India, Aug. 15 -- If you watched The Odyssey and thought that spending 10 years to get home is a shameful waste of time, we know how you feel. We're at that stage of evolution when we're "quantifying every aspect of our lives," says Preeti D'mello, 61, executive coach and founder of The Fulfillment Institute. "We've started believing that work, workouts, even leisure time has to produce improvement that you can track." Odysseus had his smarts (and Athena). You? You have us. We combed the internet for the best new productivity hacks, born of the same internet that's trying to kill us with efficiency. Pick what works. Or give up and ask Calypso to feed you some lotus. Get together with strangers, friends, family, or even co-workers and get it all done. Some people are hanging out just to clear their phone storage. Or to clear 10,000 unread mails. Or to file their income-tax returns. Or sort through their bank statements, or update their CVs. "Most of us live in nuclear families and don't spend as much time with our communities," says Lalit Taneja, 45, a Gurgaon-based anxiety and confidence coach. "This is a low-stakes way to be productive and social." It's a fancy way of saying Do Not Disturb. Dan Crompton, a UK-based leadership coach, uses ScreenZen to block distracting apps and websites from his phone when he's working. On most devices, there's an inbuilt Focus Mode that can push attention-grabbing apps into the background, mute notifications, and move the screen to grayscale for a set time so scrolling seems less fun. Forest, another app, lets you set a timer, plant a virtual seed and have it grow into a healthy plant as you focus on work. If you try to bypass the mode, your tree dies. No one wants their tree to die. Write or Die deletes your words if you stop typing after a set time. On Beeminder, the app charges your credit card (an amount of your choosing) if you don't achieve your goals. You only get a refund if you can prove that something genuinely prevented you from finishing your tasks. Habitica turns your life into an adventure RPG: You set Habits (such as waking up to go to the gym), Dailies (repeat tasks), and To-Dos (one-off goals). The more goals you complete, the more battle armour, pets and magic skills your avatar unlocks. With Finch, the app assigns you a pet "birb", whose wellbeing is tied to your goals. As you cross tasks off your list, your birb goes on an adventure. Miss a goal, and its mood plummets. Surely you're not so heartless? "We are all rubbish at estimating how long a task will take - I still get it wrong," says Crompton. His solution: Hovering over the calendar for the month and identifying patterns - a busy weekend here, a tired Monday after, but a free Thursday a few days later; a flurry of evenings out that will necessitate a recovery day; a three-day oasis when nothing is planned. Then, fill in tasks accordingly. "That move alone will help you realise so much about your distractions, your procrastination and your wasted time." Or, "get a dedicated journal or a productivity planner and visualise your days on paper," says Jasmine Chabria, 35, a motivational speaker and personality development coach from Mumbai. Pencil in reset days. "The goal is to make life easier, not to let your calendar run your life." Give Sai, a planning bot, a task ("Create a list of 20 events happening near me this weekend") and it does the research, lists the prices, and saves a document to your folder with the details. Motion, another AI, plans your day, schedules meetings for you, takes notes and prompts you with follow-up tasks. It also keeps track of colleagues' workflows, so it can notify managers about who's swamped and who has space in their schedule for a project. There's Jace, which uses AI to manage your inbox, replies to emails in your tone of voice, and notifies you of what needs your intervention. It even sends updates to your team, depending on the contents of the mail, and downloads documents and attachments. "You plug in your to-do list and how long each task will take, and it maps them across your week around your meetings, sends alerts, and does the organising for you," says Crompton. No cloning involved. Body doubling simply means working alongside a friend over a video call or offline and getting them to "gently hold you accountable" with their presence, says Taneja. Apps such as Focusmate and Deepwrk, let you book sessions with real people so you can both do your thing in each other's background. "It's surprising how much you're able to concentrate just because someone's working quietly alongside you." Or, film yourself as you complete a task. Nothing like a camera judging you to keep you going. By early evening, you probably have a good sense of what you've completed and what's left. Use the stacking hack for days when there's too much left over. Grab your laptop, your task list and a snack. Head to bed. Lay it all out. And speed-work until sleep hits. Lying in bed is often so comfy, you won't want to get up - a perfect lock-in zone. Pending tasks have a way of piling up, and people often freeze when they're overwhelmed. A simple hack: "Match tasks to your energy levels," says Prarthana Shah, an integrative health coach. "Arrange tasks according to when your focus peaks and dips. Mornings for client calls, afternoons for admin work, evenings for clearing your inbox." Or the other way around, if it works for you. An even simpler hack: Allot a fixed chunk of the day to that task. Chabria has fixed times of the day for emails, WhatsApp, and social media regardless of who pings when. "That way, I'm not constantly pulled in all directions."...