Top 10 Apps to Improve your Productivity at Work
What do the most successful people have in common? They all have 24 hours available to themselves each day! That’s right, same as you! The only difference is they utilize the same number of hours in a much more productive way.
In earlier days, you would just have to depend on your discipline, acumen and good practices you would imbibe over several years to be more productive and rise above the others. Well, you still need all that but in this “App Age”, there are several apps that make your job of organizing yourself and being super productive, a lot easier.
From our own experience we handpicked the top 10 apps (not in any particular order) that you must use on a regular basis get the most out of yourself.
1. Evernote:
Evernote is your web based notebook for everything. It helps you manage your tasks efficiently and also helps store photos, files, audio clips, web pages and to-do lists. With its great indexing feature, you can easily search your saved tasks. It works great on mobile, desktop and web. Best of all, it is completely free to use.
2. Google Calendar:
I am sure most of you are already using it. It’s a great tool to keep you organized. It not only helps you schedule and be on top of your work related engagements but also remember important dates such as birthdays, anniversaries etc. Remember, an important part of being successful is how you manage your time and how you maintain your relations with people. As an easy to use calendar, that works well on any device and is completely free, Google calendar is a must use tool for you to be more productive
3. Rescue Time:
The tagline for this app is “Find your ideal work-life balance”. This is a great tool for keeping track of time you spend on various activities online. It not only tells you which websites and apps you are spending most time on but also provides insight on which of your hours have been most or least productive. Quite incredible huh! The premium version of this app also allows you to block you distracting sites. If you don’t want to spend money on an app, even the free version comes with useful features.
4. LastPass:
How many user profiles you need to manage now a days? 5, 10 or 50? Well, as we all know, it’s the “App Age”. More the apps you use online, more passwords you have to set and remember. While in the beginning it looks manageable, as the number of your user profiles grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember and manage your passwords. LastPass is an incredible tool for managing all your passwords at one place in an easy and secure way. It can be used across multiple devices and also helps you to create more secure passwords. Try out the free version but if you want to utilize its full potential pay some money to get the premium version
5. Google Alerts:
How much important do you think is it to keep a tab on what’s latest being published on your brand, product or organization?
- Not important
- Little important
- Very Important
- Absolutely Important.
That’s right, absolutely important. Google comes to your rescue again. The alert tool from Google, lets you know whenever your brand or business is mentioned anywhere online. Not only it keeps you updated on the PR your brand is getting but also provides you an opportunity to get connected with the source that published the news about your brand.
6. Feedly:
Remember the good old Google Reader? Feedly serves the same purpose but does it much better. So much more that Google had to roll back its News Feed app, Google Reader. Feedly is a great app to access news feeds on all your topics of interest and from the best sources available online. It’s simple to setup, picks up the best stories and provides a killer user experience. Browsing through news was never more fun. Keeps you updated and well informed.
7. Unroll.me:
How often do you bump into an article or an online resource, which you are eager to explore but can’t go through unless you subscribe to the “Newsletter” of the provider? All the time, right! As a result you are now subscribed to hundreds of annoying newsletters that keep cluttering your inbox. Some of them you want to keep but most of them you don’t. Well, Unroll.me lets you unsubscribe to the ones you don’t want to follow, all at one place. Not only that, for the ones that you want to follow it rolls up all the newsletters together for you to go through at once and keeps your inbox clutter free. Cool! Isn’t it?
8. Hemingway:
Not all of us are born or raised with good writing skills. We invariably make several grammatical mistakes. Most of us depend on the ever so dependable “MS-Word” to fix the spelling and grammatical mistakes that we do. That being said, many a times MS-Word misses to catch grammatical errors or fails to provide a suggestion, especially if you are using a long and complex sentence. Hemingway is a easy to use and very effective tool that highlights long, complex sentences and common errors and makes suggestions by highlighting the sentence with different colors for specific actions. If you see a sentence highlighted in yellow, shorten the sentence; if you see red, it means that the sentence is not making proper sense so edit it loose the red highlight and so on.
9. HootSuite:
Love it or hate it, in order to be successful nowadays you have to be socially active online. With so many different social media channels getting prominence, being active on all of them (or least the ones that are important) has become increasingly difficult and time consuming. Hootsuite allows you to manage all your social media profiles at one place and also lets you keep your channels updated. You can schedule posts, organize your list of followers and what not at a fraction of the time you otherwise would have spent if you didn’t have the tool.
10. Slack:
If you are a team player, this is a must have tool for you. It revolutionizes team communication by doing away with emails. It integrates with all the important tools that you may have been using, such as DropBox, Asana, Trello, Google Hangouts etc. etc. and helps you manage all of them at a single place. It keeps you connected with your team members and allows you to collaborate effectively with them without having to exchange dozens of emails every day.
Have more tools that you want to recommend to our users? Feel free and add to the list by leaving a comment.
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