In this age of constant digital distraction, organizing and focusing on tasks is not always the easiest exercise to accomplish. I, for example, will probably check my Facebook, e-mail and Twitter at least a couple of times before I finish writing this article. Or at least, I would have, were I not using the incredibly useful and productive tools listed below.

Intended to help you organize, remember and execute your tasks as quickly and effectively as possible, these simple tools will serve you well in the battle against procrastination and help you to increase your productivity in the future.

Remember the Milk – http://www.rememberthemilk.com
As the name suggests, Remember the Milk is an online application designed to help you organize the little tasks that you would usually write on post-it notes or scraps of paper, such as remembering that ever-evasive milk.

Offering a minimal and easy-to-use interface, you can categorize tasks by type – such as ‘home’ and ‘work’ – and set individual details such as due date, repeat date and time estimate. Additionally, you can tag each task, a feature which becomes incredibly useful if you need to search through a vast back catalog of already completed assignments.

There is also hope for the forgetful among us and you can easily you can set-up reminders which notify you of your task via mobile phone, instant messaging service or e-mail.

Focus Booster – http://www.focusboosterapp.com

Employing the famous Pomodoro time management technique which breaks down periods of work into 25 minute intervals, Focus Booster is an application which is essentially times these stretches of work. The thinking behind it is that if you work solidly for 25 minutes, have a short break and then continue to work for another 25 minutes, you will get more done than if you just solidly worked through a long period of time. This is because frequent breaks supposedly improve mental agility.

If you can get on board with the Pomodoro theory, Focus Booster is available to download, or if you don’t fancy that, you can use a simple online version right in your browser.

LeechBlock – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock

A Firefox extension which allows you to block time-wasting websites, LeechBlock is the perfect tool for preventing procrastination. Whether your online vice is Facebook, Reddit or simply aimless browsing, you can set LeechBlock to impede your attempts to visit designated websites within a number of versatile time parameters.

At this point, cynics would no doubt hasten to point out the fact that you can disable Firefox extensions at any time and with no-one else to stop you from returning to your time-wasting ways, the tool is largely pointless. In order to combat this, LeechBlock allows you to password protect the application, so if you get a friend or colleague to set the password, then you should be sufficiently deterred from making the effort to disable it.

WriteRoom – http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom

A full screen word processing application, the purpose of WriteRoom is to eliminate the distracting environment of your cluttered desktop and ensconce you in a world where writing is your one and only focus.

Instead of responding to your e-mails and constantly checking to see if your followers have retweeted your latest musings, you can fully concentrate on the task in hand and immerse yourself in the huge, whiteboard sized canvas. Described by Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times as the “ultimate spartan writing utopia”, it takes minimal to a whole new level and will have the same elevation effect for your productivity too.

Buffer App – http://www.bufferapp.com

Rather than swamp your Twitter and Facebook feeds with article and website suggestions during your morning blog check or manually enter posts at regular intervals, BufferApp allows you to automatically update your account periodically throughout the day.

By adding pages to a Buffer queue, you can set them to post at regular time intervals, giving the impression of activity throughout the day and not concentrating updates too heavily in one period, a practice that could certainly lose you followers.

Another useful aspect of BufferApp is its ability to records statistics. In the case of Twitter, for example, you can see how many people your tweets reached, how many clicks it received and how many times it was retweeted. Statistics such as these can help you figure out which time of day is the most effective time to post your updates.

Suggestions?

If you have any suggestions of more tools that will aid your productivity and stave off the woes of procrastination, please let us know in the forum.