Living in such a fast-paced and busy world can make it difficult for some to stay focused and concentrate. When devices such as your mobile phone or computer can easily distract you from the task at hand, it is important that you find ways to avoid these distractions.
Fortunately, a long list of online productivity tools can help you with this problem. From avoiding distracting noises to keeping track and organizing your tasks in the future. With that, here is our list of the top self-management apps that can help boost your productivity.
5 Must-Try Self-Management Tools
Sleep Cycle
Getting enough rest and sleep is an important part of a healthy and productive lifestyle. This is because the quality of sleep that you get at night can affect your physical and mental well-being the next day.
However, quality sleep is more than just getting 7 or 8 hours of sleep. While it is essential that you get a long night of sleep, it is even more important that you are able to complete a full sleep cycle and prevent waking up in the middle of it.
The sleep cycle is an essential bodily process where our biological clocks perform brain functions that allow our bodies and minds to recuperate.
It involves four stages, including three of NREM and one of REM. Each stage is defined based on the brain’s activity. Generally, the deeper the sleep cycle stage, the better the sleep quality.
The problem is when you suddenly wake up in the middle of your sleep cycle, effectively disrupting your body’s natural clock. You’ll likely experience brain fog, headaches, and even fatigue when this happens.
The Sleep Cycle app aims to prevent this by setting up an alarm clock that wakes you up when you are at the lightest phase of your sleep cycle. The app analyzes your sleep cycle and adjusts your alarm clock accordingly to wake you up at the best time for your body.
The app can also provide you with reports and analyses on your quality of sleep. It can also provide suggestions on the best time for you to go to sleep to wake up naturally at your desired time of the day.
Noisli
Are you the type of person who finds it difficult to focus when there’s too much noise around you? Do you struggle with noisy housemates or a loud neighborhood?
In situations like this, Noisli offers the perfect solution. Instead of wearing uncomfortable earplugs to block out distracting noise, the app offers a wide array of sound options to create the perfect background music to increase your productivity.
It is a comprehensive white noise generator that allows you to choose and modify exactly what you want to hear.
Do you want to make it sound like you are on the beach, next to a campfire, under the dark moonless night? Noisli can do that for you. Noisli’s sound mix can effectively take you out of the distracting reality and build the perfect working environment to get you into your focus zone in a snap.
Forest
Do you often find yourself reaching for your phone when working? Our mobile phones hold a ton of things that can make it difficult to stay focused. From a list of enthralling games to indulgent music and addicting social media apps, you can easily lose track of time when you’re all absorbed using your phone.
If you’re guilty of such a practice, installing the Forest app on your phone might just be the perfect solution. The Forest is a program that keeps you off your phone by locking your access to other apps on your phone and keeps you from getting distracted.
Much like it is called, the Forest works by showing an animation of a seed growing into a full tree based on the time set by the user. The longer the time, the taller the tree will grow. The app also encourages users to plant more trees to grow and expand their personal virtual forest.
Users can even choose the type of tree they want to grow, and it all depends on the amount of time they spend on the app and effectively away from the distractions of their phone. Even better, the Forest also works on desktops and restricts access to websites added to their Blocklist.
Tweek
Sometimes, keeping track of all your tracks can be a hassle. Although businesses often use project management tools such as Asana and Trello, some people prefer having a more simple and easy-to-understand way to look at what they have to do.
Tweek is a task management tool available both on mobile and desktop. It features a clean and simple interface that allows users to list and track their tasks for the week. Considering this, Tweek can also be used as a calendar management tool that you can use to take note of future projects, deadlines, appointments, and other responsibilities.
The app comes in some sort of Kanban board style where you can drag and drop tiles from one column to another. In this case, you have the ability to move unfinished tasks to the next day and keep them in your weekly Tweek to-do list.
Users can also personalize their Tweek calendar by adding colors, changing font styles, and even inserting notes for tasks needing more details or information.
Focus Journal
Adopting time management strategies is another way to improve your productivity and practice self-discipline. Knowing how to effectively and efficiently spend your time will help boost productivity and show you how much more you can do with the amount of time you have saved.
The Pomodoro technique is one of the most popular time management strategies. The premise of this method is simple, you set a timer to stay focused and allot a bit of time for breaks between tasks as a sort of rest and reward for the job done.
Focus Journal is a time management tool designed to work as a Pomodoro timer. It encourages long focus time and frequent breaks in between to prevent immediate burning out.
But unlike other Pomodoro timers on the web, Focus Journal offers quite a unique feature. Aside from working as a Pomodoro clock, the app also tracks the time you are focused and distracted throughout your session.
Let’s say you set a 50:10 Pomodoro timer and finish one session. However, that doesn’t automatically mean that you are successful in maintaining a productive use of your time during that period. Focus Journal offers a more in-depth analysis of your time spent and shows when you are actually focused and when you are still distracted.
If you were able to maintain a productive and focused session, Focus Journal will reward you with a red tomato, but if you didn’t, you will be given a green one. For context, the term Pomodoro comes from the Italian language, which means tomatoes.
Focus Journal will also keep track of your progress. It will show the number of your green and red tomatoes based on daily and weekly reports.
Bottomline
Boosting your productivity is primarily based on your self-discipline. It would be amazing if you could shake off distractions and stay focused with little to no help. But with such a bustling and hustling environment, it can sometimes be too difficult to stay in the zone for long periods of time.
Using productivity tools is already a common practice, especially for online businesses. Entrepreneurs utilize a wide range of project management tools, task management tools, and time trackers to ensure that their remote employees are working as efficiently and effectively as possible.
However, there is more that you can do to improve your productivity. You can improve the quality of your sleep with Sleep Cycle and get rid of distractions with apps such as Noisli and Forest. In addition, tools like Tweek and Focus Journal will help you stay focused and keep track of the important tasks that need to be done.
Need more ways to boost work productivity? Sidekicks is an on-demand virtual company, and we’re eager to help visionaries and entrepreneurs like you. Get a free ebook and learn more about how we can help you by signing up for our newsletter. We also offer a free 30-minute consultation if you prefer something more personal.
