Consider incorporating tools that allow you to:

1. Increase your efficiency in time management

2. Optimize collaboration and knowledge sharing

3. Access consistent learning & skill development

4. Increase focus & reduce cognitive load

5. Improve data organization & retrieval

6. Achieve work-life balance & flow

7. Reduce your environmental impact

Consider the following steps:

1. Define your most pressing need (and start there)

2. Start small and build gradually (choose just 1 tool to try)

3. Look for intuitive, user friendly tools

4. Use All-In-One Options if possible (ex. Notion)

5. Choose tools that sync across your devices

6. Explore! Use free trials and plans to try out a new tech tool

7. Look for recommendations & reviews from friends

8. Focus on tools that minimize manual impact (work smarter not harder)

9. Be patient, there is often a learning curve

10. Reflect, Re-evaluate and Adjust your tech usage to ensure its working for you

Examples:

• Calendar Management

• Task Prioritization

• Project Management

• Focus & Deep Work

Choose a tool that aligns with the personal need or goal to improve your workflow.

The technology should enhance your productivity by streamlining processes and improving your workflow, not distracting or detracting from it.

What to look for?

• Clean interfaces with minimalist design

• Easy Navigation & Accessibility

• Integration with other tools you are already using

If you are choosing a tool for a team or your family, test the accessibility for all team members to ensure it works for the group and not against any member.

Flexibility in access is key to building a tool into your workflow.

Examples include:

• Setting recurring reminders

• Scheduling recurring meetings

• Automatic Email sorting

This can reduce the overall cognitive load and allow you to focus on the work you want to be doing and not remembering all the balls you are juggling.

Why?

This allows you to leverage these tools effectively, creating cohesiveness and reducing the need to switch between multiple platforms and apps.

For example:

• If your workplace using Google Workspace products, you can integrate trello or asana for project management and link to your google account to allow seamless integration of folders, emails, docs and calendar invites.

Choosing one system and spending time as a team familiarizing everyone will help streamline communication and collaboration.

Visual tools (ie. boards, timelines) can help teams visualize an entire project and filter or focus for their tasks. Audio tools (such as Notebook LM) can allow resources and data to be reviewed and accessed in different ways.

Flexibility, Adaptability and individualization are advantages to many technology apps and customizing the interface can you allow you to get the most of these tools.

• Too few and you may spend a lot of mental energy ensuring you dont miss important meetings or tasks.

• Too many and you are constantly being notified which can be fatiguing, and prevent deep work and flow.

What to do?

• Use notifications & alerts thoughtfully - think about what alerts will help reduce your cognitive workload and free up your mental space for the thinking and work you want to focus on

• Experiment with frequency & format (phone notifications, email notifications etc) to determine what works best for you.

For example:

• Turn off ALL email notifications (consider not even having email on your phone)

• Use calendar notifications with a 10mn warning

• Flag/Notify for an important deadline or task

Look for productivity tools that offer insights into how you are spending your time to see where opportunities lie for you. Use that information to adjust workflow and habits to improve your productivity and give yourself time.

• Gentle Prompts

• Gamification

  • Streaks

  • Badges

  • Leaderboards

This can help habit formation by encouraging regular use and cueing you to engage in whatever task you want to reinforce.

Some lessons learned:

DO NOT turn on notifications. If you can have times where you can pause your inbox do so.

DO NOT have your email on your phone. If you have to have it on your phone turn off notifications and consider keeping it off your home screen.

Touch every email as few times as possible.

Use the schedule send feature to allow you to batch your email work.

Use your away message when you are on a busy clinical block, away at a conference etc. This can allow you to mentally have some breathing room when you need to focus your attention elsewhere.

• Experiment with what type of organizational method works for you and your workflow but keep it simple.

• One app that can integrate across multiple platforms to improve workflow and is accessible on all your devices is important.

• If choosing an app for team project management, ensure everyone can access the platform and app without firewalls or institutional blocks.

AI has ramped this up, with emerging tools designed to help you work smarter, not harder and increase your effectiveness in scholarship, advocacy & community work, and education.

1. Calendly

2. Boomerang

3. Zoom Scheduler (Google Calendar)

4. Meetric

5. Motion

6. Reclaim.AI

1. Doodle

2. When2Meet

3. Embedded Meeting Schedulers (ie. Gmail, Zoom Scheduler)

4. HubSpot Scheduling

1. Boomerang

2. Grammarly

3. Inbox When Ready

1. Trello

2. Asana

3. Monday

4. Slack

1. ToDoist

2. Asana

3. Trello

4. Google Tasks

5. Apple Reminders

6. Notion

1. MindMeister

2. Google Workspace Applications

3. Shared Drives (ie. Box, DropBox)

4. Slack

5. Microsoft Teams

6. Miro

7. Canva

8. Whats App

A number of apps are available that allow you to do a time audit or tracker to see where your time is already being spent, as well as using timers to allow you to be effective and engage in deep work when its time to get things done.

1. Toggl Track

2. Forest App

3. Session (Mac)

4. Pomelo App

5. Focus Productivity Timer

Many different options exist including ones that incorporate game-based elements or are integrated into existing tools (ie. pausing your email inbox for a certain number of hours).

Apple offers "do not disturb" options that allow you to set up blocks on your notifications based on time blocks or location.

Some Apps to explore:

1. Freedom

2. LeechBlock NG

3. SelfControl (Mac)

4. Session

5. PawBlock

1. Open Evidence

2. MedEd Mentor

3. Notebook LM

4. Chat GPT