Using fancy tools to manage your email, task list and calendar can be a great way to increase your overall efficiency at work and in your life. But sometimes the very tools that are meant to make us more productive, actually hold us back from getting stuff done. Sounds familiar?

Here is the ultimate guide to identify your productivity tool sins and learn the strategies to really maximise your efficiency with technology.

Your Inbox

What NOT to do:

• Opening and reading your email without replying, deleting or having an effective system to process these emails later on.
• Checking your emails constantly throughout the day.
• Using your inbox like a to-do list.
• Wasting time writing the same replies over and over again.
• Desperately filtering for important emails in your over-flowing inbox.
• Failing to unsubscribe from newsletter that are not relevant for you anymore.

What to do:

• Process emails immediately: Whenever you open an email, deal with it instantly. Take care of urgent things right away, delete irrelevant things, archive interesting information in specific folders and use a tool like Boomerang to bounce emails back to your inbox in a few days for follow-up.
• Schedule dedicated time slots for attacking your inbox and systematically work through all your emails at once. Plan extra time for clearing your inbox before the end of the day or on Fridays. For the rest of the time, turn off email notifications entirely or use a tool like IFTT to send you a text message when you get an email from a specific email address (e.g. your boss, your investor or a high priority client).
• Separate your to-do list from your inbox to not fall into the urgent vs. important trap. Define your most important tasks pro-actively and prioritise them over random tasks from your inbox.
• Use templates for email replies that occur more frequently like customer service emails or partnership requests.
• Use an automatic filtering system like Gmail Tabs (Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums) to pre-select important emails for you. That way, you can be sure you are not missing out on any important messages and you can always go back later to check your favourite newsletters.
• Regularly use a tool like Unroll.Me to automatically identify email newsletters and mass-unsubscribe from them.

Your To-Do List

What NOT to do:

• Using different tools, notes and reminders to manage your to-dos.
• Randomly entering your to-dos to an endless list of tasks.
• Not kicking off things from your to-do list.
• Not syncing your to-do list with your calendar.

What to do:

• Stick to one single tool that meets your needs. Whether you are working with a physical notebook, an app like Wunderlist or Todoist or a more project based tool like Trello or Asana — stick to ONE TOOL and manage all your tasks from there. Invest some time to think about what you really need in terms of notifications and reminders, syncing across devices and with your calendar, sharing with other people or managing big projects on a day to day basis.
• Categorise and Prioritise your to-do list: Make different lists for different areas of your work and life. Then, drag those tasks to a separate list for each day or week according to their priority.
• Clean out your to-do list at the end of every day. At the end of each day, tap yourself on the back for your completed tasks and decide what to do with the remaining ones. Reflect on why you weren't able to get them done — maybe they are not that important after all? Delete tasks that became irrelevant. Then, set your to-do list for the next day. This way, you end the day with a clean slate and wake up with clarity the next morning instead of wasting time thinking about what to work on next.
• Check your calendar before you set your to-dos for the day to make sure you are prepared for any upcoming meetings and know how much time you got left for working on your own projects. Then, block out time for important tasks from your to-do list in your calendar to make sure you get them done and don't get carried away with random meetings, phone calls or requests.

Your Calendar:

What NOT to do:

• Using your calendar just for meetings.
• Using the same colour for everything in your calendar.
• Blindly accepting every calendar invite you get.
• Not accounting for buffer times in between calendar events.
• Not syncing your calendar across all your devices.

What to do:

• Use your calendar as a powerful scheduling tool. Put everything in your calendar. Block times for deep work, breaks, workouts, date nights, errands and evenings off and make a deal with yourself: what is in your calendar gets done, what's not in your calendar is not a priority. This forces you to actually estimate the time it takes to do certain activities and thus can be a great help for a more realistic and efficient time management.
• Use colours for different activities in your calendar. Pick a colour for deep work, meetings, exercise, breaks, errands and free-time. This allows you to get a quick overview of your schedule and detect any imbalances in your activities at one glance.
• Be intentional about accepting calendar invites. Being booked up by other people the entire day can be a killer for your productivity as well as a serious threat to your important projects. Instead, discuss meeting dates beforehand based on your schedule or let people book specific, pre-selected times in your calendar. The latter works with tools like Google Calendar or Calendly.
• Don't just schedule the actual activity, also schedule commuting times and buffer times. Moreover, schedule an extra hour of buffer at the end of the work day to wrap up things you weren't able to finish.
• Sync your calendar with all your major email accounts and across your devices. This will allow you to have an overview of your schedule wherever you go. If you are keeping your work and personal calendar separate, use one calendar to combine all events into one.

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