Improve Your Productivity With Color Coding

Coca-Cola is red, Starbucks is green and McDonalds is yellow. In marketing it is a common practice to use color in order to grab our attention and engrain a brand into our memories. But how can we use the same principle to help organize our days and thereby improve productivity?

The benefits of color

Studies have shown that color can influence our levels of attention. For example, children with ADHD can focus for a significantly longer amount of time on a colorful text than on a plain one. Color has also been shown to enhance memory performance. The reason why color helps our focus and memory is that color evokes an emotional response. Different colors can have different effects on us: while blue tones usually elicit a feeling of calmness, warm colors such as orange or yellow can bring happiness and energy. On contrast, overly bright colors can be distracting.

Because the individual response to color can vary, Structured offers a wide variety of colors that you can use to highlight your tasks. With the color grid, spectrum, or sliders, you can create custom colors that perfectly fit your preferences.

Color coding

There are several ways in which you can use color coding to improve your productivity. The following tips are just a few ideas on how to use colored tasks in Structured to your advantage.

1. Distinguish types of tasks

To make your timeline more organized, you can use different colors to classify your tasks. For example, you could assign one color to all of your meals, one color to your work-related tasks and a third one to chores around your household. This will give you an overview on what types of tasks fill your day, making it easier to mentally prepare for it.

2. Prioritize to-do’s

By using color, you can structure the tasks that await you in your inbox according to their priority. This will help you to distinguish between the most important tasks and those that can wait a bit, preventing you from feeling overwhelmed when your inbox is becoming crowded. In order to do this, you can use colors that feel urgent like red for more important tasks and a calmer color, for example green, for tasks that can be done further down the line. Alternatively, you can use different shades of the same color to visualize an urgency scale.

3. Mix it up

When your day is packed with similar tasks that bore you just by looking at them you can make them more fun and manageable by assigning colors. If you, for example, have a full day of studying planned you can use different colors for the different subjects that you have to work through. That way you don’t feel a sense of doom by looking at your packed timeline.

Now you can start using color in Structured to your advantage and tackle the challenges of making your timeline and inbox more organized and fun!