My Productivity Tools - Software

So these are the tools I am using in my attempt to become hyper-productive for a year.

Trello - in essence Trello is simply about managing lists. I have lots of lists and Trello helps me keep them in order and share them with the team. It’s an essential tool. I find it particularly convenient as a way of managing my emails. I have them all forwarded to Trello Board, from where they could be deleted or assigned to an area of activity.

Freedom - I’ve removed the Twitter app from my phone but I also need it blocked on my desktop. Freedom does the job nicely.  I might investigate whether using it to block other sites pays dividends as well. 

Google Keep - I have switched between various ways of keeping quick notes over the years. The easiest way is the first bit of paper I lay my hands on. I've experimented with hardback notebooks, A4 notepads and reporters notepads. All have their advantages. But the great advantage of Google keep is that I don't lose anything. It's also possible to copy and paste notes from it. All in all, it's a great tool.

Voice Recognition - this comes as standard nowadays on most devices.  And it works extremely well. There is still something of a skill to using it, that's the skill I am happy to learn. If it means I can produce written material more quickly it is time well spent. For some reason I find it works better on my phone than on my laptop. I don't know why this is, but it is very convenient meaning I can write stuff even when I'm not anywhere near my office.

Speechify - the other transformation that technology is now capable of is that of converting text to speech. Speechify does this very effectively and efficiently, and as enable me to read much more but I would otherwise have been able to. The speed setting on it is particularly handy. Add on top of enabling me to do things I would've done anyway more quickly, I can also use it to force myself to read stuff that I would not otherwise have been able to do. And it's great for proof reading as well.

PomoDoneApp - the Pomodoro technique is something that I find useful sometimes. Its best feature is when you have multiple things you need to get done, you can allocate the available time to the required goals via the number of Pomodoro sessions. I find using an app to keep track of them helps avoiding devoting unnecessary thinking and planning time during a work session.

Google Drive - I find that the Google suite of products has better potential for working together with the rest of the team, and everything integrates well if not always elegantly.  It also has a scripting language I am finding useful and plan to find more uses for.

Database - my Access 2000 database which I have to run in a virtual environment has reached the point where it needs to be replaced.  I am hoping an SQLite one running in conjunction with Python will be able to replace it once I've worked out how to get it running.

This list was longer than I expected....

That is my basic toolkit.