How to be More Productive with Your Smartphone

Today's smartphone has a ton of computing power, enough to be a dynamic tool for modern workers. However, it can also be a major distraction. Listed below are a couple tips that will help you be more productive with your smartphone. 

Find the Right Apps

If you are like most of the rest of the world, you have all kinds of apps that you’ve downloaded on your phone. There are the normal apps like the email app, the browser, the app store app, and the messaging app. Then there are social media apps, games, productivity apps, dating apps, retail apps, and a variety of other apps that you don’t remember downloading as they have no purpose for you.

To use your smartphone as a productivity tool you will want to terminate most of the distractions. You can certainly still spend hours scrolling through the app stores looking for the right apps, but we’re guessing if you are making a conscious effort to use your smartphone for productivity, that you won’t be doing that. By eliminating a lot of the extra apps you currently have, you will be able to focus on the apps that remain, the ones that allow you to be productive.

Also, once you have the apps you want on the device, you then will want to arrange the apps in a manner that makes it simple for you to navigate to the apps that you need. For example: you can group social media apps together to keep them in one place rather than have them strewn about the device. This organization will come in handy when you are looking for the apps you need.

Disable Certain Notifications

Notifications are very useful, until they are a horrible distraction. Turning some of the more useless notifications off won’t hurt you, but leaving them on will hurt your ability to be productive. Turning off mobile notifications for your social media accounts (unless you need them for work) and your remaining mobile games is a solid practice that will cut down on distractions.

Update Software Regularly

The smartphone is being increasingly targeted as an attack vector to get onto business networks. Because of this, you will want to ensure that your mobile OS is updated regularly and that the applications you depend on get their patches and updates. Usually, this process is handled automatically, but it’s smart to be sure to check. If you don’t use the app anymore, just get rid of it! 

Smartphones will just become a bigger part of business in the future. For more great tips and tricks subscribe to our Macro Systems blog.