2020 was unquestionably a tough year for large and small businesses alike. We are finally bidding goodbye to the year of pandemic, civil unrest, business travel restrictions, and abundant disasters and welcoming 2021 with open arms. The year saw a tremendous rise in remote working that helped businesses cut down overhead costs. Not only did it help businesses save workspace costs, but it also saved the workers an ample amount of commute costs and time which can now be better utilized and shared between personal and professional lives.
Tech Trends That Can Boost Your Productivity
There were a few lessons learned during these trying times, the work culture has changed and so the employee productivity. It has been a big concern amongst the managers and executives to get the best out of the employees working remotely. Technology has to a great extent eradicated these concerns and will be certainly advancing in the coming year. It has a vast potential to boost work productivity and has proved it time and again.
Table of contents
Cloud-Based Collaboration
Artificial Intelligence, A Reality
Leap In Communication
Extensions To The Rescue
Time trackers
Boost Your Productivity With These Tech Trends
In this blog, I’m going to list down a few tech trends that can boost your productivity in 2021. All you need to do is just implement these trends in your work life and you would be good enough to receive a pat on the back from your boss, and yourself.
Cloud-Based Collaboration
Cloud security has always been a concern among companies of every size but the scene has changed a lot in 2020. With the unprecedented domination of coronavirus over the entirety of humanity, the work-from-home mandates have proved to be a blessing in disguise. Corporates are forced to trust cloud-based collaboration as it is seemingly the only-method to match the effectiveness of physical collaboration, or even better.
Cloud collaboration is taking over the physical counterpart for it allows easy sharing, editing, and working together on projects within teams. Enterprise collaboration has seen a massive acceptance this year, thanks to cloud-based collaboration tools like Google Workspace and Office 365. These suites of products enable easy sharing and editing of documents that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. This is one of the top productivity-enhancing tools and businesses are making the most of it.
Other than this, Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs) like Zoho and Salesforce empowers the sales teams to keep track of the status of clients on a unified platform. This in turn saves time by cutting down the conversations and monitoring the status on the go, and also maintains the flow in the customer relations doubling the productivity and gains.
Artificial Intelligence, A Reality
AI technology is gradually making its way to our offices. Let’s admit it, we waste a lot of time on non-core recurring activities at the workplaces. Consigning these activities to AI will save a lot of time, money, and effort while you focus on other important productive activities.
AI helps in automating stuff and improvised decision-making and productivity. Machine learning with the use of algorithms can find patterns in large data, automate accounts payable processes, and ERP systems to automate routine business processes.
As per the estimates, AI will be used across occupations, especially in low-wage and education roles that carry out routine work. Also, you might have a colleague in a robot to whom you will be assigning your boring mundane tasks that will be done in seconds by your robot friend.
Leap In Communication
Are most of your team conversations still through emails and phones? You need to move over them if yes. Communication has progressed ten folds over the past few years, with the trend slowly changing from emails to online video conferencing and chatrooms.
Email is undoubtedly the dominant communication tool today, but the alternative tools are steadily catching up. These newer platforms emphasize real-time collaboration, integration, and above all, effective and quick communication.
Platforms that integrate image sharing, video and voice chats, messaging, screen sharing, dedicated channel features for teams, real-time collaboration, and file sharing are seeing an upward growth in terms of business acceptance.
Slack, Skype for Business, ClickMeeting, Zoom, Zoho Meetings, Cisco WebEx, and Google Meet are just to name a few in this category. Microsoft Teams is also a leading remote communication tool among small and medium sized businesses. These applications are adding on the productivity functions quite regularly to create a compact communication package. Thank me later for this productivity hack if you haven’t been using them yet.
Extensions To The Rescue
Google extensions have a hidden potential that not many have unraveled yet. Whether you are working from home or are engaged with your school or college project report, you might have wondered, “What did I achieve today? I spent a lot more time on this than I actually should.” You aren’t alone though.
If Google Chrome is your primary browser and if you make great things happen on it, then there’s good news for you. You can take full advantage of the free Chrome extensions to speed up your work and hit your checklist rapidly.
As a writer myself, I make use of a lot many extensions to ace my tasks at the same time staying highly productive. Grammarly, Color Pick Eye Dropper, WhatFont, and Keyword Planner are the ones on top of my head right now.
Some of the remarkable chrome extensions are Taskade and Noisli. While the former allows you to manage your entire workload and collaborate with teams on the go, the latter puts you in a pleasant work environment by creating a customized soundscape with effects to focus on tasks at hand. Listening to such soothing chords and tunes on quality earbuds and headphones appear to be a piece of music to the ears.
Time trackers
A time tracking application is a must-have if you are working in a fast-paced environment with a multitude of tasks. It helps you stay organized, efficient, and get a lot of stuff done. As they say, Time is Money, just using a good time management tool can save your company hours of effort on non-deliverables and double the profitability.
Among a vast expanse of time management tools available out there, choosing one might be difficult for you. When looking for a time management application, make sure it has most of the basic features like a timer, to-do lists, productivity timeline, interactions with project management systems, attendance tracker, invoicing features, and of course a reminder you remind you of things you forget quite often.
Toggl, Forest, Clockify, and Timely are some of the most popular time tracking applications used by students and working professionals alike. Once you have them installed, you would not have to stress your brain too much to remember stuff, and you would be as productive as ever before.
Another great tool that you can consider is the project management template by monday.com that ensures you are never late on fulfilling your promises on time.
Boost Your Productivity With These Tech Trends
Productivity is bound to take a hit at times but when things are better organized and monitored, you can reverse and upscale it. Higher productivity certainly doesn’t come in a day but we could take baby steps and level up so that when we look back, we could feel proud of ourselves for achieving double the feat achieved today. I hope this list of the latest tech trends would be of some value in boosting your productivity. Wishing you a great year ahead, cheers!
