Tech Tools and Tricks That Boost Productivity

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One easy trick is to cut down on time spent on e-mail. If you use Microsoft Outlook (MSFT), Ferriss suggests an add-on program called Xobni, which is "in box" spelled backward. The program adds an extra layer of information about the mail you send and receive. Best known for making it easy to search your inbox for contacts and lost attachments, Xobni also analyzes when your inbox is busiest. Ferriss says Xobni can tell you when your e-mail "hotspots" occur—the times when you should check for e-mail from your most important contacts and when you can ignore e-mail altogether without fear of missing something important. Xobni, which operates on PCs that run Windows, is free; an advanced version called Xobni Plus is available for $29.95.

Doodle can schedule your meetings

Ferriss suggests using a program called RescueTime, which tracks how you spend time on your computer and lets you block access to sites that tend to distract you when you need to focus. "Most people are severely unaware of how they spend their time," Ferriss says. RescueTime runs on Windows and Mac OS X, and comes in both a "lite" version that is free and A Pro version that costs from $6 to $9 a month per user.

Another time-killer? Booking meetings. How many times has an endless stream of back-and-forth e-mails focused solely on when to schedule a meeting? Ferriss suggests a Web service called Doodle, which lets all participants vote on a time, then schedules the meeting according to the voting results. There's a free version and a premium version that costs $28 a year.

How we define productivity may underlie the problem of thinking we're not productive enough. So argues Douglas C. Merrill, the former chief information officer of search giant Google (GOOG) and author of the new book Getting Organized In The Google Era. Trying to accomplish several things at once is not productivity, he says. "Over the last few years we've come to associate multitasking with productivity and I think it's exactly the opposite."

Switching back and forth between tasks is something people are not very good at, especially when we do it quickly, says Merrill. The upshot, he contends, is that you end up being less effective on all the tasks than if you were to focus on one at a time. "The way we think of multitasking makes us less productive," he says.

Merrill suggests a few simple tools to help streamline your work processes. He suggests centralizing all your e-mail accounts on GMail, Google's free e-mail service. GMail has a feature that will check other accounts for you at regular intervals and it allows you to answer e-mail as though you're using any of your other accounts. "You should have only one place for e-mail, no matter how many accounts you've had in the past," he says. Other Web mail services such as Yahoo! Mail (YHOO) have the ability to work with outside accounts, but GMail's primary strength is its ability to make the contents of your inbox as easily searchable as Google.

share your Google Calendar?

Merrill also suggests getting important computer files off your laptop computer and into the cloud, where you can reach them whenever you need them. His favorite storage service, Dropbox, is free for up to 2 gigabytes and then costs $9.99 a month for 50 GB and $19.99 a month for 100 GB. "People have this idea that their files are safe when they're stored on their laptop," he says. "That is, until their laptop is stolen."

Next try a shared calendar service such as Google Calendar. Give selected colleagues and family members access to the online service so they can know when you're busy and where you are.

Finally, don't let technology overwhelm you. William Powers, a former writer for The Washington Post (WPO) says in his forthcoming book, Hamlet's Blackberry, due out in June, that modern workers need to strike a balance in their overconnected lives by disconnecting regularly and by resisting what he calls "digital maximalism." Adding more technology doesn't always improve productivity, although we often assume it will. Powers uses examples from some of history's most prolific figures, including Benjamin Franklin, Plato, and Shakespeare (hence the reference to Hamlet in the title) to make his points.

"All these devices that we use do wonderful things by making our lives more enjoyable and enhancing our creativity," he says. "But if you don't take some time to open up some distance between yourself and your screens, you end up shuttling between small things and never doing the big things that lead to the best kind of productivity." His suggestion? A regular walk, with the smartphone left safely in a desk drawer. "Nothing bad will happen," Powers says. "And something good just might."

Hesseldahl is a reporter for Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

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