For the regular readers of Ensemble Magazine, you will recognise Anastazja Klimczyk (Ana) from the Summer 2021 Issue. She is a Product Marketing Manager at Apple with a lot of experience juggling multiple projects whilst prioritising her personal goals. She shares her top 3 digital tools with us to keep on track and stay organised, particularly for those who have to self-manage whilst working from home!
Tip 1: Notion for organising your day-to-day
Ana's top mention for her go-to productivity and organisation tool calls for Notion. From planning weekly menus to overseeing global projects at work, Notion proves to be an excellent platform that helps you to stay on top of things.
A wonderful feature of this app is its pre-made templates. If you don't know what may be the best layout or way to organise your thoughts, Notion can be a wonderful resource to inspire ideas. Their wide range of free templates allows you to journal, track progress at work, make notes, build reading lists and so much more.
Going above and beyond, if your workplace doesn't currently use any project management software that allows for collaborative task management, then Notion can be a great starting point because it allows you to invite your team members and assign them tasks as well.
Ana uses Notion for a variety of things including planning her weekly food shop, tracking expenses, keeping track of contacts from networking, etc. The idea is to free up your mind. By efficient note-taking, you can be assured that you will not forget important information or lose sight of upcoming tasks.
Tip 2: Focus mode to avoid distraction
Ting. Ting. Swoop. These annoying 2-second sound clips are all too familiar. How many times do our screens, including phones, tablets, smartwatches, and/or computers, distract us? Makes me think, is this why our attention span over the years has reduced?
A recent study by Microsoft concluded that the human attention span has dropped to 8-seconds – shrinking nearly 25% in just a few years. I would like to think that technology leaders in the market are listening to consumer behaviours that are recognising the negative impacts of our devices on our attention and productivity.
Ana recommends something simple to help fight these distractions: focus mode. With recent Apple iOS updates, you can create custom notifications, schedule your time, build in automation and create custom pages that can help you to focus, and more importantly help you keep doing what it is that you are doing.
Staying focused at work is a given, but what about your personal time? We still need that time to focus on our reading goals or developing our fitness regimen. By building your own personalised focus mode, your phone can in fact become useful tools that help you to achieve those goals.
Tip 3: Forest using the Pomodoro technique
Time-clocking/time allocation is an easy way to make sure you spend your day ticking things off a to-do list, rather than just endlessly staring at them.
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a timer to break work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.
Here are some simple rules to follow to not only figure out how to best use your time but to identify exactly how long to spend on something.
Find out how much effort an activity requires, and consequently how many 25-minute time slots you need to both complete the task at hand and review it.
Cut down on interruptions. Usually, you can afford to take 25 minutes before getting to your text message or replying to emails. You’ll learn how to handle the inevitable interruption while staying focused on the task at hand.
Estimate the effort for activities. This will become a healthy habit where you can understand how long it takes you to produce quality work. Consequently, next time you are in meetings you can use these estimates to build timelines that are achievable.
Recap and Review. Use the first few minutes to review what you’ve done before, and once completed review the completed work.
Conclusion
These simple yet effective tips by Ana show us that we can leverage our devices for our benefit. We can organise our lives in a way that even pen and paper may not allow. We can cut out distractions and better understand our productivity patterns.
Hoping that these tips have helped you, comment down below your favourite productivity tips!
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