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5 min read

Productivity Hacks and Efficiency Gadgets: The Top Tools To Make Your Life Easier

productivity-hacks-and-efficiency-gadgets-the-top-tools-to-make-your-life-easier

New technology and innovative approaches are constantly emerging to make day-to-day life a little bit easier. At VC3, we are obsessed with innovation, and so we love to explore the best technology hacks that make your workday more productive and perhaps more enjoyable as well. 

Whether it’s apps, tech hacks, or new software, there are loads of amazing tools out there that can seriously supercharge your productivity, your efficiency, and your output at work, and these small technology adoptions can be genuine drivers of success.

In the spirit of sharing and general goodwill, we thought we’d put together a list of some of our favorite apps, gadgets, and programs that really make a difference to working productivity. Take a look below and let us know what you think! We are always in the market for hearing about new tech.

For Managing Time

Power Automate

Microsoft Power Automate is an outstanding business tool that lets anyone in the organization analyze, act and automate across the organization. The idea behind Microsoft’s Power platform is that anyone in a company can be a developer, and Power Automate allows people with little to no coding experience to create powerful automations which eliminate repetitive tasks and free up humans to be creative and innovative.

ManicTime

Finally, one of the best productivity hacks is to find out how you actually spend your time online to give you a baseline and an idea of how to address unproductive areas. ManicTime tracks how much time you spend on each of your apps, how much time you spend online (and where you go), as well as in every document you work in. This gives you an amazing insight into how you divide your time and allows you to see if you are over-prioritizing certain projects or just spending too much time responding to emails.

Things

A favorite of ‘productivityists’, Things is a task manager app that lets you collect thoughts, organize your day, plan time, customize your workflow and generally keep yourself on the right path throughout your working day.

For Improving Teamwork

Microsoft Teams

Get rid of endless, annoying internal emails with Microsoft Teams. This platform acts as a hub for collaboration and vastly improved teamwork, combining chats, meetings, and calls all in one place and allowing teams to work together far more efficiently and effectively. It is particularly effective when working with remote, dispersed teams, bringing everyone together and keeping everyone on the same wavelength.

BenQ Instashow

Nothing is more frustrating or more of a waste of time than when tech fails at the beginning of a presentation. The BenQ Instashow doesn’t need software or a connection to work, is incredibly user-friendly, and allows presenters to get off to a flying start. All it requires is plugging in or casting via Airplay, and you are good to go.

Timekettle WT2 Plus AI translator 

Working with partners, clients, and providers abroad can be a delicate and time-consuming business, with long waits for translation software and the potential for misunderstandings. The Timekettle WT2 Plus is a space-age device for now, using AI to translate 36 languages in almost real-time. Just pop in the earphones and chat with Abu Dhabi, Singapore, or Beijing with no trouble at all.

For Building Good Habits

Productive

Sometimes the most important part of improving productivity is by building good habits. Productive helps by letting you schedule in habits, setting smart reminders, and delivering feedback on how well you are doing. This helps you turn occasional actions into regular habits and builds good, productive behaviour into your daily life.

Forest

A little bit of fun, Forest is a tree-planting game that is designed to help you focus on the task at hand and put down your phone. It is a great way of building good habits, helping to increase your attention span and focus, and preventing distractions while being a snippet of fun relaxation at the same time.

For Taking Notes

Otter

Taking notes and minutes in a meeting can be a thankless task and often results in a less-than-useful record of what went on. Otter is a web app that provides rich, accurate speech-to-text transcription, essentially acting as a digital assistant for anyone who wants one. Whether it is note-taking in a meeting or just jotting down thoughts on the commute, this app means you will never forget or miss out on a good idea again.

Microsoft Stream

Microsoft’s video streaming platform offers a remarkable automated subtitle and caption creator for its videos. It also allows users to download the entire transcript of a video call, captured and generated automatically. This makes note-taking during phone calls a thing of the past.

For Managing Workload

Monday

Monday is a fantastic project management tool used by loads of remote teams and agile organizations. It also works brilliantly as a personal productivity tool, allowing you to assign tasks, keep up to date with deadlines and see progress in real-time. It also has fantastic integrations, syncing up with a huge array of other apps and software.

Apple Watch with Workflow

Smartwatches often promise much but are disappointing on delivery, but Apple’s offering, in combination with the Workflow app, gives you direct access to all the essential apps and agendas you need to stay on top of your work. It acts as an ‘always-on’ task list and will help you never miss a deadline, even when on the move.

For Remembering

Due

Remembering deadlines and tasks can easily clutter up even the most organized of minds, so put them all to one side with Due. It is a robust reminder app that lets you store all sorts of tasks, deadlines, and reminders, and means you’ll never miss something important again. A great one for keeping on top of the basics. 

Last Pass

Quite simply the best password manager around, this will keep your accounts and subscriptions secure while avoiding the inevitable annoyance and lost time of recovering passwords that you have forgotten. 

For Disconnecting

Peloton

Getting out of your head and practicing self-care is one of the most important elements of maintaining productivity during the working day. Exercise is an amazing way to start the day fresh and energized, but getting to the gym before work can be a stretch. Peloton bikes allow you to get in a workout before or after work without the stress of getting to and from the gym.

Tech, tools, apps, and gadgets are constantly providing new ways to improve the way we work and make us more efficient. The list above is just a few of our favorite tools to improve productivity, but we hope they end up helping you work harder and more effectively and make your work day simpler and easier.

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