Imagine… there’s more power packed into the cheapest smart phone on the market today than there was on board the Lunar Module used during the Apollo missions. Focusing your smart phone’s capabilities on personal and professional efficiency unleashes productivity potential that generations before had never envisioned.
Managing and organizing your time, content, media and tasks are each critically important to getting the most out of your performance. Getting the most out of your smart phone is no different. The road to mastering your smart phone capabilities revolve around these concepts. Let’s look at the capabilities you hold in your hand to improve your efficiency.
Time Management
“When you waste a moment, you have killed it in a sense, squandering an irreplaceable opportunity. But when you use the moment properly, filling it with purpose and productivity, it lives on forever.”
– Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, Author, Teacher, Political Advisor
You can’t control how time passes. But, you can control how you pass the time. The processing power of smart phones these days is a huge advantage. They are great tools for organizing your time and organizing your tasks.
Organize your to-do list
The first step to managing your time is to organize it. Eliminate time wasters from your life. Methods that were the best option for managing your time in the past may no longer be the best practices.
For example, how do you currently determine what to do first during the day? You probably know that you can use calendars on your smart phone to keep up with your schedule, but did you know that you can set up automated to-do lists to help keep your work prioritized?
One great app to manage your schedule is 2Do. 2Do can be used as either a simple or comprehensive task manager. You can categorize your tasks by lists, such as personal lists, business lists, and so on. They can even be tagged, grouped together, and prioritized. These tasks can be scheduled to your calendar to keep you ahead of the competition.
Another great app for managing your tasks and improving your focus is called Eisenhower. It uses the ‘Eisenhower matrix’, a proven time management principle in which your tasks are grouped by importance and urgency. The technique helps you focus on your most important tasks.
Skip the VoiceMail
We’re all pulled in many directions each day. Yet sometimes, the most mundane tasks, like returning an email or a phone call, can mean all the difference for future business or positive comments in social media. You need to be effective in managing the simple things or they’ll put you right out of business.
Smart phone apps can convert voice mails to text so that you can respond back via email or text message. You can also set your voice mails to appear in your email inbox, allowing you to work your responses from one setting. You can set designated times each day to give responses, or with the voice mail to email conversion, delegate this to a subordinate.
YouMail Visual Voicemail is a great example of a smart phone app that does just that. This app will convert your voicemail to text and you’ll receive it by text or in your YouMail inbox. You can then either respond by email or delete. It’s also a great way to block unwanted calls.
Email Management
The most routine way to manage your email with your smart phone is by using Host-based apps provided by Google, Yahoo, and Outlook. They are all full functioning apps. You can create email, reply to received email, attach files for delivery, use your spam filters and folders, etc.
There are also e-mail management apps that help you to manage your email accounts across multiple platforms. If you have several email accounts, whether with the same host or across different hosts, you can manage those effectively with several different e-mail management apps. Commonly used aggregators are K9 and Aqua Mail, although there are many others.
What are some of the ways that you can manage your email accounts from your smart phone?
- Aggregate emails from across different accounts into one inbox
- Sort your emails by priority using various filters
- Use folders to properly organize your emails across different accounts
- Use auto-responders to get important messages to your different lists
Social Media Management
“Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever.”
– Dr. Daniel Goleman, Ph.D, Author, “Emotional Intelligence”
The greatest paradigm shift that has occurred since the advent of the information age has been the emergence of social media. Never before has mankind been so interconnected within a honeycomb structure of information accessibility. The ability to exchange information easily and rapidly across any media platform has transformed the way that people communicate.
However, the rapid growth of social media also makes it difficult to manage, both on a personal and professional front. How can you be present on all these different networks? You want to stay connected to your friends and family and see what they’re up to. At the same time, you need to be where your market is, since social media is also a critical business tool for marketers.
Be Everywhere at Once
Savvy marketers are distributing their messages across multiple social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest – all at the same time. The idea is to get your message in front of as many people as possible. Your smart phone can be a key ally in using several different popular apps to distribute your content across a broad array of social media platforms.
Hootsuite’s mobile app provides you a great smart phone solution in pushing your content to the internet across different social media platforms. Hootsuite’s app integrates perfectly with the Hootsuite Dashboard. It then puts the complete management of your entire social media presence in the palm of your hand.
Buffer is another mobile app that makes it easy to get your message out on social media. You can share things to multiple social networks directly via their app, or through their integration with dozens of other services.
Content Management
Content management revolves around promoting your online presence in a way that delivers your message to the people who you want to receive it. Whether you’re a work-at-home mom blogging about the challenges of balancing work and household responsibilities, or the CEO of a major corporate titan, the impact of what you have to say will be measured in your content’s reach and relevance to the intended audience. How efficient you are in managing your content will likely revolve around using an app that helps you manage content across multiple platforms.
Smart phones have become an excellent platform for content marketing while you’re on-the-go. No longer do you have to wait to be sitting in front of your computer to get relevant information to your audience. It’s easy today to share thoughts, opinions, pictures, and videos with the world in real time. Think about how you can manage each of these different types of content with your smart phone.
Native Content
Native content is simply the content that you create yourself. It can be blog posts that you originate, pictures/videos that you’ve taken, or even merchandise that you’re offering for sale. Whatever the content may be, it must impact your audience.
Smart phones can be used to manage and distribute your native content across media platforms in the same way as any other content. You can share directly from the location where you created the content, such as in your built-in phone camera, or through an app designed for that type of content. For example, you can use Instagram to share your photos to different networks.
You can also upload your content from your phone to the cloud with an app like Dropbox. Then you can access that content later when you need it elsewhere.
Newsfeeds
Sharing valuable, timely, relevant, and interesting information with both your friends and your market can be done very easily if you’ve organized your favorite sources of news.
Using an app like Feedly, you can create ‘feeds’ on different topics of interest. Add different website’s newsfeeds to the appropriate topic folder on Feedly whenever you find something new.
Then you can go into your Feedly app on your phone whenever you have a few minutes. Review the latest news and share it directly to different places online when you find something juicy.
Content Creation
“At the end of the day, a television, a computer, or a smart phone is just a device through which one can access content. The content itself is what matters, not the device.”
— Ray William Johnson, Blogger, Prolific Developer of Viral Content
Let’s say that you’ve got two fantastic steaks for dinner that are cooked exactly the same by the same chef. One of the steaks is served with sautéed asparagus spears, a seasoned baked potato with all the toppings that you like, and a generous house salad.
The other steak is thrown into a Styrofoam container, and you eat it in your car. The steaks will taste exactly the same, but one experience is worth far more than the other. Taken one step further, what if you were served the best steak in the whole world, but what you wanted and what you ordered was grilled salmon? Consider the power of the presentation.
Content is the backbone of any presence on the internet. Your content will mean the difference between your message being effective or meaningless. Your background doesn’t matter. If you want or need others to see your work, content is the key.
There is a multitude of ways to go about creating content. You will have likely settled into a method that best suits your interest. Are you using that method efficiently? Are you squeezing out the most potential for your content? Smart phones can help you realize these goals.
Blogging
These days people blog about everything. It’s true that anyone with a computer and an internet connection can now have a voice. What’s important for you is that your voice is not lost in the sea of the countless other voices.
There are many apps that make blogging from your smart phone a breeze. You can use the apps to create text copy, import images and videos, and create links to other blog posts or merchandise. You can use them to schedule when your next blog post is posted. You can also use them to update your SEO settings.
The WordPress mobile apps transfer your complete set of WordPress blogging tools to your smart phone. Write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and create new blogs all from your mobile device. Available for Android and iOS devices.
Creating Images
Smart phones are a great way to create images. The camera technology used inside smart phones has continued to get better. How you choose to use this technology can greatly impact your productivity.
Smart phones today make it effortless to capture high quality pictures. It is not uncommon for smart phones to feature cameras capable of capturing 12 megapixels or greater.
Being more productive sometimes means simply utilizing the tools that you have available. Here are some ways that cameras can be utilized to impact your productivity:
- Make price comparisons between retailers a breeze
- Take a picture of your to-do lists
- Easily capture receipts for major purchases/expenses
- Memorialize important meetings
- Scan your documents on-the-go
- Capture evidence such as boundary disputes or fender bender losses
Instagram is the perfect example of an image editor app that can also be used to share photos.
Creating Video
The same camera in smart phones responsible for creating high quality pictures can easily capture HD quality video. What’s more, you also have the capability today to stream live video directly from your smart phone. This can be a major benefit in terms of productivity when used properly.
- Capture adorable family moments quickly
- Video phone with loved ones near or far away using Skype or FaceTime
- Memorialize special events
- Dictate quick thoughts to yourself
- Record before and after video for accountability regarding home and auto repair and maintenance
- Record a demo of a product that you’re reviewing for your readers
Apps like Magisto allow you to take and edit video on your mobile.
Creating Graphics
Smart phones can be a great tool for creating quick, simple graphics for your pictures on the fly. They can then be directly uploaded to the internet via your method of choice.
Photo editors are readily available as apps for your smart phone. Lighting, borders, text, saturation, and many other effects can be manipulated with your phone. They can be an effective way to efficiently communicate your message.
A fun app to try is WordSwag to add text to your photos and create attractive graphics. It’s only for iOS, so try using InstaQuote if you’re an Android user.
Other Productivity Tasks
In addition to the tools we’ve listed there are amazing things you can do that are unique to smart phones. Utilizing these tools can help greatly with improving your productivity.
Need to find what movies are playing within a 20 mile radius? Ask your smart phone! Today you can literally communicate with your smart phone by talking to it. Both Apple’s Siri and Google’s Sherpa personal assistant apps take your spoken commands or questions and respond with relevant data combed from their search engines. This can help you speed up your decision making process while on-the-go.
Trying to get to where you’re going in record time? Use smart phone apps such as Waze or NeverLate to get information on the routes with the shortest delays in real time. You’ll discover where the traffic cops are hiding to boot!
And if you need someone to get you to where you’re going, just access your Uber app to find the nearest Uber ride.
Learning Activity:
- Review all the different ways you can use your smart phone to improve your productivity.
- Which ones are you using now? How could you use those better?
- Which ones would you like to try? Pick 3 that you’ll try right away.