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- Many of us spend waste time on our phones instead of using them to get things done.
- There are plenty of ways you can use your phone to actually boost your productivity.
- Here are 15 things you can do with your phone that can lead you to getting more done with your day.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
The very premise of owning a smartphone is that it makes you a better, more productive person.
Combining a medley of technologies into a single device — phone, messaging, navigation, music player, alarm clock, and more — should equip you for almost anything. Right?
Of course, that’s not the reality. Many of us spend too much time mindlessly staring at that tiny screen and not getting stuff done.
The good news is that your phone really can make you more productive — you just need to use it more thoughtfully.
Here are 15 ways you can noticeably increase your productivity with your smartphone.
Use your phone for better time management and task scheduling
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How good are you at prioritizing tasks and accomplishing your to-do list?
If you need some structure to how you approach your day, you might want to try your hand at one of the many common time management techniques that rely on scheduling blocks of time to accomplish tasks throughout the day.
The Pomodoro Technique, for example, is a popular strategy that breaks your day into 25-minute chunks. You can install a Pomodoro app like Focus Booster or PomoDoneApp, or skip apps entirely and simply use your phone’s timer to chunk up your day.
Use your phone’s search for anything and everything
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You probably waste a lot of time trying to find things on your phone, from apps and contacts to calendar entries.
But the built-in search tool (pull down from the top of the Home screen) can find all sorts of things for you more quickly than you can. There’s no need to find the calendar app, open it, and look for an upcoming appointment, for example, when you can go to it directly by searching for its name.
The same is true of contacts, email messages, text messages, apps, and web sites. If you have an iPhone, Spotlight Search is even more powerful than Android; it’s even able to do simple math without opening the calculator.
If you have an Android, install visual voicemail
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If you’ve never owned an iPhone, you may not know how liberating its built-in visual voicemail is.
Rather than needing to dial into your voicemail and listen to messages, iPhone users can see a list of their voicemails and choose which one to listen to with a tap.
You can get the same productivity boost on an Android phone though — most of the major carriers offer their own free visual voicemail app. You can install the app in the Google Play store for AT&T, T-Mobile, or Sprint. Verizon users can get it directly from Verizon.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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Source: Business Insider – feedback@businessinsider.com (Dave Johnson)