In this age of techno-innovation, which is unmatched, each new app aims to save you time, money, and energy, but some of us feel like we’re doing less and have a harder time concentrating amid all these seeming time-savers.

In the United States, people work an average of 45 hours a week, of which 16 are considered unproductive. In finding some useful ways to improve productivity, there are a couple of people who have developed some really cool methods of considering work and how to improve productive work.

1. Dan Ariely, the brilliant Isreali behavioral economist at Duke University, has developed an app aimed at helping you get more and better productive work. Called Timeful, Ariely’s app assumes this axiom: the world is plotting against you. If you followed all the claims of the competition, you would soon be obese, broke, and constantly distracted. Timeful aims to help everyone get competing for their time on a calendar. As the app learns about you and your schedule, it will make suggestions about your schedule and, over time, help you create new and productive work habits. Ariely calls her app “Smart Time Attendance.”
2. Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week states that the main key to managing time is controlling your mood. Numerous studies reveal that we work most efficiently when we are calm, relaxed and focused.
3. The key to achieving this calm and focus is in some heretical views: Do not respond to email for at least the first ninety minutes of your day. Time and time again, we find that happy people achieve more and are more successful. Studies have shown that happy salespeople outsell their pessimistic colleagues by more than 55%. Emails tend to cause stress and loss of control.
4. Before starting a task, ask if it really needs to be done.
5. Keep in mind that attention and concentration can be achieved very simply: eliminating distractions.
6. Develop some kind of system that works for you.
7. Each night, decide what your goals will be for the next day.

The clear message here is that productivity increases when we feel good. When we’re not trying to answer ringing phones, answering emails, reacting to all other goals other than our own.