Top Ten FREE Digital Tools to Keep Your Organized
Technology has revolutionized our work environment totally in the last two decades. Several physical tools have given way to digital ones, in the form of Apps. Desktops Apps have lost their shine but they are still around. Few technology waves made web Apps as powerful as desktop ones sans the maintenance headaches. Rapid growth in mobile technologies has managed to give you a similar level of performance on devices that you could carry in your pocket. The bottom line is that we are spoilt for choice when we talk about the digital tools that we could use in our work for personal productivity.
The benefits of using digital tools are well-known. You get the capability to copy-paste and edit several times, without smudges. Your produce becomes omnipresent and could be shared with many people, at once. The content becomes search-friendly.
Word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation Apps have become staples in the workplaces. But beyond them, people tend to use physical means instead of digital ones. Many times it’s a lack of awareness and in some cases, it’s resistance to change. Switching to digital tools could remarkably increase not just productivity but even creativity. The pragmatic thought here is that if every output of us soon requires to get digital then why not start creating it digitally.
Here are my top ten recommendations for digital tools, that will make you more productive and creative.
- Spreadsheet (MS Excel/Google Sheets) – They are the real workhorses. The good thing about them is that they come with tabs and you could naturally organize disparate material on a topic together in just one document. Most of our data could be organized in tables and spreadsheets give you tables. You could use them for almost anything. Your creativity is the limit. Some examples are – meeting minutes, to-do lists, journals, etc.
- Freemind – This free desktop App is a powerful mind mapping tool. It is available on both Windows and Mac OS. Mind mapping is useful for brainstorming and work breakdown. Essentially this tool makes tree diagrams, so if you have any information of hierarchical nature, you could represent it in a mind map. Here is a quick start guide to FreeMind.
- Draw.io – After the tables and the tree charts are taken care of, you are still left with a requirement to draw flow charts and schematics. Draw.io, a free App, available as both desktop and web App, fills that gap.
- Google Keep – You would still need a plain listing App to quickly capture tasks that you are reminded of when you are away from your to-do list or maintain small running lists and checklists. Google Keep mobile App will give you exactly that. You could access these lists even from your desktop.
- Ebook reader – Kindle devices and Apps are simply great and once you see their power you would never look back at the paperbacks. Kindle Apps come in all possible variations, i.e, desktop, web, and mobile and you would like to have all of them in addition to the kindle device itself if you are an avid reader. You will still get some books in EPUB format and it is good to choose them than resort to PDF format. ReadEra is one nice mobile App to store and read your EPUB/PDF formatted books.
- Audible App – Audible is another great solution available for us to “listen” to the books. Audible books can be listened to along with your physical activities and will turn out to be a great idea of utilizing otherwise wasted time. Choose Audible for books that otherwise might sound boring to read.
- Instapaper – Thanks to Web 2.0, we have tonnes of short-form content available in the form of blog posts and articles. Of course, you have e-newspapers and e-magazines too. With Instapaper Read later App, you don’t have to engage yourself in reading the material, as soon as you find them. A simple idea but goes long way in keeping you well-read. Instapaper comes with a “Speak” option for listening to the articles.
- GanttProject – GanttProject is a simple and free tool to make Gantt charts. Gantt charts are quite helpful to make project plans for longer-duration projects.
- OneNote – You have a wide range of tools that could do OCR for you and depending on the scale of your needs you could choose one of them. But, for smaller day-to-day needs, MS OneNote App can do a good job of the picture to text conversion. Simply paste the picture and select “Copy text from picture” on the right click.
- Speech to Text Apps – When you are worked up with typing, you wish you could get an assistant to take notes. Your desktop OS comes up with good speech-to-text capability (Open an MS Office App and select Windows+H). There are umpteen mobile Apps that also do a neat job. The non-English Apps especially are quite useful as it’s painfully difficult to type in those languages with the usual QWERTY keyboard. So look for App for your native language (other than English), And I am sure you will find one. This is my favorite Marathi speech to text App.
Deploy all these in your work life and see how you would take yourself to higher levels of productivity and creativity!
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How to work effectively with HARO!
HARO is a free service you can sign up for. Every day, about three times a day, they will send you a batch of inquiries from journalists. You can respond to the ones that are relevant to you and that you are qualified to comment on. This is one way to connect directly with reporters who are looking for content. You could possibly be quoted in articles. Over time, as you talk to more reporters and get quoted more frequently, that will inspire even more reporters to reach out.
It is quite easy to register yourself on the HARO website and open the flood gates into your inbox, but not so easy to scan these emails religiously, every day, and look for questions of your expertise. You can’t afford to have a day without checking these mails as there is always a tight deadline for submissions on most inquiries. It’s also difficult to spend that kind of time every day, so we need some practical method to work with HARO. Here is my method that might have an answer.
- Register yourself with that email address of yours that you check every day if not every hour.
- Important: You have received a bunch of emails from HARO. Wait! Do not yet open them. Use your search of email App and search for the keyword that best reflects your expertise, along with the word “HARO”. I search for “HARO productivity”. Practically, I type just H and Gmail search prompts me with “HARO Productivity” and I hit enter.
- If the search result shows NO unread mails indicating that new mails do not have your keyword, go back and simply delete those unread HARO mails.
- If the search result shows an unread mail, open it and now search the same keyword inside it. See if it really has a question of your interest or if it was a false positive. Delete the false-positive mails.
- If you are lucky to get an inquiry from your area of expertise and you still have a few hours left before the deadline, draft and send your response. If the reporter likes it they will let you know and you know the rest.
- But even if you don’t hear back from the reporter, you still have got some new content created on a hot topic. So, don’t lose it. As soon as you send the mail, keep a record of the response in a short document, at a DESIGNATED place.
- Also, nothing is lost as you gather names of bloggers and reporters from the field of your interest (at least wherever they are not anonymous).
- Revise your keyword, if needed, to get better results. Eventually, you could use the names of your favorite reporter(s) also as keywords for another round of daily searches.
I know this method will get you most candidates but not ALL, but then this will give you the biggest bang for the buck! And, so you will be able to sustain this daily ritual.
Normally there are tight deadlines to respond back. So, we have to keep the draft content ready in anticipation and act fast. It should also help to set up an alarm a few hours before the deadline so that you can throw work in hand and respond to the request.
The 1000 mistakes of my life!
Well, it’s not the title of the next book by Chetan Bhagat! It’s the title of a virtual book that I have been writing for myself. It’s about celebrating every mistake that I make!
Hold! This is not going to be some “be positive” fanfare, but a practical tip to flip your mistakes upside down to sharpen your productivity further. Let us see how!
Let’s me narrate a couple of incidents:
- I was in the middle of a discussion with one of my coaching clients. I was making an important point and I saw a notification on my laptop about low battery. I realized that my laptop was not connected to power for quite some time. I decided to finish my point and then connect the laptop to power to avoid interruption. But I was interrupted eventually, although a few minutes later when the battery of my laptop drained fully and the meeting stopped abruptly – I had forgotten to connect the laptop to power! That was pretty embarrassing!
- I work on a remote Windows workstation somewhere in the USA, through a remote desktop connection from my laptop, sitting in India. I prefer to shut down my laptop (and all my machines) every day. I could have not shut down my remote machine as I would have to be dependent on someone to switch it on physically, the next day (I don’t have this issue with a Mac that I access remotely as I could configure it to start automatically at a specific time).
Well, on this particular day, thinking that I was shutting down my laptop I shut down the remote machine as both screens looked the same. I had to then request one of my colleagues in the USA to brave the peak of the pandemic, go to the office and restart my machine. That was pretty embarrassing!
It’s natural to get upset when you make such mistakes. You might want to even kick yourself, which is also fine. What we normally don’t see is that we have figured out a possibility of how a certain thing could go wrong. There is an opportunity to avert such occurrences in the future, the impact of which could be more disastrous than the current incident. And this perspective gives us the right to celebrate the mistake. But only if we seize the moment and take concrete action and not just take a mental note.
Let’s get this straight, nobody wants to repeat the mistakes intentionally. But at the same time, not many people take concrete steps to avoid the same mistake in the future, or at least not every time. Most often we end up savoring the gloom and self-loathing.
This is how you smile your way out of the gloom:
- Use the gloom as a signal to act. You may at times miss the signal, but I am sure if this happens the next time, there is a better chance of not missing it.
- Think of a practical idea that should help to avoid the same mistake in the future. It might not be easy always, but determination and sustained thinking should help us get there.
- Implement the idea right then, if possible, or else add a task for it to your to-do list.
Let’s get back to the two embarrassing incidents, I narrated before. In the first case, I added a checkpoint to my checklist of starting a video call – Ensure the laptop is connected to power. In the second case, I changed the Windows theme of my remote workstation and also moved the taskbar to the top edge of the screen, so that the two machines look different.
I did secure several of my ways of working like above, courtesy, the mistakes. It is yet to reach the mark of 1000, but I will be there someday ?
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(Originally published at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/stay-organized-stay-productive/the-1000-mistakes-of-my-life/ on April 2, 2022)
Dear (Business) Diary
Come December and we start thinking about business diary for the new year.
“What do I want to do about it in the new year?”
“Am I going to continue the way I did in the ending year or do something different?”
I always had one major issue with the business diaries. Since the pages are day-wise, I ended up having several pages nearly blank and some of the pages crammed to the extreme if I had a bunch of meetings and took several notes on that day. It looked very inefficient.
Some meetings ended into the lunch break and I had a problem of “what do I do with this brick”.
I ended up having an ever-growing heap of diaries from past years and did not know what to do with it.
Our presentations migrated from OHP (I am sure some readers don’t even know what this means) to Powerpoint and I had to carry a laptop for presentations. Even if I was not presenting, I still needed to carry a laptop for referring to relevant material. So when I was already carrying a laptop, carrying another bulky diary became inconvenient.
Eventually, as our meetings were booked online, the diary was not required to be used as a meetings planner.
Last but definitely not least, my notes stayed safe in the diary and only occasionally ended up in timely execution.
I had come up with a solution, a few years back for this, and it has been working quite well.
Here is my solution:
- Buy (or convince your organization (I had done that)) A5 size notebooks for taking notes in meetings. A5 size is so small that you could slide it in your jacket pocket or even if you carry it in hand, it is not heavy.
- In the meetings, take quick notes in the notebook instead of struggling to type them on digital devices. More often the display of your digital device might be required for some other purpose. Moreover scribble has to be faster than typing. If possible flag the action points right away while noting them down.
- Once you are back from the meeting, process your notes, and as you process them strike of those lines in the notebook. Your goal would be to keep your notebook in a state where everything written in it is struck off and the contents are transferred to a more durable and ubiquitous digital storage. Since you will be processing your notes immediately, you will end up making decisions about what you are going to do about each of them. Actions go to your to-do list. Minutes go to your digital meeting minutes document. Some will end up in creating meeting invites. And so on.
- This notebook compliments your laptop which you will use to refer to your past notes.
- Once your notebook gets filled, you could happily shred it as it would have already served its purpose. Don’t forget to dogear a page that is a few pages before the end indicating that you should procure your next one, then.
- Interestingly you lose nothing if you lose this kind of notebook.
- Now the final question of what to do with the business diary. The easy answer is don’t buy. And if you are gifted one and is made with beautiful paper, repurpose it for creative work like drawing mind maps or taking notes during your learning sessions.
However, there is a small problem with it as these diaries do not have page numbers, and it could become tricky to search for your notes, later. The best way out is to reserve the first few pages of the diary for the table of contents and to use the dates in place of the page numbers in the table of contents.
Try out this simple but powerful idea in the coming year and witness its power.
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Bells and Whistles of Time Management – Quite Literally!
November 20th is my youngest brother’s birthday. Over the last few years, sparked surprisingly by our mom, wishing each other exactly at midnight has become an unspoken tradition in our family. And it’s not just a simple text; it’s about the thrill of getting it right—no matter the time zone.
This year was no different. Living in Mumbai while my brother resides in California, I had to do some quick time zone math. Habitually, I set an alarm a couple of days in advance to ensure I didn’t miss the moment.
Fast forward to last Saturday afternoon—I found myself in a shopping mall (my first visit since the lockdown in March 2020!). The alarm went off, right on cue. A couple of snoozes later, I timed it perfectly and sent him a “Happy Birthday” message on WhatsApp. Mission accomplished!
Here’s what struck me:
When I set that alarm, I had no idea where I’d be that afternoon. A shopping mall? That wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. Yet, thanks to the alarm, I got to enjoy the fun of surprising him at his midnight—an otherwise impossible task.
The Power of an Alarm: Why We Forget and Miss Tasks
We often trust our memory to remind us of critical tasks, but here’s the reality:
- We forget.
- We miss deadlines.
That’s just how our minds work. No matter how good our intentions are, tasks slip through the cracks without reminders. Our entire time management system, in fact, revolves around overcoming this single limitation of the human brain.
The Modern Alarm: A Tool for Guaranteed Execution
Alarm clocks have been waking us up for centuries, evolving from mechanical clocks to digital ones, and now to apps on our smartphones. The beauty of a smartphone alarm is its portability and flexibility, allowing us to use it for far more than just waking up.
Here’s a simple recipe to leverage alarms for time management:
- Set an alarm immediately when you plan something for a specific date and time. Most alarm apps allow you to choose a future date.
- Use recurrence patterns for tasks that repeat on certain days of the week.
- Name your alarm. A quick label prevents you from wondering, “Why is this ringing?”
- Factor in prep time. Set the alarm a few minutes early to give yourself a buffer.
- Snooze, don’t dismiss. Keep snoozing until the task is done. If you shut it off thinking you’ll remember, trust me—you won’t.
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A Quick Guide for Remote Work Productivity
Call it pandemic or endemic, remote work is not going to go away in hurry! Remote work may look like an interesting proposition as no one is breathing fire on your neck and you get flexibility at work. But it is not that it does not have its own problems as you are not physically present in the office environment. For example, you may not get friendly reminders about your work or you may not get a chance to substantiate your contribution.
Here are some key ideas that should help you to stay productive and shine in the remote work environment:
- Go Agile: Follow Scrum or Agile method where you work on 15 days sprints. A sprint plan is made and approved by the manager at the beginning of a sprint. The sprint plan could be just for you or a team. The priorities are also set in the sprint plan. A sprint plan ensures that one has enough work at hand and will never be short of work even when your manager is not physically around. You also could use your time wisely when you have a bunch of different kinds of tasks.
- Adopt a robust Personal work management system: GTD is an excellent methodology to manage productivity at the personal level. A sprint plan would have set the goals, but each goal involves doing several tasks at the personal level and those tasks must be managed and tracked well. GTD ensures that the tasks are written down in a system and there is no reliance on memory or occasional nudges from superiors. This is very critical as there is no one who can oversee you when working remotely.
- Communicate deliberately: You will have regular video calls and email communication for work tracking, anyway. Additionally, you should share daily written updates about progress made in a day. This ensures that you and your manager are on the same page. It also keeps you on your toes to meet the daily targets and eventually the sprint plan. Additionally, one should provide weekly and monthly reports which should ensure that management has very clear visibility on progress and your time utilization.
This approach guarantees you stress-free productivity and builds the confidence of stakeholders in you.
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(Featured image: Photo by Ivan Samkov from Pexels)