This New Year is a perfect time for re-examining your creative side. A portion of getting the work to life balance right has to do with completing your work on time or in many cases before time. You can consider some easy changes this year in the workflow to help you in achieving this. One of the things you can do for improving your creativity is re-examining the toolkit to check out if any new ones can be added. Here are some tools to help you become more productive and creative.
- Panda
Are you required to spend a lot of time each morning going through various websites looking for inspiration? It is a good idea to stay up to date with the latest developments in the field of technology and design, however; there is another simpler and efficient way of doing it. It describes itself as your homepage for reaching your favorite sites. Panda is a free and simple newsreader and it brings together all the things you need on a single page. It saves you from having to go through various sites for inspiration. It is a terrific place to begin your day with morning coffee.
- Forest
Although Forest is a bit of an odd tool however it is highly recommended to get it. When you are looking to forget about your smartphone and focus on work this app helps you in activating a timer. As the timer is in ON condition it will grow a virtual tree. In case you succumb to the temptation and take a look at your smartphone, this tree will die. It also provides a free Chrome extension that allows you to enjoy the benefits of the desktop. It can also block certain sites such as Facebook when the timer is running. The app can be used for planting trees in real life as well.
- Automate
When you are looking to become more creative and are looking to spend a lesser amount of time on repetitive tasks get Automate. This tool can help in completing most of the mundane tasks for you. All you need to do is tell it that after one thing is completed this next assignment should be undertaken. For instance, when an email gets tagged “To do” there should be a Trello card developed. You can connect more than 100 apps and it is possible to create one-to-one and multi-app workflows. You can use the free version at the beginning that allows 250 actions every month.
- Microsoft video indexer
You can also display your creativity with videos and share your creation with your family. In such cases, you might want to think about how to send large videos so you make it easier for yourself. In the year 2017, there was a flurry of tools that arrived in the market with added AI capabilities. One of them was Microsoft Video Indexer. It can be used for analyzing your videos. You may use it for detecting when a scene on the video changes or when text appears in the video. The tool can understand spoken words well and can produce audio transcripts. All these possibilities will appeal to the people producing a large number of videos.
- Photoshop curvature pen tool
The year 2017 saw Adobe release their latest update for Photoshop CC version 19. The biggest news related to the release was the addition of a new tool to this immensely popular software for making the drawing of curved lines simpler. This tool can be found under the Pen tool on the Tools panel. The Curvature Pen Tool allows you to click for adding points. Then it creates curves between them automatically. It is possible to push and pull various sections of the curves for modifying them.
Conclusion
Some of these tools will work nicely with creative and innovative people. If these tools can be combined effectively with the tasks you are trying to accomplish they can make a massive difference to individuals and teams to achieve a lot more and quickly. The question you need to ask yourself is, should I invest in them? Are they as good and helpful as described here? Yes, they are.
