11 simple productivity-boosting tech hacks you can deploy before lunch

One of the things we love about digital marketing is how quickly the industry moves. There’s always some news, a creative new angle, or an algorithm update to keep us on our toes.

In such a dynamic environment, it’s easy to get lost in your ever increasing to-do list. There’s never a slow day in digital communications and you’ll hear “how is it 4 o’clock already?” around the Bring office on a daily basis. In order to deliver successful campaigns for our clients we have to stay on top of our game, which means we may have to juggle a few tasks simultaneously.

Most of us rely on coffee to start our engines in the morning. According to Steven Miller, a neuroscientist at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda in Maryland, you should wait until 10.30am to have your morning caffeine hit. This is due to a hormone your body releases called cortisol, which makes you feel alert. That’s all well and good, but we start work at 8.30am, and we want to make every minute count.

As you’d expect from a digital marketing agency, we like to use technology to make our lives easier. Here are 11 useful productivity-boosting tech hacks that are so quick and easy to deploy that you can have them all in place before you stop for lunch.

Conquer your to-do list

If you’re constantly losing scraps of paper that have your entire life planned out on, then Wunderlist is the app for you. The virtual to-do list allows you to organise your life into specific tasks, create reminders and alerts, and share your list with others. Discover the power of Wunderlist here.

Optimise your emails

If emails were possessions, most of us would be hoarders. Emails are an annoying part of daily admin that can’t be ignored. Make your life instantly easier by using an email reminder service like Boomerang which lets you control when you send and receive messages. You can schedule messages to go out whenever you like, create reminders and follow-up emails so that you’ll never let something slip through the cracks.

Find out more about Boomerang here.

Majestic SEO

Our digital PR and content teams swear by this plugin. Use this handy tool to see citation flow, trust flow and other link data for the page, domain and subdomain you’re on simply by clicking a button.

Stress-free saving

Never experience the sheer horror of your computer crashing and losing all of your work again with Google Docs. It automatically saves your work to your Google drive as you go along and it has a frill-free interface for distraction-free writing. Try it for free here.

Halve your coding time

Need to write multiple lines of code? Sublime text is your new best friend. Our web development team swear by this handy tool which allows you to select as many lines as you need to and type the same stuff in at once. It’s much quicker than copy and paste because it’s essentially copying and pasting as you go and

it interfaces well with FTP server so you can push your server changes as you go along using GIT. In addition to this, it’s beautifully customisable as you can change colour schemes and really personalise your coding experience. Check it out for yourself.

Focus your creativity

Need to knuckle down and write an article, but the office is too noisy or silent to concentrate? Many people find light background noise helps to focus their minds. Sites such as Rainy Moods and Coffitivity provide ambient sounds to improve your concentration. Our copywriters love the sound of a Texas Tea house.

LinkClump

Open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time with this handy Chrome plug in.

Automate your life

There’s an app called IFTTT that turns your thought process into actions in only a few steps. If one thing happens, you can choose for another action to happen, for example you can get a notification if you receive an email from a certain address. It’s a little complicated to explain in such a short space, so have a look at it in action here.

Double your output

A really simple and effective tech tip we use everyday is dual screening. This allows you to easily switch between tasks and is great for writing emails and copy. Why flick back and forth between screens when you can have two?

Streamline your screenshots

Jing is a great tool for taking quick screenshots of what you are doing. No need to rummage around your desktop looking for Paint and then faffing around cropping your image, this innovative tool helps you save time and upload the images straight to social media, email or to your own files. Have a look at Jing in action.

Gather extra intelligence

Want to know when people have opened your emails but not replied? Sidekick gives you a heads up by sending a notification every time an email is opened so you can find out when, how many times and what device your email was opened by. While the program is perfect for digital PRs sending out emails to journalists and bloggers, it’s also really useful to see whether clients, and even colleagues, have read your messages.

We hope that these easy tech hacks will help to boost your productivity throughout the morning so you can have the most productive afternoon of your career. We like to keep things simple here at Bring Digital, and if you’d like to know more about our services, we promise that we won’t baffle you with jargon!