It’s Monday morning, and you’re confidently making your to-do list, zipping through emails, and contemplating how much you’re going to get done this week. You’re an unstoppable productivity machine!
Then suddenly it’s Thursday afternoon, and someone has sent a Donald Trump+Game of Thrones mashup video to everyone in the office, and after you’re done lauging about that, you realize you’re not even close to checking off all the items on your list. You’re behind on social media posts, you’ve got a blog post to finish editing, and a million emails to follow up on. You’re either going to put in some hours over the weekend or face a Monday morning even further behind. What happened?
To-do lists are important tools, but there’s nothing worse than looking at all those empty boxes that you feel like you’ll never check off. We’re an easily distracted populace, with fun time-wasters like Facebook and Twitter just another open tab away. And once you start wasting time, it’s harder and harder to stop. It’s not surprising that we often leave the office on Friday with that sinking sense of incompletion.
No more! It’s time to reclaim your weekends and conquer your to-do list, and feel just as unstoppable on Friday afternoon as you do on Monday morning. Check out our top five favorite productivity tools to help keep your focus all week long.
Top 5 Productivity Tools to Conquer Your To-Do List
1. Buffer
If you manage social media accounts, you know how hectic it can get to keep track of them all. You’ll have a great idea for a Facebook post that gets lost in the shuffle, or you realize you haven’t tweeted in hours. Buffer allows you to create as many posts as you’d like and sends them directly to your chosen social media accounts within a selected time frame throughout the day or week.You can also attach videos and photos and they even shorten the content links for you. That way you don’t need to actually visit those sites every time you need to post, meaning you don’t get bogged down in scrolling when you should be doing other things.
2. Pocket
One of the easiest ways to get distracted is to come upon some juicy article or other content in the course of your work that is only peripherally related to what you actually need to be doing. You want to read it—it might even be helpful to your work in the long run—but right now, you don’t have the time. With Pocket, you just click a button in your bookmarks toolbar and that content is saved in a folder for later. You know, when you have actually checked an item off your to-do list.
3. Coffitivity
Have you ever escaped to your favorite local café and sipped a latte while you worked? Ever notice how something about this environment increases your ambition and focus? So did the creators of Coffitivity, a unique sound app available for Android and iOS users. The idea is that you’re more creative and interested in what you’re doing when you’re just a tiny bit distracted, such as by the low-level hum and clattering dishes of a coffee shop. With this app, you can get recreate that environment right at your desk.
4. Tomato Timer
It’s not realistic or sustainable to work continuously for hours on end. Your brain needs short breaks to remain focused. Tomato Timer helps you utilize the Pomodoro Technique, where you have a timer set for 25 minutes of continuous work. After the timer goes off, you take a five-minute break and then proceed with your project. Repeat this four times and then you’ll take a longer break of ten minutes. Getting into that rhythm and giving yourself precisely limited short breaks makes it so much easier to keep your focus.
5. SelfControl
It’s so easy to sit down, all prepared to GET STUFF DONE, and then before you know it you’re mindlessly scrolling through Facebook and an hour has gone by. Distractions happen. That’s why we all need some self control. No, really. SelfControl is a free, open source app that allows you to block your own access to the websites you choose for a certain period of time. There’s literally no way to disable it for the time you’ve designated, so you’re pretty much forcing yourself to be productive. A more moderate version of the same idea is StayFocused, a Chrome extension that gives you a certain time limit per day on the sites that tend to distract you, and blocks your access once you’ve reached that limit.
We’re only human, and distraction is inevitable. There’s no shame in using the tools that have been provided to us to stay on track and feel accomplished every day. Enjoy checking off your to-dos!
