Boosting Your Productivity
Tags: productivity, planning, focus, automation
Published: 2023-04-12 04:39:11

Abraham Lincoln once famously said, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." I am huge fan of productivity as it helps me save time for my personal as my work load is quite high most of the time. As a software developer I use following productivity tools for saving time in my personal and professional work:

1. **Bullet Journaling** - I learned about bullet journalling in 2021 from the book "The bullet journal method" and ever since I have been using this method for managing my work and personal life. Bullet journal is a journal where I plan my coming months, weeks and days. At the start of the year I create yearly planner with one section for each of 12 months and put tasks, activity I would be doing in that particular month that year. I keep adding new items there as and when I need to throughout the year. Then every month I create a monthly day wise planner where I add task which I need to do on a particular day in that month by referring yearly planner, Also I create a section where I put items which needs to be done but not necessarily on a particular day. Then every day I create day planner before starting my day by picking up tasks from this monthly backlog. This helps in completing tasks without missing things and helps keep things organised.

2. **Alfred** - Alfred is one of the best tool I have found in last few years that helps me automate many of my tasks and help look up quickly. All my bookmarks in the browser are searchable in it and with one click it opens them. Also workflows help me speeds up my daily work e.g. searching some piece of data and complex queries in db(in web interface) is done with one click saving me around 5-10 mins with every search and I often needs to do it multiple times on variety internal tools. You can create different workflow to automate your tasks as per you need, possibilities are endless.

3. **Focus Keeper** - Human mind tend to get tired with longer concentration periods, thus needs to take break to relax and recover. So I use focus keeper to divide my work day into short intervals for 25 mins or 50 mins sessions and take 5-10 mins of break thereafter to relax so as to be able regain focus. At the start of interval I decide in next 25/50 mins session what will I be focusing and targeting to complete and then dedicate that time to that work item only and ignore any distraction that come up during that time as I have a target to complete in limited time. 

4. **Happiness** - As per a study Happiness can make you around 12% more productive. So I try to plan for my weekly and daily happiness quota - playing sports, watching comedy, exercising, practicing gratitude etc. Also In the 5-10 mins break during my focus time,I use breathing techniques, jokes, gratitude logs, revisiting happy memories to keep myself in sound state. 

5. **SmartWatch** - I use smartwatch to keep track of my daily physical activity, my daily meeting calendar, weather conditions, time in other timezone where interact more. All this save me time as I don't have to open my calendar in mobile/laptop to view next meeting, all that is on my wrist. Similarly when stepping out I don't have to check weather which is must for me as London weather is quite unpredictable. All these things on the wrist helps me work faster as don't have to search for them explicitly.

6. **Task Tool** - We have an internal company tool for managing tasks(similar to JIRA), I use that for project planning. 

These are the tools I used to boost my productivity, let me know in the comments what tools you use to boost your productivity and save time.