10+ Ways to Increase Your Productivity At Work & At Home When you’re trying to meet personal and/or professional goals, one of the first things you evaluate is your productivity. Are you managing your time well? Are you checking off items on your to-do list? Or do you find yourself falling behind? If so, this article’s for you. Discover low-effort ways to boost your productivity – whether you’re working from home or heading to the office. How to Increase Productivity at Work Figure out your productivity patterns. Don’t multitask. Be accountable. Break up large tasks. Block off your calendar. Use productivity apps. Ways to Increase Productivity at Home Limit distractions. Stick to a routine. Prioritize breaks. Set up your environment. Have a designated workspace. How to Increase Productivity at Work 1. Figure out your productivity patterns. Just because the average work day is between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. doesn’t mean those are the hours in which you do your best work. Some of us focus best in the early morning before the sun is even up and some of us are night owls. The first thing you should do when working on your productivity is first to...

Reducing Busy Work: Tips & Tools for Marketers The average marketer spends almost a third of their time completing repetitive tasks. Marketers already have enough responsibilities — and can't afford time mismanagement on busy work. Marketers should spend their time driving company growth and visibility, — and in this post, we'll give you our best tips and tools to help you minimize your time doing busy work and center your real priorities. Busy work prevents marketers from focusing on the more important or urgent tasks like working on the next big campaign, strategizing, or content creation. Luckily, we know ways to cut down busy work so marketers can get back to productive projects. Tips for Reducing Busy Work 1. Determine how you'll prioritize your workload. Chances are you have more than one type of deliverable if you're a marketer. Take the time to analyze and prioritize which parts of your job duties are most important to least as a general framework. Focus on the most critical or time-bound tasks first, making the busy work seem less tedious when you get to it and giving you designated time to address it. Pro Tip: Avoid the myth of multitasking. Otherwise, you risk jumping from project to project without finishing notable work, thus extending the time spent on busy work. 2. Create a routine with daily to-do lists. Making a to-do list is easy, but adhering to one is not. Marketers should carve out time at the beginning of...

15 of the Best Productivity Blogs To Read Staying productive is a goal many of us have, but finding a strategy that works can be challenging. We can also have certain periods where staying focused isn’t an issue, but others where it can feel impossible to stay on task. This is why reading about productivity is helpful, especially when the content helps you develop your own tactics for dealing with it. Read on to discover a list of productivity blogs featuring high-quality information and strategies you can adopt to get over the productivity hump. Top Productivity Blogs 1. HubSpot Blog The HubSpot Blog features various articles on productivity, from tips from experts on their own best practices to lists of tools that can help you be more productive. You can also download a free productivity guide that will help you learn more about productivity and even prioritize your tasks and projects. Recommended Read: 5 Surprising Research-Backed Tips That Will Boost Your Team's Productivity 2. Ali Abdaal Ali Abdaal uses his experience as a doctor and studying for school to write his blog, The Ultimate Guide to Productivity. In his posts, he talks about what it means to be productive and how people can achieve their versions of productivity with the tools they already have. Recommended Read: The 2-minute productivity rule 3. Thrive Global Entrepreneur Arianna Huffington is the founder of Thrive Global, a site that features productivity solutions that reference technology, science, and behavioral psychology. Recommended Read: 5 tips on...

Why Integrated Productivity Tools Matter for the Future of Work, According to HubSpot's CMO As marketers, we know first-hand the importance of using effective software. Powerful tools enable marketing teams to increase the quality and timeliness of their marketing efforts. Consider, for instance, how project management software can help you coordinate cross-functionally and ensure all team members have visibility into the tasks required to get a campaign off the ground. Leveraging the right tools also enables you to determine whether your marketing efforts are working. A CRM that integrates with a project management tool can empower each team member to become a better, more data-driven marketer. Best of all, the right integrations help to ensure your organization isn't duplicating work and wasting time. In challenging economic times, it's never been more critical for business leaders to avoid costly duplication efforts. In 2022, one out of every five businesses reported they pivoted from their established plan due to the potential recession. Supportive, integrated tools can ensure your team is remaining efficient even when you need to shift course. Effective tools matter greatly for your business' bottom line. And as businesses approach the new world of hybrid or remote-first working, it's never been more essential for your teams to use powerful technology to remain connected, in-sync, and effective. Today, we're announcing an exciting new partnership between HubSpot and ClickUp, a cloud-based collaborative work platform. Let's explore why this partnership is valuable, and how I believe it can help our customers scale their...

How One HubSpotter Created a Framework to Reduce Meeting Fatigue This post is a part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal thought leadership series through which we extract lessons from experiments conducted by our very own HubSpotters. A few months ago, I came to a startling realization: My job is meetings. Maybe you can relate. From morning to night, I spend my time jumping from Zoom call to Zoom call. I race to grab a snack in the two minutes I'm afforded in-between calls, and I'm mentally exhausted by the end of the day. It's a struggle to decompress before spending time with friends and family. And, equally challenging, the amount of meetings I have takes away from my ability to get my work done. I'm Chris Saly — an Engineering Lead at HubSpot. As an engineer, my day job was code. Sure, we needed meetings to discuss things and stay updated as a team, but the main mechanism and value of my job was the quality and reliability of the code I produced. Now, the primary value of my job is talking to others. Whether it's as a mentor, being involved in tactical decisions, or helping set a strategic vision, most of these goals are communicated through meetings. However, there are some very real consequences to my role as an EL. Among other things, my meeting-heavy life was taking its toll on my mental health, relationships, and workplace productivity. I knew something had to change. Here, I'll show you...

The 7 Best Music Playlists for Productivity, According to Science Not long after I first started at HubSpot, I was welcomed with a fresh pair of orange, noise-canceling headphones. At the time, I had no clue that these headphones would carry me through many long work days and some of the deepest, darkest levels of writer's block. Over three years later, they are truly the gift that keeps on giving. You see, for me, listening to music while working is the secret to my productivity. All it takes is the right Beyoncé track, and I go from idle to uber productive. (Seriously, it works like a charm.) The trouble is, finding the perfect playlist isn't always easy. With endless streaming music possibilities at my fingertips, it can be hard to nail down just the right tunes to get the wheels turning. So, I did what we do best around here — a little research. As it turns out, there are a ton of studies that explore the influence of specific types of music as they relate to your productivity levels. To help you find just the right mix, we've sourced and curated seven Spotify playlists designed with specific studies in mind. Whether you're into Mozart or Chance The Rapper, we're confident that there's something on this list that will do the trick. Note: Some of the playlists contain tracks with explicit language that might not be suitable for the office. 7 Science-Backed Office Music Playlists for Productivity 1. Classical...

The 9 Best Free Email Accounts and Service Providers of 2020 You need it for networking, job recruitment, downloading resources, transferring files, setting reminders, meeting with colleagues, and so much more. Even with the rise of office chat platforms, you still depend on email for a surprising number of things. But unfortunately, not every email service is completely free. And even the free ones might not be the easiest to use or have all the features you need. It can be a challenge to find an email service provider at no cost that balances the right features with usability. To help make your search easier, we put together a list of the different types of email accounts you can set up, followed by the nine best email service providers you can host your account on right now for free. Types of Email Accounts There are two main types of email service providers to choose from: email clients and webmail. When you use your provider to access your email from a different device or location online, you can use one of three major email protocols to do so: POP3, IMAP, and Exchange. Let's briefly go over these different types of providers and protocols. Email Clients Email clients are software applications that you install onto the computer itself to manage the email you send and receive. To access this email, the client interacts with a remote email server. Email clients you've likely heard of include Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, and...

7 Best Link Shorteners to Shorten that URL Trying to convince people to click on a long, jumbled link is almost as bad as a door-to-door salesman trying to sell people financial services. If your audience sees a link they perceive to be spammy in one of your social media posts, they’ll do the digital equivalent of slamming the door in your face -- scroll past it. To avoid being perceived as spammy or sloppy when you have a legitimate link to share, check out our list of the seven best link shorteners that’ll clip your links into clean, consistent, and clickable URLs. What are the benefits of using link shorteners? Using link shorteners can benefit your brand in three main ways: When you post long links on social media, it can look like spam or deter users from clicking on something they don't recognize. In particular, adding tracking parameters to your links can result in URLs that look long and confusing to someone who's unfamiliar with typical link tracking practices. Link shorteners can prune spammy-looking links into clear and concise links. Many link shorteners also let you track each of your link’s performance and analytics, which can help you understand which pieces of content perform best on specific platforms. Every social media network limits the amount of characters you can include in your posts. Twitter and LinkedIn have the shortest character limits at 280 and 700 characters, respectively, so if you need to squeeze a link...

From Coffee Shops to Cat Videos: 13 Unexpected Productivity Hacks That Actually Work Recently, a friend of mine asked me how my day was. "Busy, but productive," I replied. But what did that even mean? I suppose what I'd really meant was that all I did was work: I got to work early, worked through lunch, broke for dinner, and then proceeded to sign back online to wrap a few things up after that. And now that I think about it, I barely even moved.  Many of us have this distorted idea of productivity where the more hours you put in, the more work you put out. The less you socialize during the day, the more work you put out. The less you move during the day, the more work you put out.  Trouble is, that's not entirely true. In fact, countless studies have proven that some of the things we might think of as "a waste of time" -- preparing and eating a healthy breakfast, watching a kitten video, taking a midday run -- actually boost our productivity by leaps and bounds.  To help put this idea in perspective, check out the following counterintuitive productivity hacks. Sure, they may sound a little strange, but don't let that deter you from trying them for yourself.  13 Unexpected Productivity Hacks That Actually Work 1. Build your schedule around your energy levels. Each person has their own unique biological schedule called a circadian rhythm. This rhythm makes you tired at night and keeps you awake during the...

A Brief History of Productivity: How Getting Stuff Done Became an Industry Anyone who’s ever been a teenager is likely familiar with the question, "Why aren’t you doing something productive?” If only I knew, as an angsty 15-year-old, what I know after conducting the research for this article. If only I could respond to my parents with the brilliant retort, "You know, the idea of productivity actually dates back to before the 1800s." If only I could ask, "Do you mean 'productive' in an economic or modern context?" Back then, I would have been sent to my room for "acting smart." But today, I'm a nerdy adult who is curious to know where today's widespread fascination with productivity comes from. There are endless tools and apps that help us get more done -- but where did they begin?  If you ask me, productivity has become a booming business. And it's not just my not-so-humble opinion -- numbers and history support it. Let's step back in time, and find out how we got here, and how getting stuff done became an industry. What Is Productivity? The Economic Context Dictionary.com defines productivity as “the quality, state, or fact of being able to generate, create, enhance, or bring forth goods and services.” In an economic context, the meaning is similar -- it’s essentially a measure of the output of goods and services available for monetary exchange. How we tend to view productivity today is a bit different. While it remains a measure of getting stuff done,...