Since the pandemic started, plenty of businesses have transitioned into the digital space. This could mean having more digital processes, or people on remote work or transitioning to a work-from-home setting. I previously gave you some tips on how to declutter your physical spaces, now we proceed to your digital spaces!
Why is this important?
If you’re like me, my gadgets are everything in my work. My email, my folders, my files, and everything I use for work is on my laptop and phone. While there are things that I still print out and have physical copies of, most are primarily digital. This is also because most of the processes are digital because my team and I do our work remotely.
Having a cluttered digital space means a cluttered email inbox, or having unorganized files, or having a cluttered calendar (or a lack of it). Addressing these things can increase your productivity, ensure that you don’t miss anything, and keep you from being overwhelmed.
How to organize your digital space (and other productivity tips!)
TASK TRACKERS
It’s important to keep track of all the tasks that you have on deck. This is especially true if you’re working on multiple projects simultaneously. Having a space to log all of your tasks (actual, pending, and “good-to-have’s”) is really helpful to make sure that you’re on top of it.
For this, you can try using Trello. Trello is a digital bulletin or corkboard where you can create cards for all the things you need to accomplish and dedicate a board for every engagement and project that you currently have. You can also check out Airtable, Slack, or Asana as well. These tools all have different strengths and it would depend on what you need and what your team needs as well.
Most apps can also connect to Google Drive so the tasks and projects can also be linked directly to your folders or files.
EMAIL ORGANIZERS
Your email is one of your major communication tools in remote work. Keeping a clean and organized inbox ensures that you don’t miss out on any important email, and prevents the taxing work of cleaning out an overloaded inbox. You can utilize your email provider’s sorting features (filters and labels on Gmail) and automate them to a dedicated folder to keep them organized.
You can also utilize services like Unroll.me, a service that manages all of your subscription emails. They keep it in one space and give you easier access to unsubscribing. Another app that you can use is Sortd. Sortd tracks your email and manages it similar to the Trello cards. It can highlight important emails and label them easier. You can also collaborate with other people directly from your email through their service.
TIME TRACKERS
These trackers are helpful to monitor what you’ve done and how long you’ve been doing it. For me, writing this article has taken me about an hour and 2 minutes at this point. I know this because of the tracker I’m using. This is particularly helpful so you can log all of the tasks you did and have a better grasp of how long it takes you to do something. This will help when clarifying deadlines and timelines.
You can try either Toggl and Clockify for this. They log what you do on your computer, like what the active application is, what you searched for or what you watched. This monitoring tool is really useful especially when you create a report on your productivity and highlight all you’ve accomplished while on remote work. You can also manually add those tasks that aren’t done digitally.
These are only some of the things and tools that can help you manage your digital space! Remember, you can always check other tools and apps out there that would be a better fit for how you work and what you need.
