Digital Tools to Boost Productivity

In the digital workplace, time is money and every seconds counts. Businesses spend a lot of time and effort looking into how they can boost productivity and trim off the fat by ditching inefficient software, apps and administrative practices.

There are countless ways in which you can boost productivity in the workplace from ordering direct office furniture to ensure that everyone is optimally comfortable, to ensuring that workers are free of distracting noise and have access to natural light. For the purposes of this article, however, we’re going to look at productivity in digital terms and how you can boost it by adopting, ditching or replacing certain digital applications.

Image by Pixabay

Microsoft Office is all well and good, but while it can be used for most workplace activities doesn’t necessarily mean that it should.

Every one of the apps suggested here is free or has a workable free version available.

Don’t share links via email, use Twitter

Unorthodox? Absolutely! But, let’s face it, even the most pristinely kept email inbox is full of clutter and spam. Most of us are quicker to react to a Twitter notification than an email. Moreover, using an appropriate hashtag will help to share the link with a broader audience and generate awareness and interest for your business at no extra effort or expenditure to yourself.

Don’t create a new document, use Evernote

Any tool that makes digital collaboration easier is always worth investigating and Evernote represents a quicker and simpler alternative to traversing your hard drive for a half-remembered Word document.

Evernote allows you to store all your notes and documents in one place and once it’s in there everything is text searchable (even if it’s an old business card that you snapped and filed away in there).

Don’t use Word, for the love of humanity use Google Docs

If you’re still sending the same document to multiple recipients and becoming bamboozled when they all send different sets of feedback, then you’ll thank your lucky stars for Google Docs. Besides being an excellent word processing platform, Google Docs allows for quick and easy collaboration, too. After creating a document, you can grant access privileges to anyone in your circle, anyone to whom you send the link or just about anyone on the whole darned internet if you feel so inclined.

Gone are the days of reconciling the notes from separate documents, multiple persons can make annotations or (if you grant them editing privileges) make alterations to the same document. This also allows you to see who made which changes, so those awkward conversations about who suggested what are a thing of the past as well.

Don’t save that screen grab in Photoshop, use Skitch

Photoshop is a wonderful, sophisticated piece of kit, but if all you want to do is screen grab an error message to send to tech support or store a digital receipt, it’s like cracking a walnut with a hadron collider. Skitch allows you to quickly and easily create, save, share and resize images.