How to Make Your Day More Productive

It doesn't need to explain why we are busy all day long. We are to do lot of works everyday. We don't have much time for relaxing, for recreation. We are human. We can't work all day long like machine. But we have to finish all the tasks in our hand. If the situation continues, we'll be stuck at some point. What should we do?

Sound familiar?

One effective way to solve this problem is to make your day more productive.

Below I discussed few methods to make your day more productive. These work for me well. Try if those work for you.

How to Make Your Day More Productive

 

Begin the day with goal in mind: Why you need to be productive? The answer is simple - to achieve goal.

When I was discussing this issue with one of my colleague, he replied, we do a day job, we don't have any goal there, why do we need to be productive?

Why not?

We are working to achieve company's goal and thus our own goal. If you help to achieve company's goal, company will give you incentives, will increase your salary. Ultimately, you are building your career. So, please don't think, why we you need to be productive in a day job. Simple.

Start your day with a To-Do list: Make a list of everything - what you should do today. Sort out important tasks. Don't take much time to make list. Because you have to update it several times for the day.

Start with most important task: Ok. You sorted out important tasks. Now start with most important task.

Update your list accordingly: After finishing your first important task of the day select next important task. And frequently update your list after completing every task.

Determine your best productive time: Not all are at best at same time in a day. Some can do more in the morning, some in afternoon and some in evening. Determine, in which time duration, you can be more productive. Try not to take rest at that time duration and do your most important task at that time.

Productivity is influenced by several things like healthy diet, adequate rest and being stress free. So think positive, have good food and take enough rest to jumpstart your next productive day.

Photo by Yourdon

5 Tactics to Do Anything Successfully (from my point of view)

"Good start is half done"!

I always hear this here and there. I think you also do.

What is good start?

What will happen if the start isn't good?

And what about the bad start?

Can someone explain me above questions? Please.

No matter the start is good or bad, our ultimate purpose is to finish the task perfectly.
You'll find thousands of tactics to finish tasks. But those tactics don't describe how to handle mental pressure formed in the process of doing any big task.

From my point of view I outlined following 5 tactics to finish any task successfully.

1. Start small
2. Step Small
3. Form habits
4. Trial and Error
5. Focus

Start small: If you think the whole process of a big task, you will be stuck at beginning. Forget about the fear of failure. Forget about obstacles you'll face later.

Did Florence Griffith-Joyner, fastest women in the world in 100m sprinters, thought she will be fastest women when she started to learn walking? Even her first step was imperfect, unbalanced. Can you say her first step was good start? If she thought the whole process of becoming fastest women at beginning, I must say, she will be frustrated.

So, whatever your start, good or bed, just start. Many good things will happen when you start. This is the most difficult part of doing anything. Forget about the good start. That will hold you back.

Step small: Starting is difficult, so is finishing.
Lets take 100m sprinter for example.
Winning 100m sprinter is started with 1st step, then 2nd step, the 3rd, 4th.... Forget about the end line. Just do your best in every steps.
This is true in any small and big task. You just start with small. After finishing that, start 2nd small and do same up to end.

Form habits: Don't take your task as work. Take them as game. Then you'll enjoy your work.

One of the best way to treat your work as game, is to make a habit of doing that.

Trial and Error: They don't make any mistake who don't do anything.

So, forget about mistake or error. Do something, make mistake, and then try again.

Focus: Do focus whatever you do. Being focused on certain thing will bring best result for you. Leo babauta, one of my favourite writer, wrote a good article about "the magical power of focus".

I must say, don't worry about the bad start. Just start small, go ahead with small steps, make a habit of doing so, make mistake, focus on the things you do and successfully finish your task.

5 Free Productivity App for Windows Phone

Technology is making our life more easier than before. It seems the whole world is in our hand now. Latest addition in this trend is smartphones. These made our life even easier and handy. Many applications from developer all around the world made the things possible to do on smart phone which we could do only on computer.

Below I describe 5 such productivity app which I use frequently on my windows phone 8 -

1. Evernote
2. Skydrive
3. Indigo
4. Pdf reader
5. Feed reader free

5 Free Productivity App for Windows Phone

Evernote: This is the must have app for anybody who want to increase their productivity on daily documents life.
A few days ago I wrote two articles on evernote. Below are the links -

How I use evernote for better productivity, part-1
How I use evernote for better productivity, part-2

Now you can use evernote on your windows smart phone on the go.

Skydrive: Skydrive is the place to store your files so you can access them from virtually any device. Now the skydrive app for windows phone makes it easier to manage and share files-all in one place.

Indigo: As indigo's own words, it is the cleverest voice-enabled personal assistant.

Some cool features of indigo -

Create and store diary entries.
Save notes and reminder and alert system
Update facebook
Tweet, retweet and read tweet
Play video on YouTube,
and much more.

Pdf reader: I have a habit of reading books. Whenever I have time I start reading book. Pdf reader for windows phone made this simple for me. Now I can read my ebook wherever I go.

Some features -

Bookmark page
Text search option
Resume reading
Share pdf files through skydrive, etc.

Feed reader free: Blog has been a huge source of knowledge. You will find blog about anything on net. There are about 50 blogs which I want to read regularly when they publish new article. But, going to every blog and check if there is any new article published is very time consuming. That's why feed concept came to action to get you know when a blog is updated.

There are many application and browser add-on available for computer. But, for windows phone those are few. Yet I have found a good app for windows phone which let me read my favourite blogs on the go.

Some awesome features-

It can follow voice command.
Have your news audibly read to you
Integrated full twitter client
Support offline reading
Social integration, etc.

Photo by Bob Familiar

How I Use Evernote for Better Productivity, part-1

In last post, I shared, why I use evernote. Today I'll share how I use evernote for better productivity.

As you know, evernote has both, folder and tagging options, we can save a document in a folder and tag them as we want.

In our computer hard drive, we can save documents in a folder but can't tag them.
Giving an example will clear your concept.
Suppose, we have created a folder in our computer hard drive named "Book". We save all our ebook in this folder. We can have different types of ebook, for example, for me, I've some books about my profession (which I've studied on-Civil Engineering), some books on computer such as, excel tutorial, autocad tutorial and some others software tutorial etc, some books about literature Nobel, Poem etc. I save them all in the Book folder. And want to categorise them as engineering, computer and literature. But I can't. But I'll able to do this in evernote. Because, evernote has tagging option.

Now lets see how we can do that in evernote. From above example, we'll create a folder in evernote named "Book". We can save all our ebook in this folder. Now if we want to categorise our ebook we can do that by tagging. We can create tag like Engineering, computer and literature.

That is just for example. I organise my document different way in evernote. Lets see how I do -

I've created three folders in evernote -

Inbox
Action Pending and
Cabinet

A short description of above folders -

Inbox: All my new documents, which I haven't tagged or organised yet, go to this folder. This is my primary folder. All my new documents and email which I want to save for later consideration go there. When I have free time, I give appropriate tag to those documents and send to Action Pending folder or delete, if I think I don't need those later.

Action Pending: The Documents, which need further action, I send to this folder from inbox. All documents in this folder needs further action. For example, an ebook, which I need to read later, goes into this folder.

Cabinet: I consider this folder as a file cabinet. Suppose, in office, we keep a file cabinet for keeping our files for future reference. This folder acts like that. For example, I have read an ebook, but want to keep that for future use, I keep that in this folder.

Those are my folders. The actual magic begins with tag. That I'll share in next post.

How I organise my documents and became simple

I've saved a document file somewhere in my computer hard drive. Now I need that file. But I forgot where I saved it. Even I forgot the file name. What should I do?

How many times have you faced this problem?

Nowadays, we use computer everywhere, in office, in home, even we use our mobile as a computer for getting things done easily. Most of my email I read on my mobile. Suppose, I've got an important email on the way which I want to save for later use. What should I do?

I use a universal software for organising my documents world. That is Evernote. I'm not advertising for evernote. Even they didn't pay me a dime for writing this post. I'm just sharing how I use evernote for increasing my productivity and simplifying my computer life.

Little about evernote:
Evernote is a document organising program. You can save office document, pdf document, image, audio and video etc in evernote. Isn't it better to keep everything in one place? You can access all your saved file everywhere in web, in mobile or in computer. Because evernote synchronises instantly when you save changes. Evernote has a desktop version, a mobile version and a web version. So, no matter where you are, you just need a internet connection. You can also access all your documents offline if you have a software version installed in your device. Evernote has a free version and also a paid version. But free version is enough for me. To Know more go to evernote's "website".

Lets light on the above problem. Now I never save my documents in my computer folder. Whatever it is I save them on evernote.
Now I never lose my documents in the jungle.
Evernote has very convenient system to organise documents. I can use tag, I can use folder to save my documents. I'll write how I organise my documents in evernote in my next post.