Right from my childhood, I could tell what time my Mum would be back from work. As it with banks and all traditional offices, her job is of a steady nature and wih a set number of hours that customers can come in.
The modern way of working, however, makes it evident that today’s workforce does not like to waste even a second of their time (except on social media, that is). We are all out to get the most out of every bit of the day. Is this really happening? How much time do you end up losing at various instances?
Take virtual meetings, for example. Time is spent preparing for it (scheduling, checking your calendar, preparing notes), time spent during the meeting, and some time to process the happenings and restart from the previous activity, after the meeting. You are unfortunately losing a lot of time in this process.
There are tools, however, that will make all of this easier for you. There are also places that give you a pre-made of tools you could use for your various cases. For example, fyi is a list of 171 tools for your freelance work. For keeping everything in one central place, try Rambox Pro to help you take care of multiple apps from a single place. There are three main categories of tools wrt time that I’m going to talk about today.
Scheduling a meeting:
Haveing to get on meetings a lot, I am a huge fan of scheduling tools. These make it a lot easier to find a suitable time that is comfortable for all and to have meetings with ease.
I havn’t used it, but an app like Simplish claims to be an all-round productivity tool with all the features you would want right from to-dos to scheduling meetings. A personal favorite is Calendly which I use excessively and find it time saving to let the app take care of my meetings, and I use Worldtimebuddy a lot, too, to find the best time. Along the same lines, apps like Doodle Bot help in efficiently using the time you have at hand in an efficient manner by alerting you about every meeting on your schedule for the day. For more official meetings where you need to get a lot done, you can try an app like Instagantt to keep track of things by making use of charts.
Tracking time:
In everything you do, you are either using or wasting time. In loading a page, waiting for a reply, etc. you are losing a lot of the time you have. While opening and closing apps, too, you are doing that. There are tools however which tell you exactly where you are losing or using time and using these can make the work more efficient.
A few recommended time tracking apps are TouchTime and Wakatime. Wakatime is made specially to be used by developers. One thing I do a lot is refer to points about my day and work time and again. Apps like Google Keep and Zoho Notebook are ideal for this. I’m a huge fan of the intuitive search functionality and how easy it gets to find a note. Timeblocks also lets you stick to your schedule by creating structured agendas.
The meeting:
Planning a meeting well is a big advantage. You can find some amazing pointers on how to make your meetings more effective by making use of complete planning and execution. You may not have even realized that some of these can help you. You can also always make use of amazing tools.
If a meeting requires you only to control and show some things, then Teamviewer is an amazing tool choice. For instance, NextCall makes it way simpler to join meetings. urLive also lets you connect with anyone over a meeting at just the click of a link. Is this enough? You should be able to get the most out of your meetings without tiring your listeners. Tools such as Team.Video make your meetings more fun and lively with cool features. These features are agendas, collaborative notes, and emoji responses. For a more completely and well structured meeting, try Cisco’s WebEx. A little on the costlier side, it is surely a great addition to your workflow. You can check out alternatives listed here. A meeting app with a simple experience, but limited fundtions is GoToMeeting (find alternatives here). It lacks a chat function, but is easier to use.
Try a tool like Retrium to make your team continuously improve through agile retrospectives and Apteo to share vital data in an easy to understand way. Tools like Poll Everywhere let you additionally get feedback from your team regarding the effectiveness of the meeting whereas a tool like Tendii lets you document outcomes in easily.
