We are very fortunate to live in an age where there is a plethora of digital tools available to help us to complete a wide array of tasks in our personal and professional lives. Hole (2017) states that there are three broad categories associated with digital productivity:
Management and organisation of tasks
Communication and collaboration
Creating and Organising notes
I was recently asked by a colleague to share the digital tools that I use on a daily basis to help me in both my professional career and my academic studies as a part-time doctoral student. Part-time doctoral students have to cope with many pressures that are exerted upon them (Gardner & Gopaul, 2012) and having effective information management skills will help to alleviate some of the potential causes of stress (Yousaf et al., 2016).
To structure this post, I will divide the digital tools that I discuss into the categories of hardware and software.
Hardware
I have used a wide array of different devices as my daily work machines over the years, including Windows, Chromebooks, and Apple products. At the time of writing, I use the following pieces of hardware outlined in Table 1 in both my professional and academic productivity tasks.
Table 1
Productivity Hardware
| Apple MacBook Pro | The schools that I serve have a mixture of Windows and Apple devices. I have opted to use a Macbook as my main device as I can use multiple operating systems. | https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/ |
| External Monitors | I have two 27" external monitors that I hook up to my MacBook at my desk. I cannot stress how beneficial this has been and I now find that my productivity is adversely affected when I need to resort back to the laptop screen only. I'd highly recommend this set up. | https://www.amazon.ae/gp/product/B07FKH79XM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 |
| Apple iPad Pro (+ Accessories) | I use this device on a daily basis for taking meeting notes as well as to annotate academic journals. Coupled with a Paperlike screen protector, Apple Pencil, and keyboard, this is a game changing device for productivity. I hope iPadOS includes support for extending desktops in future updates. When this happens, I may be able to replace my MacBook with this device. | https://www.apple.com/ipad/ |
Software
Over the years I have explored a wide variety of different software applications. The main applications that I currently use in my digital productivity workflows are outlined in Table 2. It is pertinent to note that this is not the entire list of the applications that I use on a daily basis but I would class them as my core set.
Table 2
Productivity Software
| Microsoft Office | I have access both to an education account supplied by my education group/district, and I have also purchased a personal subscription to Office 365. | https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-365 |
| Microsoft OneNote | This application is part of the Microsoft Office suite, but is also available for free across all devices. I use this application daily to take all my meeting notes. | https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-365/onenote/digital-note-taking-app |
| LiquidText | I use this application on my Macbook and iPad to annotate and analyse digital texts. | https://www.liquidtext.net/ |
| Miro | A powerful collaboration software that I use to brainstorm and manage projects. | https://miro.com/ |
| Canva | An amazing application for creating digital assets such as infographics, presentations, and videos. They offer a free education account as well. | https://www.canva.com/education/ |
So there you have it. I hope this overview has been useful and if you would like any further information on the technologies outlined in this post, please feel free to drop me a comment below.
References
Gardner, S. K. & Gopaul, B. (2012). The part-time doctoral student experience. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 7, 63-78. https://doi.org/10.28945/1561
Hole, A. (2017, July 18). Digital productivity for work, study and life. University of Sussex. https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/tel/2017/07/18/digital-productivity-work-study-life/
Yousaf, S. U., Usman, B., & Akram, M. (2016). Exploring the causes of stress and coping with it amongst doctoral level students: highlighting the importance of information collection and management. Pakistan Journal of Information Management & Libraries, 18(2), 19-39.