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Productivity apps can help you stay ahead of your tasks and deadlines, and stay efficient. Want to use an app to boost your output, but aren’t sure which one?
While there’s no better feeling than crossing off tasks listed on a sticky note, there are certainly better ways to stay organized. Many people are turning to productivity apps for both personal and professional use to manage tasks, projects, and appointments. From note-taking features to location-based reminders, timers and to-do lists, these apps are packed with useful features to help you stay productive.
1. Stay Organized
Keeping lists and staying organized is critical to your productivity. It’s important to know what you need to do, where you need to go, and what’s coming up, to stay ahead of the curve. We all jot things down on pieces of paper, leaving a scrap here and there. Thankfully, there are productivity apps like Any.do and Todoist to help us all out.
Any.do is one of the most popular apps for busy people, because who can blame you for not remembering your doctor’s appointment between work deadlines and school pick-ups. To make it a bit easier – and to never forget a task or chore again – try out the free app, available for iPhone and Android. It does a great job of keeping your schedule in check and lets you keep a clean to-do list that you can check things off of when they’re completed. You can also write notes to yourself, set reminders, and share lists with family members, spouses, or colleagues. Todoist is another popular option. It uses artificial intelligence to help you prioritize and organize your tasks. It’s so good and easy to use that the app was chosen as a Google Play Editor's Choice. It uses the latest technologies and has a feature called "smart schedule." The feature helps you choose the best dates to schedule tasks for, using machine learning.
Both options integrate with your calendar for easy scheduling. If this sounds useful to you, you’ll enjoy Clear. The app costs more than others, but its clean look and feel are worth it. It syncs with other accounts like your Gmail or iCloud for easy access.
2. Work From Anywhere
Of course, productivity apps are great for many reasons, but a major selling point is that they sync across devices. Take Google Drive and Evernote for example, which are two productivity powerhouses. They bring everything together, including notes, files, and tasks, and save them to the cloud for access on any device. So if you put in information on your work computer, you can easily access it on your phone or home computer. You can make changes to anything and know that it’ll get saved across devices.
3. Collaborate With Others
There are meetings, appointments, take-outs, pickups, and date nights – so many tasks require collaboration. For these, which are often work related, there are productivity apps that emphasise easy collaboration. This can be collaborating with colleagues, managers, or even friends.
You’ve likely heard of Trello or Slack. They’re some of the most common collaboration tools, and are used by teams, couples, and families to stay productive. Trello is like a virtual sidekick. It’s available for both iPhone and Android and acts as an online bulletin board. Think about pasting sticky notes around your office without having to cross out, leave marks, or re-write notes hundreds of times. Trello is incredibly easy to use, and is highly customizable. Once you create your “board,” you will need to create your “lists.” From here you can drag and drop your individual tasks for easy management. This is ideal for sharing a task with someone else. Just create the task, and drag it to the correct list. It will automatically get added to their to-do list. All tasks and comments can also be shared with anyone you feel is relevant. Slack is similar to Trello in that it’s a great task manager, but does so from a different angle. It’s a messaging app that makes group messaging and coordination extremely easy. You can send files, images, or plain text to others, to always stay on the same page. It’s packed with features and shortcuts, making it a favorite with teams throughout the world. For another alternative, give Microsoft To-Do (formerly Wunderlist) a try. It offers both free and premium plans, and allows you to assign unlimited tasks, send files no matter the size, and add unlimited subtasks.
4. One Place For Everything
One of the biggest advantages of a productivity app is the ability to keep everything organized in one place. How can you be expected to work efficiently when you don’t know where anything is?
Dropbox, which is available for iPhone and Android, is a great go-to solution. Think of it as an online safe for your documents, pictures, and files. The best thing is that it saves everything to the cloud so that you can access it anywhere and anytime. You can even download it for offline use. It’s definitely one of the best cloud storage tools out there. Pocket is another popular app which is similar, in that it keep all of your “things” in one place. Pocket lets you save articles, videos, files, and pictures in one place to read later.
It’s That Simple
Staying productive is not always easy, especially when you have a lot going on. Productivity apps are loaded with features that make staying on top of all your tasks and to-do’s achievable. Even better is that they’re great looking and intuitive to use. Yes, it’s really that simple.
