Ah, productivity. The eternal bane of entrepreneurs, small businesses, large international conglomerates – a fickle creature, imbued with near-magical powers. The Holy Grail of success, the overthrower of self-doubt, the usher of dreamt-of days, the pinnacle of triumph.
How does one capture and captivate such a being?
Often with much difficulty, as is the case with any mythical beast.
There’s that prerequisite aid in most productivity-hunting arsenals: caffeine. Some have also practiced much harsher and self-inflicted methods: isolation, exhaustion, sleep deprivation. Of course, there are also the softer and more domesticated approaches: motivational videos, books, podcasts, conferences.
However, all of them pale in comparison to the mightiest weapon in a productivity-hunter’s kit: the productivity app.
In the year 2024, the production of the productive and productivity-inducing productivity apps will have reached unprecedented heights – and will have thus enabled many an ambitious fellow to bask in their light, and climb to the top of their own Everest.
We’ve already covered some of the best productivity hacks, but in this post we’re going over more actionable technology enabled tips, so here are the seven productivity apps you should consider hanging on your belt, to help you reach your desired results.
ProofHub
You cannot be productive in your workday if you spend most of your time telling people what to do, finding files, sifting through emails, and asking about task status. Thanks to the evolution of project management and SaaS technology, you have project management tools like ProofHub.
ProofHub is an ultimate productivity app that helps you manage projects, teamwork, and team communication from one place. You can create projects and assign them to the team members. Each team member gets notified and can see the task in their dashboard. Thus, there is no need to write emails.
The best thing about ProofHub tasks is you can attach the files directly to the tasks to share with task assignees and mention people in the task comments. This saves time in finding information and makes it easy to collaborate with the team members.
Having all the projects in one centralized place, ProofHub makes it easy to track the progress at a glance in Kanban and Table view. There is no need to ask every team member. Just see the progress from your system.
Apart from that, you get features like reporting, time tracking, in-built chat, project discussions, and file proofing- all adding to your productivity.
Habitica
Sticking to our fantasy-meets-productivity theme, let’s open this list with Habitica – an app that takes gamification to an entirely unprecedented level.
The app lets you choose an avatar and embark on a quest to, you’ve guessed it, complete tasks and build healthy habits.
You will need to input your daily to-do’s and goals, and each time you tick one off, you will gain points, allowing you to level up and get access to rewards. They can also be set up to your liking: anything from an evening in with Netflix to a night out with friends.
The glorious bit about the app is that it is both completely personalizable (you get to create your own path in the game), and it has put to good use our love of games and our desire to level up.
The apparent downside of the ‘game’ is that you can, of course, cheat – but since you’ll only be cheating yourself out of a future self you would be proud of, try to stick to honest and diligent work.
Forest
Another app that has uniquely tapped into the human psyche, Forest is the ultimate focus app that will keep your mind in the present and away from your social media profiles, the news, or that funny video of two corgis chasing each other in the snow.
Whenever you want to tune in to work and tune out everything else, Forest has you plant a tree. And if you grab your phone before the task is done – that tree will die. A bit of unconventional motivation, but the 25 million app downloads are proof that the system works.
The app also lets you track the time you spend on your phone (and the data is shocking!), and comes with gamification features: you can unlock new trees, connect with friends, and move up in your focus skills.
The more you use it, the better your mind will grasp the simple fact of ‘leave your phone alone while we focus on this task,’ and the more productive you will become.
Calm
This might not be the kind of app you had in mind when looking to improve your productivity, but the fact remains that a calm, stress-free, and well-rested mind is the key to improved focus, enhanced productivity, and better results.
Calm is one of the two most popular meditation and mindfulness apps on the market, and its guided meditations can teach you how to tune in, tune out, and get back in touch with your thoughts and emotions. With consistency, these meditation exercises will help you better understand what gets you going and what slows you down.
As you become better and better at it, you will soon catch on to the negative thoughts that are interrupting your work and the preoccupations that keep barging in, and you will learn how best to overcome them.
Furthermore, Calm’s sleep stories will help you drift off to a more peaceful slumber, with the help of the soothing voices of Stephen Fry and Matthew McConaughey, to name a few.
One could argue that this is the only productivity app you need – as it helps unlock innate powers none of the others can.
Woven
One does need a time management and calendar app, and Woven tops the list of tools with similar features.
It allows you to streamline scheduling by sending out a link to those interested in having a meeting with you and enabling them to choose the time that suits them best. It also has a group scheduling feature, letting you find the best time for a chat when everyone is available.
The app also allows you to create custom templates for different kinds of meetings: i.e., with clients, with staff members, with your accountant, and so on. It will sync with all sorts of other calendar apps and let you know if you’re double-booking yourself for something.
You can find Woven at woven.com.
TimeCamp
Saving time by filling timesheets automatically is a must these days. Luckily you don’t need to dig deep to find the perfect tool for it – TimeCamp serves you right with its high availability and variety of features for streamlining daily time management.
Using TimeCamp, you automate many processes that you usually waste your time on, which leads you straight to productivity improvement. Besides tracking time in general, it also tracks billable hours and lets you create invoices based on project hours and attendance reports for payroll lists.
With TimeCamp, you can create rich-data reports using its built-in templates or pivot tables to generate a custom one. Such reports are a great source of knowledge about your own and your team’s productivity and also tell you a lot about how your projects are performing.
TimeCamp offers an impressive list of integrations, and one of the most popular native ones are Trello, Asana, Jira, Zendesk, Azure DevOps, Clickup, or Freshdesk time tracking integrations.
Pocket is an app that was made for the modern online user.
The more time we spend on the web, the more and more interesting content seems to crop up. Algorithms are getting smarter, bloggers and vloggers are getting more creative, and the internet keeps growing – and we simply have zero chance to keep up with the expansion.
Which means we tend to compile bookmarks that remain forgotten, notes to self that get ignored, and copious emails we send ourselves and never actually open.
Enter Pocket, a storage space for all those blogs, videos, and podcasts you would like to experience – later. But its true beauty lies in the fact that you will now know where you’ve saved something, meaning you neither have to read it right now (and ignore the flashing red button on your desk phone), nor completely forgo the experience of consuming it.
RescueTime
We all need a time-tracking app in our lives – especially if we’re not quite sure where the time we spend awake is spent (and who doesn’t feel like that sometimes?).
The problem with time trackers, however, is that they take up a lot of your time – you need to add in tasks, start and stop timers, make sure you don’t forget to switch between tasks, and so on. Overall, they simply depend on user input too much, often meaning they eat up more time than they save.
But RescueTime is different: it works in the background, keeping track of the apps and websites you visit and how much time you spend on them. You can label certain apps and sites as work-related, you can block some off entirely, and you can get a weekly roundup of how you’ve been spending your time.
True, this still leaves you in the driver’s seat, having to make a concrete change to your habits. If only there were an app that could help you do that.
(See item one on the list above.)
Notion
Finally, there’s the app that will help you curate all of your notes, reminders, lists, and other scribbles previously relegated to the post-its you keep stuck to your monitor.
Notion lets you create general categories for your notes and add subcategories to them, but its real value is in the way these notes look. With plenty of white space, minimally formatted text, and the ability to add in anything from images, videos, links, spreadsheets, and over 30 other media types, this app is the pinnacle of customizable and centralized note-taking.
You can also cross-reference your notes, share them with others, and, of course, you can sync the app across multiple devices and use its web clippers in your browser.
All in all, it’s a fantastic way to stay on top of all your worlds from a single dashboard.
Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a time tracking tool that helps freelancers, entrepreneurs, small businesses and enterprises increase their productivity. It also offers project management and budgeting options, reports and employee monitoring, distraction alerts and offline time tracking.
Time Doctor can help you optimize the way you spend your time at work, ensuring you make the absolute most of every day. The company notes that users of the tool experience an average productivity boost of 22%.
Bonus Productivity Tips
This isn’t an app in the true sense of the term, but it’s incredibly important if getting the most done in the shortest space of time is a priority for your startup. “Don’t do work that others have already done for you.” Essentially, make use of customizable templates wherever you can.
The web is absolutely packed with credible and trustworthy services that offer free and affordable layouts, templates, and designs, that cover a massive range of applications.
Here’s a list of examples:
- Presentation templates at Slidemodel
- Google sheets templates at Template.net
- Photoshop graphic design templates at Envato
So whatever apps your team is using to create various documents, always make an effort to see whether their work can be simplified by downloading and using templates. This is a massive time-saver.
Finally, no matter how productive you are, if your computer is slow, you won’t be able to get nearly as much work done. And since even the best setups accumulate junk and slow down over time, cleaning software for your computer can do wonders to speed you up
Final Thoughts
There you have it: the seven apps that will help guide you through the desert of procrastination and help you live your best life: at home, at work, anywhere you choose to use them.
Do bear in mind that none of these apps is a silver bullet for laziness, and none of them will get the work done for you. They all depend on your input in one way or another. Hence, they should be treated as the tools they are, not as the magical solution suggested in the intro to this article.
Test them out, and find a combination that works best for your life and working style. If used correctly, you’ll likely see significantly enhanced results.
