Take back a few minutes from every hour

Take back a few minutes from every hour! We use technology everywhere these days and almost all the time. Optimizing how we use it can save us a few minutes from each task, which cumulatively can get us some additional hours every week that we all need in our busy schedules. These are a few tips on different tools and technologies we use every day that can boost our productivity! These are tips that I have been employing for my own personal productivity, sharing them as you might find some of them useful for yourself  

Minimize Notifications. Move more things from push to pull

• Disable email notifications (both on desktop as well as on mobile)
• Disable notifications for personal messaging mobile apps (e.g. WhatsApp, Signal)
• If you need, turn on badges for email/messaging apps on mobile, so that you'll know if there are new messages when YOU look at phone (pull not push)
• You may want to keep notifications ON for official messaging apps (Teams, Slack). But then manage your status well (Switch status to Busy, Do Not Disturb when required)

Calendar, Tasks (TODOs) and Reminders      

• Block calendar not only for meetings, but also for your own focused tasks (appointments)
• Do not keep reminders for personal appointments (pull vs push). Consider changing default reminder time to None
• Color code your appointment to distinguish higher priority items from others (In Outlook, you use categories for this)
• Dismiss your reminders. Reminders are there to remind you. If reminders keep growing such that reminder window has long scroll bar, they are not serving the purpose
• Keep maximum 1 or 2 places for dumping TODOs. Keep dumping there whenever you get a thought or remember something rather than keeping it in your mind
• Look at your TODO dumping ground once a day or a week and schedule time for TODOs rather than looking at them number of times in a day
• You can even use personal messaging app (WhatsApp or Signal) to dump TODOs. In Signal you can use 'Note to Self'. In WhatsApp you can create a TODO group. WhatsApp needs a second number to create a group. You can either use your second number if you have or create a group with a friend's number and then remove the friend after group gets created.

Browsers

• Save favorites or bookmarks in browser for frequent sites 
• Browser address bar is powerful multipurpose tool, leverage it fully. (Use keyboard shortcut Alt + D in most browsers on Windows). See some examples below
• Start typing the name of site or bookmark directly in browser address bar than going to your bookmarks or history. It shows you all matching results from your history as well as bookmarks
• For web search, if every time, you first browse to Google.com and then search there, STOP doing that. Start typing search terms directly in the address bar, it would show results from your browser's default search engine
• Switch browser's default Search Engine to what you use. For example, if you use Microsoft Edge, its default search engine is Bing, you can change that to Google so that your searches in address bar directly search in Google    
• Close tabs after their work is done. You don't realize how much time we waste looking for the right tab in multiple tabs. Don't fear that you'll lose that page. You can get back to that page again, if required, from browser's history
• Open different windows (not tabs) for different type of work, you can close that window when work is done to close all tabs together
• You can save all tabs in a window in a bookmarks/favorites folder     

Email Apps

• Use categorizing features, they can save a lot of time (e.g. Primary in Gmail, Focused Inbox in Outlook)
• Do NOT mix Inbox processing and working on emails. Any email that would take more than 2 minutes to respond should be dealt separately in time allocated for that work
• Work on related emails for a project/initiative together in time allocated for that project/initiative. In Outlook, I use 'custom quick steps' to tag/categorize such emails and move them to a TODO folder and then work on same tagged emails together in allocated time for that initiative
• Cleanup your inbox regularly. Treat it as a physical mailbox. There is NO point reading an email and then keeping it back in your mailbox. Do one of these actions during cleanup: File it (tag and move to TODO or relevant folder), Delete it, Archive it
• if you are a 'folder' person, do NOT overuse it and have folder for every other thing that you work on. You will spend so much extra time moving or retrieving items from the right folder. Have high level folders and rely on search. Search in email clients have improved a lot!
• Use keyword search where possible, they'll get you results much faster than full text search. E.g. use 'subject:myproject' if you know email subject has word 'myproject' than 'myproject' which will search the whole email           

General Desktop Tips

• Learn keyboard shortcuts, you can't imagine how many hours they can save your over time. Trust me!
• Use keyboard shortcuts not just for copy, paste, bold; but also for everything you do repeatedly (e.g., format a cell in excel or go to search bar of your desktop application). There is a shortcut even to move a window to second monitor
• Use Sync tools for cloud storage to keep documents locally on your desktop. It saves a lot of time than going online every time to open a particular file. If you use Microsoft OneDrive, you can even sync Teams files and SharePoint documents in addition to your own drive
• Close applications once their work is done (reduce clutter)

General Desktop + Mobile Tips

• Use a time tracker app. We don't realize how much time we spend on non-productive or non-priority items. Such apps can keep track of that. I use Toggl Track to record only activities that I consider as productive.     
• Take couple of extra seconds to do thing permanently rather than always acknowledging a prompt. Look for those check boxes such as, 'don't ask me again', 'remember me on this computer (obviously on your private device)', 'don’t prompt me for OTP or MFA on this device'
• Use apps that can sync across devices especially for notes taking, TODOs
• If you use personal messaging apps for business, Use their desktop/web versions on your desktop
• Use a good password manager. Using same password in many sites or recording different passwords in your notebook can cost you heavily. And if you keep many passwords in your mind, resetting a password takes much longer when you forget that
• Clear the clutter on your phone screen as well as on desktop. Keep most used apps on first screen and not in folders
• Take extra minute to save contacts numbers that you might need again, searching for a number from call history every time can be much more time consuming. Add 'temp' to name, if you need that number temporarily, so that you can delete all temp contacts later   

Best Practices

I follow all above tips personally, and they are based on a few high-level best practices given below. Many of these are very simple, but I see many people still not using them and spending so much extra time. 

• Minimize distractions. Move things from push to pull
• For frequent operations, take additional few seconds to do extra activity once and save many seconds every time
• Invest few minutes in learning/searching for such settings/tips to save many hours over time
• Clear the clutter that is not required (notifications, open windows, open tabs, desktop/mobile icons)
• Keep looking for ways to do even small things faster       

Here is the downloadable PDF version of these tips, if you want to keep it handy: https://bit.ly/snprotips