hello everyone
Scot Friesen here at Simpletivity
and today I want to share with you seven websites to help you stay more productive
now in today's video I'm gonna be focusing on websites where you can get some instant gratification
where you can start to get some instant results to help you stay on task
or to help you in some other productivity area
I'm not gonna be looking at applications
so we're not gonna be looking at things where you need to be managing a project
or referring to your calendar
but things that you can use
things that I use on a regular basis
to get more out of my day
Time Date Comm
and to be more efficient so let's start off with the first one and that is time and date comm
time and date comm is where you need to go for anything related to time related to calendars time zones if you want to know when the sunsets or sunrises in a particular part of the world and I want to show with you two things that I use time and date calm most frequently with
the first one is the world clock meeting planner and I am often meeting with people around the globe and I want to try and find the ideal time to schedule that meeting so when I come to the world clock meeting planner I can pick the date where I'm planning to have that meeting or wanting to have that meeting
my first location is usually yourself so I'm gonna put in Vancouver here and then the second location perhaps I'm meeting with someone in well let's say Chicago for one of them and then let's pick someone maybe on the other on the other side of that were let's say Hong Kong
okay so we've got our three locations here this is where the three people are going to be resigning my next gonna select show timetable and then what it does is it gives me this nice sort of color coded form letting me know green as standard working hours yellow would be either early morning or late in the evening but still waking hours and then red would be typically when people are sleeping
so as I scan here obviously Vancouver and Chicago I mean we're on the same continent there's gonna be a lunging though with our friends in Hong Kong so I might say well look at this here we go maybe five o'clock my time that is a little bit later in Chicago but it's 8 a.m. in Hong Kong maybe I would propose you know one of these two times here 4:00 p.m. my time 4 or 5 p.m. my time to see if that might work with my colleagues in the other area you can even add more than three cities if you need as a part of this planning tool
now another one that I use often is their calendars here in time and date comm and the first one is the date to date calendar a duration and so here you can input any two dates and instantly find out what is the distance between those two days so let's say I pick something in the in the future here November 15th maybe that's when the project is scheduled to to end I'm going to say calculate duration and here I know instantly that's 51 days or if I want to convert that into minutes hours number of weeks and so forth I get all of those time units here as well
so if you're managing a project or if you get a date on your agenda and you want to see how many days or how many weeks in advance is that actually I often use this calculator there's a number of other calculators you can use here as well so let's continue with time and
Rescue Time
that brings us to rescue time calm
now rescue time is all about analyzing where you spend your time on your computer
rescue time you install it on your desktop computer you can actually install it on multiple devices and then what it does is it just silently tracks what applications are you using what is the active window on your system and then you get a very detailed report showing you you know what websites you visited what applications are open how long you spent in email again a very detailed report which you can dig down to
here's just an example from their homepage blue is indicating work-related activities and red is maybe fun or maybe time wasters so in this case software development that's great this person seems to be spending a lot of time on that but 15% of their day in news and opinion websites may be spending too much time there
so you can even block distracting websites by using rescue time as well so a very simple application you really don't have to do anything else other than install it let it do its thing and then you can review the results and see how you might want to change your workday change on where you focus
now speaking of blocking distracting websites and obtaining that focus we desire let's take a look at forest app dot CC
now forest first and foremost is an application for either your iOS or Android device but there is a Chrome extension so you can install this on your desktop computer as well
and forest app is all about focus so what Forest does is that when you start the application it plants a little seed just this little bud in this little pot of soil here and the goal is for you to ignore your phone or if you're using the desktop version to ignore certain websites that you determine for 30 minutes 30 straight minutes
and if you can do so during that time your little sprout here will start to grow it will start to grow into a tree and be a full-fledged tree at the end of those 30 minutes however if you pick up your phone if you do something with your phone or if you go to one of those websites that you've identified as distracting you're gonna kill your tree
so yes there's a bit of gamification going on here with the forest app your goal is to to build a forest all together right build multiple trees by obtaining your focus over multiple sessions
so again this can be a great way for work right if you have to write that article if you need to review an important document start it on your phone started on your application or identify websites such as Facebook or other websites that may tempt you and distract you and see if you can focus for 30 minutes and grow that tree next
Buzzsumo
up is buzzsumo calm and you may have heard me talk about buzzsumo before
buzzsumo calm is all about finding content that is shared the most online so you can type in a topic I'm going to type in productivity and here on the I've selected in the past month I want to take a look at you know what articles what pieces of content have been shared the most on social media
so here it gives me a nice list here I can see that this article here from inc.com has been shared the most when it comes to the topic of productivity I can even break it down by you know which social media platform so you can see an awful lot on LinkedIn quite a few on Facebook not so much on Twitter
whereas if I go down a bit further here let's take a look at this article from HBR you can see still the most on LinkedIn but it's almost even between Facebook and Twitter
so if you are looking for great content or maybe you just need some content ideas for your business perhaps you write a blog or you create content yourself buzz sumo can be a great resource to see what else is trending what are other people sharing it might give you some great ideas for your own content
next up is interacting
Survey Monkey
with our customers or really just getting anonymous feedback from anyone and that's surveymonkey.com
now chances are you've probably already heard of Survey Monkey maybe you've used it already but something that constantly surprises me is how few businesses or how few team leads make use of anonymous surveys
it's so great to be able to get that information to get feedback in real time and of course people like being honest they tend to be a lot more honest when they know that their email address or their name will not be associated with that feedback
so survey monkey makes it so easy for you to create a new survey it doesn't have to be too lengthy it can just be a few questions and then you get those responses immediately and maybe change your course of action
I've done some changes right here on simple tivity based on some of the wonderful feedback from viewers like yourself and and again try and use Survey Monkey as often as I can as long as it's appropriate
but don't forget to reach out and quiz your customers your subscribers even it's even if it's within your own company or within your own business even if it's a small team I've sent out surveys to a team five or seven individuals to get their feedback on certain questions
so Survey Monkey can help you do it all very quickly very efficiently
next up we have
Most Dangerous Writing App
the most dangerous app the most dangerous website on this list and yeah it's titled the most dangerous writing app and you'll find it at the most dangerous writing app calm
so what makes this website so dangerous well sometimes I suffer from writer's block right I I'm often a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my writing so I'll write a couple of sentences and then I'll just stare at that flashing cursor what should come next what should I write next
well any professional writer will tell you you should edit later just write just get into flow just write the content and that's where the most dangerous writing app comes in
so what you do is you select either the length of time in this case the number of minutes the number of consecutive minutes you would like to write or the number of words the number of total words that you would like to write
so when I'm writing a blog article I will often select 500 words then I select start writing and I've been given a blank canvas here where I can start writing so let's start writing something and then if I get stuck and I wait maybe I should maybe I should go in this direction if I don't input I failed it's gone everything that I've just written and remember it might have as many words as maybe 400 words on that previous screen is absolutely gone
yes the most dangerous writing app is so dangerous because you need to keep writing for that specified length of time or number of words or you will lose it all
I have used this more frequently more often than you may think many of my articles on the simple tivity comm blog actually started right here it's more important just to get those ideas out and then you can always go back and cut and paste and edit it later
so go ahead and try out even if it's just for fun the most dangerous writing app comm
and last but not least let's talk a little
Sleepy Time
bit about sleep and that brings us to sleepy time or more specifically sleepy ti.me and there's a dot or a period between the TI and the ME in time and this is all about getting the ideal length of sleep
so first we say I have to wake up at or maybe I want to wake up at let's say let's say 7:00 a.m. I'm gonna select 7:00 a.m. here and then I'm gonna select calculate and it says I should try to fall asleep at one of the following times 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. or 1 a.m. or 2:30 a.m.
well which one is it what when should I try to fall asleep well sleepy time is all about sleep cycles and you may be familiar with sleep cycles that we typically have a sleep cycle which lasts about 90 minutes so what sleepy time is doing is calculating those sleep cycles based on the information that you give it and saying these would be sort of the ideal times for you to fall asleep
now again we all have different different rhythms when it comes to our sleep and some of us need more sleep some of us need less sleep but sleepy time can be a great resource to find out when should you go to bed so you can get your optimal number of sleep cycles
you can also use this last one here at the bottom find out when to get up if you go to bed right now so if I hit that right now now remember it's in the morning when I'm recording this video it's telling me I should consider waking up at these times or at these intervals throughout the rest of the day
so those are the seven websites I'd encourage you to check out I hope you found it useful and encourage you to test out some of the websites that you've seen here
I'll also include a list and link to all of these websites in the description below if you like this video I would encourage you to give it a thumbs up and if you have not yet subscribed to simple tivity please do so we have many more videos coming up releasing new videos each and every week
thanks again for watching and remember being productive does not need to be difficult in fact it's very simple
