Getting to zero inbox has always been a dream. With the rampant increase in the usage of the apps, these notifications have multiplied. So we waste most of our time spent online, on browsing through a circle of all the apps and our email. Other than getting zero inbox, we also have to deal with messages/notifications in other apps like your to-dos, CRM, project management tools, etc.

And ‘Getting Things Done‘ becomes complexly managed and inefficient, which contradicts with the fact that we are using apps, to work in a smart and efficient way. So the question is, how we can get things done, in the age of apps? – We would like to recommend you following 5 steps, that will help you make the most of your available time, in the efficient manner.

5 Steps To Getting Things Done In The Age of Apps!

With these 5 steps, we intend to de-clutter your workflow, with the popular productivity and project management apps.

1. Capture

Our day begins and ends with emails. And it’s the primary source of all the work notes, meetings, events, and updates. So, capturing the essential information from these emails, is our big first step towards ‘Getting Things Done’!

So every time you start reading your email and want to add your tasks to the notebook or a note taking app like Evernote. But rather than opening the app, you can use this tool called Augment, which lets you capture the ideas directly into the Evernote. And as you can see in following screenshot, we’ve added a note directly from your email and saved a considerable amount of time for capturing the notes.

2. Clarify

Once you’ve got off the ’emails to capturing’ phase, bringing clarity to them will help you process the information and understand it. This is a kind of filtering process, where you place your tasks and ideas into a relevant context or apps, that will give you a picture of what your day looks like.

3. Organize

One of the most crucial steps in our getting things done workflow is to ‘Organize’. This is where even the most experienced professionals fail to organize, just because their information resides in multiple apps and it is painstaking to manage all of these.

Let’s consider a scenario, where you get a mail from a user with a technical query or a bug. You might want to move into Asana or Trello, where your tech support team can resolve it. Instead of hassling with multiple tabs you can use Augment to move this info to your project management tool straight from your Gmail.

Apart from Trello, Asana, and Evernote, Augment also supports tools like Google Calendar to add events or file sharing platforms like Dropbox.

4. Review Frequently

So far, we have captured our ideas, filtered them, and organized them, with merely a few minutes. But we have not actually worked at any of those, so the last two steps are as follows.

Before we focus on getting over with the tasks one by one, let’s review them. Not just at the end of capturing ideas, but you should review your daily plan as often as possible. Keep a track of what is getting done and what is pending.

Sometimes it might get overwhelming if you keep looking at this constantly. The trick is to find the right frequency – where it is not overwhelming nor a lenient review system. Having a fixed frequency, makes it efficient not just for you, but with all other who have dependency over you or your tasks.

5. Engage

The fifth and the last step in the process is ‘Engage’. Now that we have our day plan ready & reviewed, we can give the maximum focus to our actual work. We do not have to open other apps, not even another tab in the browser. Just look at your day plan, and every task will be achieved exactly as you’ve planned it.

I hope these steps have helped you focus more on to your work than browsing through multiple apps, tools, and tabs. If you have any doubts, questions or suggestions, please write to me in the comments box below or tweet to @amolwagh for the direct conversation!