If you find yourself struggling to hit deadlines and manage your busy schedule, it might be time to take a look at some of the best productivity apps to help you manage your workload.
Staying productive is more crucial than ever. Thankfully, there is a wide range of digital tools that can help you manage your tasks more efficiently, automate some of your repetitive tasks, and even help save you from everyday distractions which can keep you from being as efficient as possible.
Here’s a look at some of the best apps designed to enhance productivity at work.
Productivity Apps
1. Trello
Trello is a project management tool that makes managing your projects and workload a breeze. Trello uses an intuitive Kanban-style layout allows for easy organization and tracking of tasks.
If you’re working with a team, you can invite multiple users to help manage projects, assign tasks and set deadlines, ensuring that your projects are always delivered efficiently.
Most features in Trello are free, however there is a paid plan, should you need more functionality. And if you find that you need project management tools with a little more functionality, you could also consider taking a look at one of Asana’s paid plans instead.
2. Slack
If you’re looking for a communication tool for your team, they don’t get much better than Slack.
Slack is a communication platform that features chat rooms (channels) organized by topics, as well as private groups and direct messaging.
Beyond text-based messaging, Slack integrates with a multitude of work apps (like Google Drive, Trello, and Asana), which allows for effective cross-tool collaboration.
Slack is free to use, and you can invite your entire team at no additional cost, however, the free version only saves messages for up to 90 days, so if you need messages that won’t disappear, you might want to consider one of their paid plans.
3. Focus@will
Focus@will provides productivity-boosting music that has been specifically designed by a team of Scientists, Musicologists, and Producers to help you focus on your work.
According to Focus@will, most people are not able to focus on work for more than 20 minutes before becoming distracted. Focus@will dynamically changes the audio based on your behaviour to help keep you concentrating on your work, and even help you retain more information.
Focus@will is a paid service, with prices starting from $7.49 per month, with bigger discounts being offered if you pay for a yearly or two yearly plan. Another option is brain.fm.
4. Forest
Forest helps you stay off your phone and focus on your tasks by letting you plant a virtual tree that grows as long as you don’t use your phone for a designated amount of time.
It’s an innovative way to visually reinforce productive behavior by making you part of a bigger cause (real trees are planted by the app creators in collaboration with tree-planting organizations).
While Forest is a mobile app, they also have a Chrome extension, which you can use on your desktop computer, helping to keep you focused on work, while also helping the environment at the same time.
5. Zapier
Zapier automates workflows by connecting your apps and services. It enables you to create “Zaps” that link different apps together, so actions in one app trigger actions in another. For example, you can set up a Zap to automatically save email attachments from Gmail to Dropbox and notify you in Slack.
Zapier’s automation saves time and reduces the need for manual, repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on more important work, or even enjoy some free time thanks to the time saved.
