Productivity software tools for making your efforts really purposeful and smart

Productivity software tools are computer-based instruments which can be recognized in two ways:

• Business productivity software applications used to measure and report indicators on employee performance (in terms of quality, quantity, time, and other parameters);
• Productivity software tools for individuals – those who would like to improve the level of their efforts with better approaches;

These two definitions referring to productivity software applications both have the same underlying principles – they focus on the fundamental matters of working productivity (measuring input and output). In other words productivity software applications are the instruments used to control the resources inputted into the working process at the beginning (time, work, money, etc), and resources outputted (products measured in terms of impact, quality, quantity, etc). Let’s form up a brief features list of productivity software (it allows you to):

• Compose a plan of your efforts (work) – tasks, objectives, action map, so that you can know what work pieces and activities are supposed to bring you to the success. This capability enables you to:
  • Review your plan to get more productivity from optimizing and re-organizing it to serve the project’s critical path rather than secondary objectives;
  • Highlight risky areas where your productivity can be heavily hampered in a case of certain conditions and risks;

• Compose a plan of your resources (time, costs, etc) – it helps you to distribute the available resources over the working plan in order to reach the adequate balance between inputs of resources and outputs obtained from the effort (to get ideal productivity), or in other words you can:
  • Evaluate and understand if your plan is worth of realization at all;
  • Get more productivity with concentrating your resources at project’s critical path (sequence of the most important actions), avoiding thankless tasks, and mitigating all connected risks;

Let’s consider some productivity software examples:

VIP Task Manager is a client-server (multiuser) productivity software tool which is delivered in two editions. This is not free productivity software, but it is a popular commercial tool with productivity software free trial version and qualified support service:

• Standard edition – it is productivity software for small and medium teams which don’t need any rich functionality, but need to concatenate their efforts on the productivity fundamentals – time, tasks, project critical path, and priorities. With a help of this tool you can allocate project tasks over your workgroup to control their performance in real-time;
• Professional edition – it is an example of more advanced productivity software for small and medium business teams where people need to collaborate at shared projects and control their daily productivity in terms of time, costs, their inputs, outputs, etc. It provides you with three sharable interface modes to work at your tasks – Task List, Task Tee, and Calendar.