How to Use Your Smartphone as a Productivity Enhancer

There is no shortage of useful devices that a business could benefit from, but the most popular is undoubtedly the smartphone. As a communication tool, it is effectively unparalleled - you can use your device to conduct business and communicate from anywhere. However, this is neglecting many of the other abilities that make the smartphone a smart choice for your business productivity, especially when you’re mobile.

Alternate Communications
Sure, the ability to make and take calls on-the-go is spectacularly beneficial to business processes, but what if your needs aren’t communicated well by voice? What if your information will need to be referenced for hours to come… are your employees (or you, for that matter) able to retain lots of information for that long?

Probably not, which is why a smartphone is such a great communication tool--it isn’t limited to just voice. Information can be input and shared through many different outlets with these handy little devices, whether you choose to send an email or text, access a document in your company’s drive, or record instructions aloud that your employees can play back as they need.

It is important to remember that we now have plenty of means to communicate, and that our smartphones can handle them all, not just one.

Management
Any business will require no small amount of management to remain up and running, and this includes much more than the activities performed by “management.” For instance, when it comes to project management, many team members may need to have collaborative capabilities to go in and make changes at odd times and from odd places. Furthermore, in the interest of productivity, some employees may want to take a spare moment and arrange their upcoming day. If this impulse strikes them at home, their smartphone could very well allow them to do so.

Learning Tool
Of course, not all time spent productively necessarily has to be spent on a specific task. One great way to improve how you work in general, is learning better methods and strategies to do so. Smartphones are excellent learning tools, with access to plenty of materials that are delivered in a great variety of ways. Whether you read a quick blog post on your phone with your morning coffee, listen to a podcast during your commute, or squeeze in a quick video sometime during your day, you can learn new skills and strategies to use to benefit your business’ operations.

Organization
There is no question that even the smallest business is a fairly complex machine, filled with moving parts and interwoven tasks. As a result, keeping your business organized is a prerequisite to its success. Your smartphone will have a variety of tools and features that ultimately make this much easier, from calendars that integrate with other services and task lists to keep you on schedule, with access to cloud-based tools making it easier to manage and organize your company’s documents and files.

A smartphone essentially combines the communicative powers of a telephone with the access of the Internet and the capabilities of an assistant (which we’ll dive into more in a moment), so it only makes sense that its organizational tools would be one of its strongest offerings.

Personal Assistant
Who among us hasn’t dreamt of a personal assistant? While they may not be able to do laundry or feed your cat, the various assistants that smartphones feature are more than capable of offering a helping hand in quite a few situations. Need to make a quick call? Tell the Google Assistant to call a particular contact. Need to add a business meeting with your team to your calendar? Windows 10’s Cortana is on it. Want to set a reminder to start the laundry once you get home, and to feed Sir Fluffington promptly at 6:45? All doable with your smartphone, allowing you to focus on your other, pressing business (and personal) matters.

Establishing “Me” Time
How often are you trying to work on something, only to have your smartphone interrupt you with an “SOS” that really wasn’t, or another group chat that doesn’t currently pertain to you? Fortunately, the average smartphone has a few key features that help to eliminate these frustrations, as long as they are used responsibly: the capability to silence your ringer, and the nuclear option, enabling Do Not Disturb.

Some tasks just require you to take the interrupted time to complete them, and sometimes, this is impossible to do without effectively taking the source of interruptions away.

While you should always go back and catch up on what happened during your reserved period of uninterrupted productivity, some tasks are just too pressing and/or important to have extraneous concerns come butting in. While the customizations that a smartphone offers can be fun, sometimes it's better not to hear notification after notification, whether you picked the sounds or not.

How to Securely Eke the Most Productivity out of a Smartphone
Of course, being productive is one thing, and sacrificing your business’ security for the sake of productivity is quite another. That’s why, if you plan on allowing smartphones to be a part of your company’s toolkit, you need to ensure that your company’s security isn’t lacking as a result.

Directive can help you to leverage mobile devices in your business securely, with our mobile device management services. We can take you through the process of implementing MDM, and help you come up with a Bring Your Own Device Policy for your employees to follow. Call us at 607.433.2200 to learn more.