5 useful tech tools for the daily grind

Whether you’re vying for a promotion or you want to transition into a new career, it makes sense to adopt useful tech tools that can make you more efficient and professional. Instead of burning yourself out by spending extra hours in the office, see if these five pieces of technology will make you a standout employee with more career options.

Portable Document Scanners

Adding a portable document scanner to your arsenal of gadgets will make it easier for you to copy documents when you don’t have access to a full copy machine. Sure, you could try to take a picture of financial records, fliers, and other documents with your smartphone, but that can often result in blurry or otherwise substandard images.

With a portable document scanner, you can copy all the information you need without it looking unprofessional. In the end, it will save you time and help you avoid embarrassment.

Smartwatches for Staying Connected (and Polite)

Image via Flickr by Janitors

Smartphones have become indispensable tools for anyone who needs to stay connected to colleagues and clients throughout the day. Unfortunately, you can’t always whip out your smartphone during a meeting. Doing so could make you look incredibly rude, which isn’t going to do anything positive for your career.

Samsung’s Gear S2 helps you stay connected without being impolite. The Gear’s built-in 4G lets you check your messages without pulling out your phone. The smartwatch even has extra features that will add to your life at work and home. Some of its most useful features include:

Voice commands
GPS navigation
Bluetooth connectivity
S Health to track your wellness

With this device strapped to your risk, you’ll feel more in charge of your life and you won’t annoy your boss or clients.

The Perfect Coffee Mug

It’s physically impossible for some people to get through the day without a few well-timed jolts of caffeine. If you fall into that category, then you have probably had the unpleasant experience of swallowing cold coffee. It makes you cringe, but you need the fuel.

That’s not something you have to worry about when you have a coffee mug from Ember. This mug will keep your beverages at the perfect temperature for hours. You even get to set your own temperature preference. That way, you can actually enjoy your coffee instead of treating it like medicine.

Dictation Software to Spare Your Fingers

Even if you’re a fast typist, it’s unlikely that you can type as quickly as you speak. Trying to type that fast will probably leave you with a mess of mistakes that you have to edit carefully before passing materials on to your colleagues.

When you install dictation software on your computer, though, you can record your voice to text. All you have to do is talk. The computer program takes care of the rest.

It’s still a good idea to review your work to make sure it doesn’t contain any errors, but a lot of people find that dictation software makes them more productive. Plus, it will help you avoid repetitive stress injuries that are commonly found in people who type a lot.

Smartpens for Capturing Ideas

Sometimes you just want to jot down a thought or note quickly without pulling out a computer. Unfortunately, it’s easy to lose those scraps of paper. It’s even harder to keep them organized.

A good smartpen solves those problems by letting you transfer your notes to any computer, tablet, or smartphone. A product like the Livescribe 3 Smartpen writes just like a regular ink pen. The advantage is that you can transfer your notes to a computer, where it’s easy to organize and tag text. Once the text is in your computer, you can even search it to find any note you might need at the moment.

You can even use most of these pens to sketch concepts, which isn’t exactly easy to do on most computers without expensive software.

You don’t have to be a huge tech nerd to take advantage of these and other tools. You just have to realize that they can make your daily grind easier by helping you focus on building relationships instead of fussing with minor chores.