There are thousands of books, websites and articles written to provide practical guidance and tips on time management. Numerous apps have also been invented to address the increasing needs of improving time management skills. Living in a fast-paced world, time management has become a success indicator and a survival skill for the modern generation. It is a set of skills that can be taught and learned but it requires determination and practice. People who have good time management skills work according to personal priority and goals, being realistic with their time and talents, using an effective scheduling system, managing distractions and making use of time efficiently. If there is a specific area in time management skills that requires a bit of work, below are some apps that served as innovative ways to raise your attention to time and tasks completion.
Prioritization and Goal Setting
Remember The Milk is a free tool that is compatible with most devices, both online and offline. It enables users to create to-do lists and get reminders via email, text message and more. The function of attaching documents to individual task can be handy and useful.
Stride is an easy to use app for setting up reminders to maintain daily habits that lead to goal achievement. It helps you to track your goals by day, week, month, year or even on a rolling average. The data can be synced and accessible from the web or a phone device.
Being Realistic with Time and Talents
Trello is a free project management web-based application that gives a bird’s eye view of your projects, both for personal to-dos and team projects. It gets the inspiration from the Kanban which is a system that organizes workflow visually.
2Do is designed to meet the need for speed. It has a simple-to-use interface and features that you can add quick thoughts and ideas before you forget them. It can be simple or complex, it offers unique approaches to managing tasks.
Effective Scheduling System
Todoist is a free to fee based app that helps organizing and prioritizing your tasks and projects. It is a straightforward and user-friendly to-do list app that can label tasks, assign a due date or assign it to someone else and marked with a special priority.
Managing Distractions
RescueTime is a free to fee based app that provides a detailed report uncovering the time wasted on certain websites and an overview of how you spend your day. It is a digital distraction-reduction aid app that helps tracking your time.
Be Focused Timer is a timer that sets blocks of work time and allows you to track your goals and work history. It combines the Pomodoro Techniques by breaking up work into focused time blocks (25 minutes) separated by a short, generally five-minute break.
Overcoming Procrastination
30/30 is a free app that helps create a list of tasks and assign an amount of time required for each task. Users can customize tab with a title and an icon with specific length of time for each task. Once the time is up for a specific task, it will move on to the next task in queue.
EpicWin is an iPhone app that brings adventurous role-playing game into mundane to-do tasks. It builds up motivation for completing chores and tasks by improving and developing animated avatars in the app.
Carolyn Lee
Learning Resource Coordinator