Matthew Royse — December 26, 2016 Follow @mattroyseThe right productivity tools at work can help you save time so you can complete an important project with a pressing deadline. They also help you make sure you can leave work on time so you have a better work-life balance. And they can help you create an outstanding presentation that propels you to get a promotion.
Whether you want to convert PDFs to PowerPoint slides, find out how much time you spend time on things, or create cool graphics for your marketing efforts, these 15 tools can help you improve your productivity in the workplace.
1. PDF to PowerPoint Converter
Creating PowerPoints from scratch are tough, especially when you want to insert PDFs into the slides. With this converter, you can change PDFs into PowerPoint slides. Just upload the PDF and the file will be converted online. If you are worried about privacy, all files you upload are deleted from the tool one hour after the conversion.
2. RFP Monkey
This is an automation solution to help you respond faster and better to a request for proposal (RFP) or a request for information (RFI). It helps you reuse, collaborate, categorize, and even search your knowledge base of information. You are able to track project assignments of team members and see the progress of RFPs or RFIs.
This tool helps you capture screenshots for all or a part of a web page. You can add annotations; put in comments; blur sensitive information; store and organize images by project; get feedback from your colleagues on screenshots and designs; and collaborate with friends and colleagues. You can even add it as an extension to your Chrome web browser.
4. SnagIt
This website is similar to Awesome Screenshot, SnagIt helps you capture images on your computer with a couple of clicks. You can customize your screen captures with its markup tools. You can also create quick videos by recording your screen and then narrate and trim them. You can get SnagIt on your Android and iOS phone with the Fuse app so you can send photos and videos from your mobile device to your SnagIt editor.
This online image editor can help you re-size and crop images via your web browser. You can apply a quick fix to the image, add creative effects, and add borders.
6. Tomato Timer
This mobile-friendly tool helps you take breaks using the flexible Pomodoro Technique – a time management method to break down work into intervals (typically 25 minutes in length separated by short 5 minute breaks). These intervals are called pomodoros: the Italian word for tomatoes. After four pomodoros, it is suggested you take a longer 10-minute break. With this timer, you have the ability to pause or reset the timer, be notified on your desktop with audio notifications, and change the alert sound and volume. If you are looking to add more breaks to your workday, this is the tool for you.
7. Toggl
This tool is a time tracker application. When you click the Toggl button, the timer begins and you track the time it takes to complete various tasks. It provides you with reports to show you much time you spent on different projects. You can do all of this through your web browser or you can install it on your desktop.
8. Rescue Time
This tool is similar to Toggl but with more bells and whistles. It shows you the hours of the day that are your least/most productive and your best and worst days of the week/month/year. You can install it on your computer to track what you spend the most time on.
This website helps you find out your strengths. Do you know what you do best every day? Most likely, you probably don’t. This test helps you find out your preferred way of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
10. Email Future
This tool helps you send yourself emails in the future. Whether it’s a reminder email in half hour or a message to your future self in 5 or 10 years, it is a great way to remind yourself of important dates (birthdays, anniversaries, sporting events, when concert tickets go on sale, project due dates) or remind yourself to buy things at the grocery store. You can send yourself helpful links you find on the internet or send yourself an email about a list of goals you want to accomplish this year or where you want to be in life in 5, 10 or 15 years from now.
11. Content Audit Tool by Kapost
A content audit can be time-consuming process but important to knowing what content you have on your website(s). It is a critical part of an effective content marketing strategy. Kapost has simplified and automated the process with this free content audit tool. It crawls your website to categorize content by type, publish date, persona, author, and theme.
12. List.ly
We all love lists. Some people love to create lists of their favorite things. If you are blogger and you want to curate a list, this is the tool for you. It provides you with a list format that is interactive and engaging for your readers.
Want to know how well your content reads? This free online readability calculator grades your content on a numerical scale (0 to 100). It tells your character count, syllable count, word count, sentence count, characters per word, syllables per word, and words per sentence.
14. Social Media Graphics by Canva
This tool helps you design cool graphics for social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram. You get access to more than 100 layouts. Open Canva, choose a layout for a specific social media channel, upload your own photos or stock images, fix the images, edit text, and then save it.
15. Pablo by Buffer
Similar to Canva, Pablo is a cool tool to help you create engaging images for social media networks. This tool does not require a sign-in and no design experience is needed. You just type in text (they have 130 inspirational quotes to choose from), an image as a background from your photos or from professionally-looking photos at UnSplash. Then, you can share the image via Twitter or Facebook or add it to your Buffer queue.
What productivity tools would you add to this list?
An earlier version of this post appeared on Knowledge Enthusiast.
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