progress as its different parts get completed and checked off the to-do list.

Step 3: Cut back on social media and other distracting online activities

If you were to add up all the hours you spent scrolling through social media or reading news sites and other distracting content on the internet, you’d immediately realize how much more productive you could be if you spent that time elsewhere.

We’re not saying you have to quit social media or stop reading the news altogether, but setting certain limits is a huge time management hack.

For example, you could set yourself a rule that you can only do these types of low-priority internet browsing activities at certain hours of the day, or set a time limit for each site every day.

If you’re someone who struggles with obeying such boundaries, there are apps out there you can use to set actual restrictions on your computer or mobile device, so you can’t visit certain sites or so your device cuts you off after you’ve spent X amount of time on them.

Step 4: Try to work on one screen at a time

Switching back and forth between multiple screens, apps, and devices is a huge time suck.

So, if you’re sitting down to work at your computer, put your phone away out of reach or turn off notifications. That way, you’re not constantly tempted to respond to a message on your phone while doing something else on your PC.

Using a unified workspace app, like Spike, is a great way to minimize contextual switching (hopping back and forth between tons of apps and screens) throughout the day, thus saving you time and boosting productivity.

Consolidating all your workflows into a single productivity app that’s available on both mobile and desktop lets you focus on one screen at a time, rather than using certain apps on your PC and others on your smartphone.