You’ve probably made a point more than once to exercise regularly, learn a language you’ve never had time for, or quit smoking. It is also true that you have considered achieving greater productivity on a daily basis, but you have not known where to start. There are technological tools available to all users that help keep track of these daily objectives and that, by offering a space to write down the tasks of the day or the objectives of the week in an orderly and visually attractive way, make it easier to achieve the goals. . These proposals are designed to keep exhaustive control of what is done each day (some even allow the time spent on each task to be timed), to collect in thematic lists everything that is pending or even so that the user feels obliged to comply. with what has been proposed and be accountable to the tool.
To put life in order
Notion It is a project manager and, at the same time, a space to take notes. These tools are usually focused on teamwork, but many users use them to organize their daily lives, both professionally and personally. This manager is an all-in-one that the user can design from scratch and choose the layout of the sections, background photographs, label documents, projects and ideas, establish a priority level for each task, add a list to listen while the tool is open, start a timer, insert a calendar and to-do lists, or add links. The different templates and sections allow you to have in the same space (but classified and independently) content that has nothing to do with each other, but that covers different levels of day-to-day life. For example, there may be one page for work tasks, another for travel, another for shopping lists, and another for monthly expenses, each specific space with its own layout and features.
If creating these spaces from scratch overwhelms the user, you can consider paying for already organized templates and customizing them from that base. It is also useful to consult the instructions that Notion offers on its website and tutorials from other users to have references and get ideas.
The personal version of Notion is completely free and those for groups, both small and large companies, are paid. It can be used from the browser or through applications for your mobile phone or computer desktop, both Windows and iOS.
The quintessential ‘to do’ list
This tool, called Todoist, aims for users to achieve the peace of mind that can come with organization and the satisfaction of crossing off tasks until completing everything that needs to be done each day. Its interface is intuitive and the user can start using it without major complications as soon as they download the application. In it, you can set a due date and a priority level for tasks, schedule reminders and classify them on the current day or in upcoming dates, in addition to customizing filters and sorting them into different workspaces, such as a personal one and a team one. . If you share a project with more people, they can leave comments, but you can also share a single task and assign it to someone else. For work environments it is also useful that emails can be forwarded to the application and added as tasks or comments.
Todoist incorporates a dashboard to check productivity trends, so that graphs are created with the tasks completed in the last days or weeks. In addition, all tasks are stored and archived, so they can be checked in the future if necessary. It can also be linked with other applications, such as calendars, voice assistants, browsers or email services, to gain efficiency in daily work. The application is available for various browsers, mobile phones and even smart watches for free, although to use some of the features (and the basic ones without any space restrictions) it is necessary to have a monthly subscription.
Where to have everything written down
Evernote It is used to create notes with many more possibilities than those usually offered by mobile phones and computers by default. Images, audio, documents and PDF or scanned files can be added to the text you type. Like Todoist, it allows you to create task lists, which can also be shared, with reminders, priorities and deadlines. Apart from scanning documents directly from the app, it is possible to store web pages, bookmark them and highlight text, and capture the entire screen or just a part.
It offers a multitude of templates for users who prefer to build on them instead of creating their notes from scratch: from a meeting agenda to budget tables, a menu planner or a calendar. If you prefer, you can also sketch with your finger or tablet stylus instead of typing with the keyboard and underlining words or phrases. The application, available for Mac, Windows, different device browsers and mobile phones with iOS and Android, is free. Although, as is usually the case with these tools, to access additional functions there are monthly plans.
How much time do you spend on each task?
Myhours It allows you to keep exhaustive control of the time dedicated to each task or project. In addition to recording the hours that have been invested, there is also the option to include the expenses that have been generated with each task. The hours and minutes spent can be written by hand, but this tool offers a stopwatch to achieve the greatest possible accuracy. If you want, for example, to keep track of time, costs and the percentage of the budget that is dedicated to each project or to different clients, with Myhours you can see all this data in tables, which allows you to prepare a report from them . Although it is designed primarily for use by work teams, it can also be useful for a single user who works on their own or who wants to keep their own control of that data. It has a free version and an application for mobile phones with iOS and Android.
Sign a contract with yourself
Created by a law professor and a behavioral economics professor at Yale University who set out to lose weight, StickK It aims for users to achieve their goals by signing a commitment contract. Its creators realized that it is more likely to achieve a goal if you have signed a contract of some kind that requires you to reach the goal and take responsibility for success or failure. Therefore, in this application you sign a contract with yourself and establish some conditions and consequences that you must abide by if you do not achieve the objective. The key is that those conditions can be economical.
First, the goal to be achieved is set and parameters are defined, such as the start date, how often you want to report on progress and how many weeks the commitment will last. Next, you choose the recipients of the money that you will lose if you do not meet the objectives: a charitable organization, a friend or a political association, for example, and the bank card details are entered. You will not lose a cent if you reach the end, although you can also choose not to “bet” money. After these conditions are decided, an arbitrator can be chosen to oversee the process. Enter the email address of the person you have chosen and that’s it. If not, one can be one’s own referee. Throughout the period that has been established to achieve the goal, you can make a diary in which you can tell how the goal is going, what difficulties you are encountering, etc., and add photos or videos. All of this can be managed from the browser or from the applications, available for iOS and Android.
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