10 Work From Home Productivity Tools You Need To Maximize Your Day

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Managing your time effectively and being as productive as possible can be hard.

If you ever feel like you can never get into the zone when you’re working, you’re not alone.

With constant distractions from our phones from social media to texting, it’s no wonder that so many of us can’t work effectively.

10 Best Productivity Tools For Work

As more people are now working from home, being able to focus, organize yourself, and get stuff done is even more important when there’s more potential for distractions.

If you’re looking for ways to be more productive and save time, I’ve got 10 work from home productivity tools you can use to maximize your day. These can also be used if you work in an office or you’re still a student.

1. Use A Planner

If you thrive on writing things down on paper and always have lots of ideas and thoughts swimming around in your head, you’ll love a physical planner or bullet journal to keep you sane.

Using a planner to plan your days, weeks, and months and to write down your short and long-term goals can help maximize your day.

With consistency and time, having this tool in your productivity kit can help you take control of your life!

Just don’t forget to bring it around with you so that you always have your notebook on hand even when you’re out.

For me, a planner keeps me organized and I feel much less anxious compared to when I don’t use one. When I visually layout which events are coming up and all the tasks that need to be done, it allows me to see what are the next steps I need to take action on to accomplish and reach my goals.

Choosing A Planner

There are so many different types of planners out there to choose from based on your needs, from monthly, weekly, to daily planners.

Some planners are specifically made to help increase your productivity.

They’re structured with specific guidelines and instructions on how to plan your days and set future goals.

If you’re really busy and want a planner that can help you account for every single hour of your waking time, this is great for you.

For a more relaxed type of planner that is less structured, you can choose a simpler planner that is more general with inspirational quotes and prompts to help you along the way.

For a list of awesome traditional planners, check out my list of 25 productivity planners here.

Another great choice is to use a bullet journal. This is my current favorite productivity obsession!

A bullet journal is a notebook with just a faint dotted grid. Because it’s blank, you can decide exactly how you want to structure your planner based on your preferences.

From calligraphy, washi tape, and creating mood and habit trackers, a bullet journal can be a ton of fun, a creative outlet, and a kick-ass productivity tool, all wrapped in one.

If this sounds like fun to you, check out my post on all of the supplies you need to start your very own bullet journal.

2. ClickUp

To stay focused throughout the day, to-do lists can be really helpful especially if you have a long list of things to accomplish.

ClickUp is my favorite project management tool that I use daily. It helps me stay productive and focused, especially when I have multiple projects going on and I feel overwhelmed by the number of tasks I have to complete.

I’ve tried all sorts of different project management tools before but this one is both visually appealing and supercharges my workflow. This tool is also perfect if you need to collaborate with others on a project or if you work on multiple projects by yourself.

How I use ClickUp is by creating different projects and then color-coding them. Then I write down the tasks, any subtasks along with more information about each task, and any deadlines.

What I like about this platform is that it’s really simple to set re-occurring deadlines if you have tasks that repeat daily or on different days. It helps save time so you don’t have to re-enter them over and over again once they’re complete.

For me, I also really like seeing a list of what needs to be done daily in one view. By going to your summary of tasks, you can see which tasks from each of your projects are outstanding based on priority.

Tasks and projects can also be viewed by calendar, kanban, or list view so it’s great to interchange the format depending on your projects.

3. PomoDone

PomoDone is a time management app I highly recommend adding to your tool kit. Using both ClickUp and PomoDone together has been a killer combo in my workflow!

PomoDone is based on the Pomodoro technique.

This is a time management method where you work for intervals of 25 minutes, take a short break for about 5 minutes, and then re-do the whole process over and over again until you get everything done.

What I love about PomoDone is that you can easily integrate it with ClickUp or whichever project management app you use within minutes.

Once it’s integrated, all you have to do is click the Start button next to your task and the PomoDone timer will start.

Once 25 minutes is over, it’ll tell you that your time is up and you’ll be able to enjoy a well-deserved break from your hard work.

Another awesome thing that I love about PomoDone is that you can take a look at the analytics at a later time to see exactly what you spent your time doing and for how long.

If you love analyzing numbers and always want to improve your productivity, this is a great place to start to see which areas you can improve on.

4. Workona

Workona is a must if you find that you tend to open endless tabs in your browser.

If you get extreme anxiety and feel like you can’t get anything done when your browser is full of dozens of tabs, you’re not alone!

I can never work efficiently when I have a browser full of unrelated tabs. My mind wanders and I end up wasting a lot of time when I switch from tab to tab.

In comes Workona to save the day.

This browser extension allows you to set different folders so you only have certain tabs that you put in each folder to show up at once on your browser. The rest is then hidden so it doesn’t clutter your browser.

This is a lifesaver when you’re working on one project or task and can’t be distracted.

Get the Workona Chrome extension here and help skyrocket your productivity and decrease your anxiety.

5. Grammarly

I tend to write a lot on the computer and really hate having to spend lots of time editing afterward.

If you’re like me and you have to write a lot whether it’s for a school paper or work, you’ll love adding Grammarly to your list of daily tools.

Grammarly catches grammar and punctuation mistakes as you’re writing. You can even set it so that anything that you write offline when you’re not connected to the internet will be checked.

I love that it gives me the peace of mind that it’ll help catch mistakes that I miss because of human error.

best productivity tools to maximize your day

6. Dragon Dictation

Have you ever had to write something up but hated typing out every single word?

Dragon Dictation can help you save time and work by accurately transcribing your spoken words into text. It’s three times as fast as typing!

If you find typing a pain, Dragon Dictation is a great addition to skyrocket your productivity.

7. Evernote

If you’re the type of person who loves to collect random notes, articles, and clippings from all over the place and you just can’t seem to ever get the whole mess organized, you’ll love Evernote.

Evernote is your one-stop shop to capture and keep your notes organized. You can sync your notes so they’re accessible everywhere you go and even share your notes with others.

Some other great features of Evernote are adding attachments, audio recordings, and links to your notes as well as scanning and searching for information within business cards.

8. Freedom

If you have trouble focusing at work and find yourself constantly scrolling through your phone because there’s no one there to watch you, Freedom is a must to help you stay productive when you work from home.

Freedom is an app that blocks distractions for you so you can work more efficiently.

All you have to do is set the websites and apps that you want to block and then sync them amongst all of your devices so that you can’t access them when you’re working.

It even has a feature that will allow you to schedule sessions of block-out time that re-occur daily or weekly.

9. IFTTT

If you’ve never heard of IFTTT, you’ll want to check out this powerful tool.

IFTTT stands for if this, then that and is an insanely useful but free productivity app that can help you streamline your whole life so you can use your brainpower for more important things.

How IFTTT works is it brings together different services using Applets.

An Applet is something that happens specifically when you connect multiple services together, which can’t be done on their own.

What’s so great about IFTTT is once you create an Applet (which takes a small amount of time initially), it fully becomes automated and you never have to think about having to do it yourself ever again.

There are so many different Applets that you can choose from that already exist on the IFTTT website if you need some ideas on how to save time in different areas of your life. You can also create your own if what you’re looking for doesn’t exist.

Here are some popular Applet ideas on IFTTT that can help you save time:

Tweet your Instagrams as native photos on Twitter
Tweet your Facebook status updates
Save receipts to Evernote
Mute your Android phone when you arrive at work
Automatically turn on your lights at sunset
Receive a text message with the forecasted weather every morning

10. Spark

Managing emails effectively is so important because it can be a real time suck. And the more you put it off, the more it can give you anxiety as you see the number of unread emails going up.

Spark is a great email management system that keeps you organized so you can get through your emails with ease and bring down the inbox number to zero.

They have a ton of features to keep you organized including snoozing emails, a smart inbox, reminders to follow up, smart notifications, email delegation, and so much more.

Conclusion

Staying productive and getting stuff done is a lot easier if you have the right work from home tools to help you stay focused. I hope these suggestions were useful and will help you take control of your day.

Don’t forget to check out my other posts on goal setting and tips on how to be more productive with your day:

What are some of the best productivity tools that you love? Let me know in the comments!