Garima Behal
July 4, 2022
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6 min
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Need a personal assistant who stays on top of your work as well as brings order to your personal life?
You’re not the only one!
Adulting is messy. The Internet goes as far as to say: Adulthood is like looking both ways before crossing the street and then getting hit by an airplane.
As you aim to strike the forever elusive balance between your personal and professional lives, it may feel like life is just a series of putting out fires.
Even if that’s true, you can still keep things from burning to the ground, without running out of water, or more importantly, time.
Your link management system can act as the competent assistant you need and it can do wonders for your personal productivity.
Why do you need personal link management
It’s easy to understand the value of link management tools for an organization working with thousands of links everyday.
But when it comes to personal productivity, there are already tons of productivity systems out there ranging from the simple Pomodoro and Time-Blocking techniques to the more technically nuanced Getting Things Done (GTD) and Eisenhower Matrix methods.
Why should you rely on link management, then?
We think a URL management tool can help you make the most of any personal productivity method you wish to adopt.
It can be the link (pun intended) that brings disjointed pieces of your life together. And it can set you on course to achieve the loftiest of your goals.
Here’s a sneak peek into how you can plan, organize, and manage your life using a good link management tool.
Plan
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
We’ve all heard these famous words by the former US President, Abraham Lincoln.
On the path to personal productivity, planning is almost as important as execution. It asks you to take a stock of where you are, figure out where you want to be, and make a roadmap to get there using the time and resources you have available.
A link management platform ties these three steps together. It can accelerate your personal productivity with the help of features designed to maximize your valuable time and cut down on repetitive and/or duplicate tasks.
Creating short, intuitive links to replace long and messy URLs
You can start your productivity journey by keeping a daily record of your tasks and habits in a note-taking app. Bullet-journaling is a great note-taking format to capture your day in a few words and distill the key takeaways from it. This will help you find out what you’re getting right and where you need to do better.
Recommended reading: 8 best note-taking apps made for your iPad in 2022 (free & paid)
Your daily records can go into a monthly digital notebook which feeds into a yearly digital notebook. Now, each of your daily records will be a virtual page with its own URL. That’s 365/366 URLs in a year.
Add to that the 12 URLs of your monthly notebooks and it’s clear you’d need a link management tool that can let you open the journal entry from your vacation last year, for example, without needing to make your way through a mess of URLs.
If you had a short link for the page with this entry, say x/15May2021 instead of a URL you don’t remember, you could do that in an instant. A link manager would make this possible for you. It can help you relive milestone moments without jumping through hoops.
Grouping links together into folders for easier access
As you make it a habit to do this, don’t forget the next step in the process — setting goals and defining exactly where you want to be.
These goals can be as short-term as your to-do lists in a task management app. Or as long-term as buying a house or taking an international family vacation a few years from now.
No matter which apps you use to set your goals, you can use a link management tool to bring them together in one place and view them in a common dashboard. URL folders or URL collections will let you group your goals by their nature and timeline, for easy access and review.
Once your goals are in place, the last step in the planning process is to actually create a plan for achieving them.
You may resort to creating checklists, preparing budgets, and outlining the steps required to accomplish the things you want. Rather than keeping them scattered across multiple apps, a link management system would ensure that your plan documents go together with your goals and create a database-like system from which retrieving, reviewing, and editing information is a piece of cake.
After all, as we grow and evolve, so do our goals and plans.
Editing your source documents without compromising their links and vice-versa
With a link management tool, you’ll also have the flexibility to update your source documents, say your monthly goals for September 2022, without needing to rename the short link, x/sept-22-goals.
The opposite is also possible. You can keep the list of goals from September 2022 in the original document intact and rename the link to x/oct-22-goals if your goals are entirely unchanged for the next month.
Organize
If life is an episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S, some of us are Rachel — frequently misplacing (borrowed!) things, never quite knowing where what is, and struggling with a general sense of self-inflicted chaos.
But then, some of us are Monica. We go everywhere with a label marker, at least three different classification systems battling for supremacy in our minds, and a sense of comfort from knowing that our affairs are in superlative order.
We are pretty confident that many in the second category are using link management tools to organize their lives.
If you wish to take care of what’s important without breaking into a sweat, you should definitely invest in a link manager.
By creating memorable and searchable short links to your essential documents, you can access them on the go without losing precious seconds as well as your peace of mind. Most link management tools will give you not one but multiple ways to search for what you need, instantly.
Finding the right information, blazingly fast
Consider x/finance, a secure folder with links to all your financial information where you can save your
- bank account details: x/finance/accounts
- monthly household budget spreadsheet: x/finance/house-budget
- investment spreadsheet: x/finance/investments
Even if you didn’t remember the individual documents, you could simply search for the folder and get the right piece of information at your fingertips.
Or imagine you could tag every copy of the health insurance policy of your family members with #insurance. The next time you were at a hospital, all you’d need to do is search the dashboard of the tool for #insurance and it would show you all the policy details without wasting precious time.
Now extend the same principle to your id docs, your reading-list, your personal wiki, your favorite playlists, your list of passwords, and virtually everything else that lives inside a link.
If we were the link management tool of your choice, we’d probably say, you’re welcome.
Recommended reading: Why OSlash
Manage
To manage something is to be in charge of something.
And we believe you can manage your life far better if you start managing your links better.
In an age of infobesity, devoting yourself to your personal projects while working can be challenging. Each project you work on — getting fit, making time for hobbies, having a side hustle etc. — would only add to the mountains of information you need to keep a track of everyday.
Maintaining a balance
With a link management tool, you can spare yourself the headache of manually separating your personal and professional life. A good tool will let you create multiple workspaces to systemize the process.
You can club the short links to your personal documents in a different workspace than the one you may be using for work.
x/fitness-tracker, x/diet-chart, x/sleep-monitor, x/guitar-lessons, x/chess-games would be short links meant just for you, in your one-person workspace.
You can create a second workspace for collaboration with a group of family members or relatives or friends who want to contribute to your side-hustle. A link management tool often automates the sharing of short links for you, saving you one additional but inevitable step in the collaboration process.
x/prospects, x/clients, x/contracts would then be accessible to you as well as your side-hustle partners.
And of course, your professional workspace will have short links with varying access for different teams in your organization.
Easy peasy!
Personal productivity is workplace productivity
While we are on the subject of workspaces, it’s worth emphasizing that a link management system can boost not just your personal productivity but also your workplace productivity.
It’s great to have clear boundaries between work and personal life but sometimes these two overlap.
Consider short links that are personal to you, but relate to your work nonetheless.
- your personal OKRs maintained in a folder such as x/my/OKRs
- your Calendly scheduler where a colleague or client can book a call with you such as x/pauls-calendly
- your Zoom meeting room, personalized for easy shareability, such as x/meet-emma
- saved industry articles and courses that you’re pursuing to upskill, grouped by theme, such as x/my/growth-newsletter, x/my/marketing-course, x/my/product-threads etc.
It’s tough to imagine yourself being productive at work without paying close attention to personal productivity, and vice-versa. Isn’t it?
Luckily, most link management tools would solve both sides of the productivity puzzle for you.
OSlash for personal link management and hyper-efficient productivity
Looking for a personal assistant that does all this and more?
We recommend OSlash as the link management solution for personal (as well as workplace) productivity.
Using OSlash, you can easily save 5-9 hours a week getting things in order. Without needing to worry about the security and confidentiality of your personal data.
Why not give it a spin today?
