Top 10 Apps To Boost Your Productivity

Nowadays, you might find thousands of applications to boost your productivity. If you like lists and top 10s, you might also have already seen tons of suggestions to use all these great products. The thing is, as you may have noticed, none of the lists are presenting the same products. Some of them might reappear once or twice, but you’ll probably end up finding twenty new ones before seeing a website validating another’s opinion. Moreover, some of the websites aren’t objective, as they’ll only want to link to their product and market it as the best tool, even though there are hundreds of better options on the market.

So today, we gathered for you the applications we came across the most often while doing our research on the best tools to improve your productivity. We stuck to the apps that can fall into the categories of “project management”, “time-tracking”, “note-taking”, “distraction and focus” and “motivation”. Anyone can use these apps, individual entrepreneurs or big companies, hence the absence of apps explicitly made for communication.

Trello – PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Popular among freelancers and companies of any size, Trello is a collaboration platform that allows its users to share tasks with the rest of the team: projects are divided into cards, and anyone on the board can reach them and work on them. Getting started is very easy, and the app has free options.

Toggl – TIME TRACKING

Mainly used by small businesses and marketers, Toggl is a time tracker that can be manually started and stopped, and measures blocks of time spent on a task, a tag, or a project. It gives you reports showing an overview of the progress the team makes and your billable time. Its basic option costs $10/month.

RescueTime – TIME TRACKING

Also used for time tracking, RescueTime is a platform monitoring the use of a computer and the time spent on particular web pages. With its intuitive UI (user interface) classifying time spent in categories of activities, users can easily understand where their time goes. Free options are available. 

Todoist – PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Back on the apps centered towards project management, Todoist helps individual users and teams of small and medium-sized businesses. With its great to-do lists synchronizing data from various platforms, you can keep track and collaborate on very diversified projects that can be divided into sub-categories of tasks, making the overall workload more manageable. Lastly, it produces nice and colorful reports where users can see their progress and get karma points depending on whether tasks are completed. While the free trial is quite limited, you can have an option at $3 or $4 per month.

Evernote – NOTE-TAKING

Focusing on note-taking and archiving, the app Evernote is helpful to manage tasks as well. Notes are not necessarily texts; they can also be voice messages, pictures, or websites. They can be sorted into folders, and part of an editable notebook with plenty of features, making your information more easily accessible. Once again, the free version is a bit basic, while the cheapest paid version is around $8/month.

Forest – DISTRACTION AND FOCUS

Amateurs of mindfulness will be pleased with Forest, an application aiming at enhancing your focus. Partnered with Trees for the Future, the user earns coins that will allow them to plant trees in real life. On the app, though, you are trained to develop what it calls a “phone-free zone”: you log on to the app to plant a tree, and if you leave it to use your phone, your tree dies. This gamification allows you to stay focused on your work and when you are with your friends or do any sort of activity where you don’t want your phone to interfere and catch your attention. And what’s more, it’s free.

Freedom – DISTRACTION AND FOCUS

With Freedom, you can set time frames in which you select what usually distracts you. Social media? Your mailbox? You can block them all for 30 minutes, one hour, even five, either repeatedly or only once. And when you try to log on to these platforms during these periods, you simply won’t be able to. Again, you can keep distractions away and focus on what’s essential with this app for free.

Pocket – DISTRACTION AND FOCUS

Implemented over 1500+ apps, Pocket helps you save content for later. Organize your saved content with tags, and stop having breaks to look at what you fall on while working. With Pocket, you can also share this content on social media. The basic option is free.

Any.do – PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Fast and intuitive, Any.do allows users to create lists of tasks with tags and colors to make the overall experience more accessible. It combines these lists with reminders and a calendar. A little extra for people who simply aren’t made for lists, Any.do comes with an option to create a daily planner that will pop up every morning to help you visualize and organize what you’ll have to work on throughout the day. It has other subscribable options, but the basic app is free.

Buffer – PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Buffer is an app made for anyone and everyone: whether you’re an individual, an employee of a small or medium-sized company, or a bigger enterprise. This social management platform is composed of tools for publishing, engagement, analytics, and teamwork. Buffer has a button to store content you come across when browsing the Internet. And it also has a free option.

Clockify – TIME TRACKING

Clockify is another free app anyone can decide to use. It is a stopwatch helping you record the time you spend on projects. As you set the timer, you can add details to know what you’ve been working on and for how long. Employers can also use it to track their employees’ progress, their timesheets, and billable hours. Finally, it can generate reports, either weekly, monthly, or annually-based. It integrates with several other apps, among which Trello (see 1).

Beeminder – MOTIVATION

The goal-tracker Beeminder will help you stick to your graphable goals, potentially by connecting another integrated service like RescueTime (see 3), which will report automatically. When you fail at achieving your objectives and staying on your progress path, the app will make you pay (yes, really, pay with real money) through a pledging contract. You’ll have the possibility to test your commitment and your will to do what you told yourself you would do. You can set goals for various activities: from productivity to fitness, from health to finance. The basic version is free… as long as you stick to your objectives.

Do you use these applications already? If so, what do you think of them? We believe using one for each purpose (project management, time tracking, note-taking, anti-distraction/focusing, and motivation) is a good way of ensuring the best amount of productivity you could get. However, do not forget to consider that being productive is important, but taking care of yourself to avoid burning out is primordial.

If you enjoy discovering new lists, makes sure your visit corepo.org, or to stay tuned on Infoforeks where you’ll find a plethora of lists:

• Useful apps to find people’s email addresses
• Tools to run a competitive analysis
• List of tech companies that provide biography services
• And much more