Streamline Your Work/Life Balance with these Tech Hacks
Achieving the perfect balance between work and life might once have seemed like an impossibility – many of us have been striving for it for years, decades even, without success- but now that technology is so advanced,and so widely available. The perfect work/life balance may not be a dream anymore.
Here are some of the best tech hacks to help you get the balance right:
Filter Your Emails
Sick of dealing with work emails when you’re trying to have dinner with your family? Set up an email filter, so that you’ll only be alerted by those messages that are truly urgent. Here’s how to do that in Gmail, but there are numerous other apps that will enable you to do similar things no matter what email provider you use. Check them out.
Let the Tech Do the Research
Whether you’re collecting information for a work product or you simply want to keep abreast of the news, why waste time making searches and sifting through a whole lot of information when you can use a news aggregator or gadgets like the Amazon Echo and similar to aggregate it for you. In the case of the Echo, it will also read it out for you!
Invest in a Fitness tracker
Part of finding the perfect work/life balance is ensuring that you get enough exercise in. Doing so will help you to maintain fitness levels and sleep better at night. Use your fitness tracker at work to monitor how many steps you take, and try to move around more so that you it at least 10,000. You can do this by taking the stairs, walking to speak to a colleague instead of emailing and staying active during your breaks. By doing this, you won’t have to worry about exercising so much after work, which means you can spend more time with your family, catching movies, reading books and generally having a good time.
Get an Audible Account
Don’t have enough time to read? Invest in an Audible account and start listening to audiobooks. Do it during your commute, when you’re doing work that doesn’t require much mental effort when you’re doing the housework, and you’ll be able to get back the joy of reading again.
Manage Your Time with Timeneye
Timeneye is a fantastic app that tracks your time so that you can see exactly how much time you’re spending on any particular task. If you use it for a few weeks, it’ll work out your patterns and suggest time entries for you, which means you can spend less time on the boring stuff and more time being creative or enjoying your home life. The app syncs with everything from Google Calendar to Trello, so it is really very useful.
Stay on Task with Focus Booster
If your work/life balance is out of whack because you’re a major procrastinator, using Focus Booster is probably a good idea. It employs the Pomodoro technique to give you a solid window of focus, interspersed with short breaks, which have been proven to increase productivity.
Now you can kick back, relax and enjoy the best work/life balance ever!