Welcome to today’s edition of ProductivityDigest! 🤗
In this edition, we would be sharing with you some of the best apps you can use to send your productivity level soaring for the rest of the year and beyond.
These apps span everything from online planners and time management apps to apps designed to prevent procrastination and distraction, fix bad habits, and improve your focus.
Now, let’s get this started!
Our first app is Calendar.
Calendar is an artificial intelligence-driven productivity app which helps you seamlessly plan out your day, week, month, and even year. With this app, anyone (with your permission) can choose a date and time in your calendar to book a meeting with you, and you would get reminders of such meeting all inside the app.
The interesting part is — the app is smart enough to handle a situation where multiple meetings are booked for the same time slot in your calendar. 😎
Calendar, which is featured in CNN and Forbes, will also let you dive deep into the analytics of your calendar to help you discover ways to maximize your productivity and save more time. The more you use it, the more valuable it becomes.
Our second featured app today is Forest
Forest is one of the best apps to help you stay focused. In our current world filled with digital distractions, staying focused has never been harder. From phone calls to text messages etc, your attention is constantly being diverted. With Forest, you are motivated to put down the screen and stay focused on tasks before you.
The premise of Forest is simple: Plant a seed when you're ready to get to work, then set a timer. If you stick to the task, your tree grows. However, if you exit the app for whatever reason, your tree dies. Soon you can grow entire forests! 😉
The Forest team partners with tree-planting organization, Trees for the Future, to plant real trees around the world when users spend virtual coins they earn in Forest, thus enabling you to positively contribute to the green economy.
The app ultimately helps you spend less time obsessively scrolling on the internet while spending more time to rather achieve your goals (Plus you can view your daily/weekly/monthly/yearly progress as well as learn about your habits).
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Evernote is essentially an app which helps you capture ideas when inspiration strikes!
As a popular notes organizer and planner app, Evernote is a favourite for taking notes and organizing all of your ideas in one place. The app allows you to capture notes not only via text but also with photos, audio, digital sketches, PDFs etc… and all noted captured are instantly searchable.
You can also easily sync all your notes across your different desktop and mobile devices.
A cool part about Evernote is — the app costs nothing to get started. You can, however, upgrade to a paid account down the line.
Slack is a communication app which makes team collaboration breeze!
Email is great for many things but can be cumbersome when conversing with colleagues. It is not uncommon for messages to get lost, or buried beneath a mountain of other emails.
With Slack, all of your office communications are neatly organized and searchable. Different channels (channels are like group chats) can be created for different projects, departments, and clients; and team members can jump in and out of conversations as needed (meaning they won't get notifications about conversations they're no longer involved in). You can also share documents, video chat, and send GIFs inside the app. 😮
Whether in a large enterprise or a small business, using Slack, it becomes easy to make progress on projects/team tasks by bringing the right people, conversations, tools and information you need together into the right channels.
Slack is also available on desktop and mobile devices, so you can find and access your team as well as your work whether you’re at your desk or on the go.
If you're the type of person who works best with intermittent breaks, this app uses the Pomodoro Technique — which involves breaking your day up into 25-minute focus sessions followed by five-minute breaks — combined with task management to help you to focus and get things done. 🤔
Using this app, you can capture and organize your tasks into to-do lists; start a focus timer; then focus on work & study. You can also set reminders for important tasks and errands as well as check the time spent working.
Be Focused also syncs on your phone and computer so you can access your lists from anywhere.
For persons who do a lot of social media, it can be really stressful to craft social media posts and respond to audience feedback across the various social networks out there at the moment. 😥
Hootsuite is a social media management tool which allows you to update your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn pages from the same screen/website — without having to log into each platform. You can also reply to comments inside the tool.
The coolest part of Hootsuite — which is why it even makes our list — is the app’s scheduling feature/AutoScheduler. Using this feature, you can log in once; schedule every post you plan to make for the next week, month, or three months (Hootsuite allows you to schedule hundreds of messages at a time), then just monitor your accounts as the app automatically posts content at the time you specified.
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Trello is an app which uses the Kanban philosophy to make project management fun.
Users of the app can break big projects down into smaller chunks by creating "cards" for every task. Cards can be arranged into different columns, which represent different phases of a project. As tasks get completed, cards can easily be transferred from one column to the next. Checklists, labels and due dates can be added to projects in the app to add the necessary jet fuel to get projects across the finish line.
Whether you are planning a website design project, vacation or company off-site, Trello is infinitely customizable to suit the need.
For we ProductivityDigesters, Trello helps to minimize mental load by giving the brain freedom from every planning detail. 😋
To boost your productivity, you really first need to know what you are spending your time on. Here comes Toggl to the rescue.
Toggl is a simple, intuitive time tracker which helps you track (and see in the form of a detailed report) what you’re spending your daily hours on. You simply then need to analyze its findings and adjust the way you work in the future to be more productive.
The app is great for salary earners and freelancers in particular — to properly track billable hours in order to charge clients accordingly. 🤑
Toggl works on phones and desktops. It also works on web browsers such as Chrome, Mozilla etc.
Lucidchart is a tool which helps to improve your productivity by making it easy to, in a few mouse clicks/via keyboard shortcuts, create high-quality diagrams made up of shapes, colours etc. Lucidcharts thus comes in handy when it’s time to create an org chart or software flowchart or whiteboard brainstorming sessions etc.
Using the app’s tagging feature, you can also easily bring in colleagues, teammates or partners to, among others, discuss projects at hand.
Our final app on this list is Zapier! 🙌🏼
Zapier is an automation tool which enables you to create integrations between apps that normally wouldn't communicate with each other. For example, you could create an integration in which attachments from every new email you receive in Gmail automatically download and are sent to a specified Dropbox folder.
The coolest part of Zapier is — there is no coding at required. All integrations in the app can be created using just a few mouseclicks. You simply need to select your business software of choice (the app works with over 1,500 software, so your favourites are bound to be included) and start building customized integrations/workflows.
You'll save hours every week and become much more productive when you let Zapier handle monotonous tasks (such as data entry) for you.
And that's a wrap on this edition of ProductivityDigest!
Try to explore the apps suggested — sign up for the free trials and see if the apps help you end up getting more done in less time. Then assess which areas you want to increase productivity in and make adjustments accordingly.
Cheers to more productive days ahead! 🥂
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