The 4 Digital Productivity Pillars to Tame Your Tech

What is your technology core?

All businesses rely on the ability to manage communication and information. It doesn’t matter how savvy your marketing is or how brilliant you are with the work you do for your people, if you are constantly looking for information, missing appointments or do not have a reliable path for your people to communicate with you, you will struggle.

The core of your technology is email, files, calendars, and contacts. These four areas are the foundation of everything else.

Email

The goal with email is to get through it, and respond to those who need responses, do what needs to be done, save what needs to be saved and delete what needs to be deleted.

In order to accomplish this goal, your email account needs to be in order and you need to be able to evaluate the messages in your inbox efficiently and effectively so that you know exactly what your people need from you. Email is still relevant in this social media age. Most people also have an email account no matter their preferred social platform.

Get clear with your email.

It is an excellent way for you to communicate detailed information that you and your people can refer to later. It is also a great way to follow up on a verbal conversation so everyone remembers what was discussed.

Check out this blog post about cleaning out your email inbox: Let’s Clear the Email Clutter

Files

The goal with files is to save what you need to save in a location and manner that is easy to find and retrieve when you need it and out of your way when you don’t.

It is so easy for files to become a jumbled mess of nonsense. They save themselves in weird locations and duplicate so easily that it becomes difficult to know which version is the file you need.

First, be encouraged that files do have a logic that they follow and you can use this logic to organize them with relative ease. Your first step will be to truly understand where your files are located on your computer or on a cloud drive. After you have a good understanding of how digital information is naturally organized you can make informed decisions about how to name your folders and files so you can find them easily.

Calendars

The goal with calendars is to know where you are supposed to be and when you are supposed to be there and to schedule meetings so that you are neither over nor under-booked.

You are one person with one body and unfortunately, you can only be in one place at a time. Everyone is so busy that we need a reliable and handy way to keep track of the things we need to do and when. More importantly, when an opportunity presents itself you want to know immediately if you can jump on it.

Your digital calendar can be organized in a way that protects your time. With shared calendars, you can keep track of other important schedules as well. A quick glance at an organized calendar can give you peace and confidence that you will not miss the treasured events of our life.

Check out this blog post about how you can color code your calendar so you can know “at a glance” how your time is arranged.: The Color Coded Calendar

Contacts

The Goal with Contacts is to connect with the right people in the right way at the right time, so you can stay top of mind for those who need you.

Our customers, clients, family, friends… our contacts are the most important part of our business and our lives. How we take care of our people has a direct impact on how successful we are. Your network of people is an extremely valuable asset to not only your business but also your life. We need our people.

To often our contacts are spread across many devices, papers, files, and systems. The first trick to organizing your people so you can care for them in a consistent manner is to choose a primary location for all your contact information. Today the most effective and robust location is within your primary email system. Within your email account, you have fields for not only your people’s email address but also their phone numbers, physical addresses and a notes field where you can document information you want to remember.

Check out this blog post about how your contacts are arranged within your email system and how you can also make sure you have access to everyone on your smartphone as well: Do You Know Where Your Contacts Are?

Once your core technologies are in order then social media, a customer relationship management program, an email marketing system and all the other cool things become so much easier to deal with. Don’t make things difficult for yourself and…

Don’t let your technology bully you!

See you around the Internet,
Nicole