Because of the pandemic, an increasing number of employees are now working remotely. While working in an office can be stressful working from home often presents some challenges of its own. If you are not surrounded by your colleges and your typical work environment, it can be hard to have and maintain the motivation to work, especially when you have to face every kind of distractions at home.
As it is difficult to dodge distractions and get work done, your level of productivity might also fall. However, the good news is that there are tools specifically designed to help you in these kinds of situations. Maintaining a good level of productivity is not that hard if you use the right tools, so let’s take a look at those instruments that will take your productivity while working from home to the next level.
- Pomodoro Tracker
This tool is directly related to the Pomodoro method. The Pomodoro method is a time management technique that encourages people to work during a specific period of time, this technique consists of setting a timer for 25 minutes to get work done, you are only allowed to focus on your work during this period of time. After those 25 minutes passed, you can take a 5-minute break or simply keep working.
The Pomodoro tracker will allow you to set the timer to get as much work done as you can for 25 minutes. This method is probably one of the greatest and most useful techniques for staying focused and increase your productivity.
- Slack/Zoom
Just because you are not going to an office doesn’t mean you will be completely detached from your colleagues. Working from home can lead to communication problems. Luckily, there are amazing apps and programs that will make the whole job a lot easier for you. Communication is key for any business to grow and function well, there are software like Slack the allows you to create a chatroom with the whole company, you can organize the communication by channels to enhance better group discussions, and even share private messages to share information, files, and other attachments.
Nowadays Zoom has been getting a lot of attention as a useful app to hold meetings. Zoom allows you to schedule and hold meetings in a very simple way, providing more tools such as activating and deactivating your camera and microphone whenever is needed.
- Boomerang
If it wasn’t for tools like Boomerang, you could literally waste all day checking emails. Thankfully, Boomerang is an email management tool that gets rid of unnecessary emails from your inbox that don’t recure immediate attention, letting you focus on the most important ones first. Boomerang does not only help with optimizing the organization of your inbox, but also helps to write emails better, schedule a date for your emails to be sent and returned, schedule meetings, and more.
- Time tracker
As a remote worker, managing your time is key. For this, the best option is Timely. Timely records all your activity for you, it helps you to clearly see in which tasks you spend the most time, how much time each task takes, and identify distractions. At the end of the day, you will have a summary of your performance and see how you did and what you need to improve. Also, working from home can easily make you overwork, Timely takes care of that as well, letting you know the hours you are working so you don’t accidentally spend more time in front of your computer.
- File Backup
It’s important to have a program for doing regular backups of your work, you don’t want to accidentally erase or lose a file and then have to start over again. You can use apps like Dropbox which is easy to use and works almost on every device. Dropbox is excellent for keeping your files and information in a safe place without having to worry about losing an entire day of work by losing a file.
That’s it! These are the best tools for improving and optimizing your day by taking your productivity to the next level. Working remotely can create many challenges, with these tools, you won’t suffer too much with organizing your work life efficiently.
