1. Number Your Days, (with Your Calendar):

Marking off calendars has been the way to improve personal productivity forever. Organizing and living off lists can take some getting used to when you initially start out. Why not go old school and use your trusty calendar to mark dates and activities that may occur in the future? Start by placing a calendar with large, bold numbers in a place where you tend to pass often, such as your work desk, your bedroom door, etc. Just take a red drawing pen and circle the date, followed by a 1-2 word description. Easy and timeless, this technique is good for tasks that have a low priority on the list. For example, you can use your calendar to check off trivial tasks, like your house help pay dates, milkman and kirana payments, and use your smartphone to improve productivity.

2. Harness the power of a planner:

Organizational tips start with having a well-designed planner. Call it a journal, task planner, or whatever you like, the main purpose is to make it work for you and help you in your efforts to save time. Before you decide to go out and choose a planner, it’s important that you know what aspect of your life needs the most productivity improvements; personal or professional? Accordingly, you can choose a meal planner, an executive planner, or an activity planner. Also, if you’re going to be taking your planner with you wherever you go, you might want to consider getting a handy one that can fit in your purse/pocket. Try to find a planner with attractive colors and designs so that you want to pick it up and look at it. There’s nothing like a brightly colored planner to boost productivity and help you plan ahead.

3. Label objects, not people:

Remember when mom used fancy printed stickers to distinguish one textbook from another? You can take hints and organization tips from these activities. Our lives also have room for labels, they just aren’t the same. Many times we prefer to have hard copies of our electricity, water, phone bills, creating a pile upon pile of paper that has the potential to act as an obstruction to getting organized or working at your desk or home. An easy tool to classify them are labels. Find a rack or plastic folder to store these papers, on top of which you can place a label that describes its contents. You can tag your documents according to their priority. As you watch your urgent pile whittle down, you’ll feel a wave of positivity and productivity rise. It is up to you to design the labels in the way that best suits your needs.

4. A simplistic approach:

To-do lists have been around since the invention of the wheel. When we’re in a hurry, most of us tend to turn to lists and they don’t require a lot of planning time. They offer us to quickly write down what we need to finish. The beauty of this tool is that it is used for both short-term and long-term planning. Also, aren’t excel sheets and others just evolved lists? Making a list might sound terribly similar to keeping a planner, but it’s not. When you make a list, you can best increase productivity by giving yourself specific instructions and not vague activities. For example, in your planner you can schedule a Sunday off when you’d like to tackle cleaning your room; but it is a list in which you can enumerate each aspect such as making the bed, taking out the curtains to wash, etc. You can schedule small tasks first to build momentum, and then finish with the main one. Also, you can always make lists in such a way that they can be incorporated into your planner.

5. Be mobile:

Enough cannot be said about smartphones and the productivity options they bring with them. An app on your mobile phone is everyone’s #1 tip when it comes to organization tips. No matter what platform you’re using, the app store will be full of apps that promise better organization tips and assisted productivity. It is up to your requirements to decide what kind of apps will be useful for you. Do you like to make detailed plans with steps at each level or do you just like to know the problem and walk towards it? This question will help you choose an app that is more your style and end up using it. A great advantage of smartphones is that we take them with us wherever we go. Despite wearing watches, we prefer to check the time by looking at our mobile. Apps like Evernote, Any.do, Fantastical, Due are commonly used organizers that work by making lists, using tags to categorize actions or information, while apps like Google Keep using a board-like format and bright colors that aid retention. visual data and help you retain information. The amount of time you have to spend and personal browsing habits will determine your choice of smartphone apps.

In short, when we ask ourselves how to improve productivity, these tools must guarantee great time savings. We must take into account a few things when choosing:

Organizing is not a one-time activity. It was a continuous process, we need to practice it every day.

Try a system/tool ​​for at least a month to understand how it can increase your productivity.

Delete the app or get rid of productivity tools that haven’t worked for you in the past.

Try to find a platform where other people (such as family members) can also find ways to make changes and optimize their productivity along with yours.