Even though more technology exists today to help us improve our productivity, the US Bureau of Labor reports that workplace productivity has actually dropped off of a cliff ever since 2007 – the same year that the first iPhone was released.

To think that there isn’t a connection between these two things would be foolhardy.

Smartphones and other mobile devices have definitely created some pretty distracting habits, especially at work. At the same time, these tools have so much potential – alongside other incredible technologies – to dramatically improve our productivity that it would be a big mistake to eliminate or ignore them.

Below we touch on five incredibly effective ways to improve productivity utilizing technology, making the most of everything tech has to offer to increase our output and efficiency – output and efficiency that wouldn’t have been possible without it!

Make sure you are leveraging the right tools in the first place

Every new piece of productivity tech is going to promise the moon and the stars when it comes to turning everything around, lighting a fire in you and in your employees or coworkers, and offering you the “next big thing” when it comes to productivity like the ledger nano s.

And while many of do that have power to deliver the goods, the cold hard truth of the matter is not every new piece of productivity tech is going to fit perfectly in your already existing workflow or business culture. You have to be sure that your choosing the right tools for the job, and that may be skipping over the new, hot productivity tech for slightly more established technology that “just works”.

Automate and systemize everything you can

According to Chad Otar, CEO of Excel Capital Management, and there is no greater piece of leverage in business today than automation, systemization, and scalability – and there’s no greater way to achieve those factors in the end by leveraging technology to help you with the heavy lifting.

The more you can automate and systemize your daily workflow or your business processes, the more your productivity is going to increase. Turning over this kind of work to machines that are lightning fast and incredibly consistent will always be more productive than having people handle these kinds of tasks individually on a willy-nilly kind of basis.

Also read: How to Convince Employees to Adopt New Technology

Keep open lines of communication

Traditional meetings are dreaded by just about everyone involved, but online meeting places and communication tools give everyone the opportunity to share updates and information with one another but also provide a whole host of other benefits that standard meetings never could.

For one, these messages are instantly recorded exactly as they are sent. There’s very little room for misinterpretation, very little room for forget fullness, and the tools that facilitate this kind of communication make it easy to immediately implement or follow up on the messages that are being shared.

Schedule EVERYTHING

If you are serious about improving your productivity so that you can get more out of the same standards 24 hours a day that everyone else has to play with you have to fall in love with scheduling and the power of your calendar.

Calendar applications (like Google Calendar, for example) interface with most every kind of application you can imagine and are instantly accessible on every device you’d like to use to improve your productivity. Run your day according to your schedule – doing your level best to account for every minute of work time possible – and you’ll find your productivity shoots right through the roof.

Utilize time tracking tools

This tip dovetails nicely with the scheduling tip shared above and combined that they may prove to be the most important of all the productivity tips we’ve included here in this quick guide.

The reality of life is that the only things that are improved are the things that are constantly measured and tracked. Everything else has the potential to slip through our fingers and slipped through the cracks, and the odds are pretty good you are either overestimating or underestimating the amount of time you have available and the amount of productive time you are putting in on a regular basis.

By tracking your time (utilizing any of the simple and straightforward time tracking tools out there right now) you’ll be able to better analyze how you spend your time already. You’ll get almost x-ray vision over your work day, but more importantly than that you will be able to see where you are spending the most amount of time as well as where your most productive time needs to be.

Chances are that right now you’re spending a lot of your most productive time on things that are anything but high leverage, and that your most high leverage efforts are having time necessary to complete them hijacked without you even noticing it.

By tracking your time you become a lot more conscious of how you spend your day. And that, of course, is going to tell you exactly how spent your life.

Use the tips and tricks above to help you leverage technology to guarantee that your time (the most valuable asset we have, and the only asset will never be able to get more of) is always invested wisely.

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