The Best Under-$100 Headphones and Productivity Tricks
Looking To Amp Up Your Productivity?
Setting up your own business can be daunting. And the worst part of it is the biggest impedance to your business’ growth is frequently your own productivity! Simply drinking more coffee isn’t a long term solution. Even if it’s 100% U.S. grown java coffee, the caffeine boost only lasts for so long. There are a few tips we’ve learned over our experiences growing businesses that we think can help you.
1. Automate With Chrome Extensions:
If you need to buy things online as part of your business, searching for coupons can be a time-consuming activity. From searching through your email for a voucher you got that one time, to trying out dozens of codes from a coupon website, these things can take up potentially hours worth of productivity time.
So next time you look for promo codes for All Beauty, install a Chrome extension that automatically adds the best possible discount to your purchases. It’ll save you time and money. Why wouldn’t you do that?
2. Create Your Own Audio Environment.
This is one of the best tricks to enhancing your productivity at work. Every cough, phone-ring or loud vehicle can devastate your productivity for a few minutes. If you put on headphones while you’re at work, you’ll create an environment you control and those little random noises will be drowned out.
The Best Budget $100 Headphones You Can Take To Work:
And you don’t have to break the bank to do it: you can choose from the best headphones under $100 on BestGear. Another benefit of having your headphones on at work is that people won’t bother unless it’s very important. That, in itself, will enhance productivity in your office, for yourself and probably that person also.
There are also lots of cool mac apps that you can use to enhance your productivity. You can use some of them with your headphones, and with other ones you can install on your computer to cut out distractions.
3. Use Mac Apps to Enhance Your Productivity:
If you work primarily from your own Macbook, then you know just how easy it is to get distracted by an iMessage notification or email notification popping up in the top right corner. That’s not even mentioning the quick trips to social media that suddenly turn into hour-long browsing sessions.
These interruptions in your workflow can keep you from finishing the tasks you planned for the day, making your productivity drop significantly and putting your goals a little further out of reach. Fortunately, there are five amazing Mac apps that can help you get out of that procrastination rut and enhance your workflow significantly.
Escape 2
Escape 2 is a Mac menu bar app created by the team at FocusList. While FocusList provides a daily planner for the iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac, Escape 2 simply sits in your menu bar and watches the website URLs you visit. When it sees a website that it has marked as distracting, it will remind you how many minutes you’ve visited that site during the week and let you know whether you’ve gone over or under budget on that website.
If you feel the need to set strict limits on website visit allowances, Escape 2 has an option to input custom amounts of time. For example, if you want to spend 20 minutes a day on Twitter, you can just input that amount of time into the app. From there, Escape will let you know what percentage of the time you’ve used.
Todoist
This app is one of the best-designed and easiest to use to-do apps on the market. As a free app, you can create overarching projects, with subtasks to mark your progress. With the Premium upgrade, you can give yourself reminders (including a location-specific option) and a special productivity chart that will enhance your workflow. Tasks can be synced to any device — the app works very well on the iPhone — and you can give yourself set times to begin and finish each task. Though it does have a free version, the Premium subscription is worth the $29 price tag.
Be Focused
This is a Mac app that gives you a flexible Pomodoro timer in your menu bar. If you’ve never heard of the Pomodoro technique, it’s a productivity “hack” that sets timers for you to work for a certain period of time before resting for a set amount of time. This repeated, intense working trains your brain to ignore distractions and work efficiently.
Be Focused allows you to specify the task you’re currently working on and then gives you a 25-minute timer. Once the timer is finished, the app will beep and remind you to rest. There’s a five-minute rest window, then it’s back to work. This technique, and specifically this app, really bump your productivity to a new level.
Fantastical 2
As your life gets busier and busier, it gets harder to remember small tasks and daily meetings. The best calendar to remember these events is Fantastical 2. It uses intuitive writing for scheduling, so instead of clicking a few times and filling in small areas with the location, time, and other details you can just write, “Tomorrow meeting at 2 with friends at coffee shop,” and the app will decipher exactly what you mean.
The app is very pleasing to look at, has customizable alerts, and has a great menu bar app to boot. Though it’s a little pricey at $15, the import options from other apps mean that Fantastical will forever be your go-to calendar.
Bear
When you hear the words “note-taking app for Mac”, you probably think of Evernote. However, there’s a new contender on the scene. Bear is a beautiful new note app that is far less bloated than Evernote. It categorizes notes using a hashtagging method and has various color schemes and styles to keep your eyes from going numb while writing.
Bear has some special features that make it a step above many other note apps. It supports Markdown, so you can code within a note. You can also export any note to a variety of formats, including rich text, PDF, and Word. It seamlessly integrates its phone app and makes note-taking easier than ever. The subscription model makes it cheaper than Evernote as well.
Our Conclusions
From apps that give you a timer for intense work to ones that make organizing and scheduling easier, each of the apps mentioned out-shines other similar apps in their categories. These will boost your productivity and make your life goals a little easier to achieve.
