Nowadays, many people struggle to balance work and personal life due to remote working, hectic schedules, and the continuously changing world. They get overwhelmed when it comes to allocating appropriate time to their professional and personal lives.
In work life, it becomes necessary to keep yourself organized and carry out tasks that are highly prioritized. When you become more productive at your workplace or you balance your work life perfectly, you will definitely get time for your personal life.
To help you stay organized, focused, and prioritize your tasks, productivity apps come in handy. Every individual’s productivity is different. As a result, certain productivity tips might work for some individuals while they may not work for others. The same applies to productivity apps.
When you search for productivity apps, a plethora of options is available in the market. As a result, it becomes necessary for you to understand what kind of productivity app you require. For instance, an individual may be perfect at taking notes but needs to stay focused on tasks. Another example is you may have an efficient communication system but need to adopt an effective way to schedule meetings.
So, based on your weaknesses, you can choose productivity apps. This article lists the 10 best productivity apps that you must consider to achieve your goals faster and stay organized at the workplace.
So, let us get started with our list!
What is a Productivity App?
Productivity apps are the types of software applications that help individuals manage or automate their tasks. They increase their productivity by facilitating tasks. A productivity app can be any application that assists people in performing their tasks, including communication or collaboration applications.
Spreadsheet applications, word processors, graphic software, and many others are common workplace productivity apps. Likewise, database management systems make it easy for people to store, retrieve, manipulate, and delete vast volumes of data.
Not only in the workplace but also productivity apps are useful for individuals. In addition, these apps are also available for mobile devices. Note-taking, email, and calendar functions are some common mobile productivity apps.
Benefits of Productivity Apps
Such applications provide a lot of benefits. They are as follows:
- Improved Accuracy: There is no doubt that productivity apps improve accuracy as the tasks are performed by software where there are no chances of human errors.
- Enhanced Efficiency: When you use a productivity app for repetitive tasks, such as data entry, it automates those tasks, allowing you to focus on other important activities. This results in enhanced efficiency.
- Maximum Flexibility: For example, consider a database management system. It provides you the flexibility to view and manipulate the data you want.
- Improved Collaboration: Most productivity applications intended for working professionals have embedded the feature of sharing documents and files, making it easier for colleagues to work together better.
How To Choose the Right Productivity Software?
There are wide ranges of productivity software, ranging from all-encompassing to more specialized tools. So, it is necessary to make a wise decision when choosing productivity software. You need to consider your needs and requirements.
Here are some essential points that you must think about when selecting productivity software:
- List out the number of tasks that you need to accomplish, and narrow down the list with the tasks that you can fulfill with the software.
- Figure out whether you need an application for personal or business use.
- There are numerous free productive software available, but they offer limited features. If you wish to have more features, you obviously need to consider a paid subscription. Make sure the application you choose fits within your budget.
- Choose the software that is easy to use and navigate.
- Make sure to verify the compatibility of your software with other applications you currently use.
Best Productivity Apps & Tools
Here are some of the top productivity apps and tools that help you organize your tasks and stay focused on what you need to do.
1. Todoist
Best For Managing your to-do lists
It is the world’s #1 to-do list app and task manager that helps you balance work and life perfectly. It lets you add tasks, assign due dates, provide them a priority level, and achieve them on time with a reminder. More interestingly, this tool sorts your to-do list into Today, Upcoming, and many other custom filter views so that you can focus on the tasks you need to do today.
Features
- Besides adding tasks and assigning due dates and priority levels, It lets you add important tasks to favorites so that you can find them easily whenever required.
- You can assign tasks to other people and get them done within time.
- It provides notifications when other people post comments or mark the tasks completed.
- It organizes your tasks in a Kanban board style so that you can track their progress.
- You can label your tasks to make them easier to find.
- With filters, you can provide custom task views based on projects, due dates, assignees, etc.
- This tool makes the scheduled task appear in the calendar of your choice.
Pricing
You will find three different pricing options for Todoist, as follows:
- Free: Free forever
- Pro: $4 per month
- Business: $6 per month
2. Evernote
Best for Taking and Organizing Tasks
Evernote is a note-taking application that helps you take notes. Besides, it is a project planning application that lets you organize your tasks. It lets you put all your important information and ideas in one place. In addition, you can search for any note through a powerful search and keyword tags.
You can synchronize notes saved in this tool across all your devices. This free organizing app is compatible with Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS devices.
Features
- Not only can you add text to your note but also images, files, and to-do lists. Also, you can capture a snap of written notes and add it to the application.
- It lets you create a to-do list and add dates and reminders so that you do not miss out on any important task.
- Evernote can seamlessly integrate with Google Calendar and bring all your notes and schedule together.
- With this good planner app, you save anything you find important online. It lets you clip web pages, online PDFs, and articles and read them anytime you want.
- It provides note templates to fit your needs. These templates are completely customizable and reusable.
- This tool can integrate with other tools in your work stack, including Microsoft Team, Google Drive, Salesforce, and Slack.
Pricing
There are three different pricing options available, as follows:
- Free: Free forever
- Personal: $3.01 per month
- Professional: $3.85 per month
3. Google Docs
Best for Collaborating on Documents
Google Docs is one of the world’s best tools for creating and sharing documents and collaborating on documents in real time. It is an online word processor that does not require you to save documents under progress; instead, they get saved automatically. Moreover, you will have the right to share the documents with the right people, whether or not they belong to your organization.
Features
- Multiple users can edit a single document in real time with the easy sharing feature.
- You can add comments and provide suggestions inside the documents. If you wish to address a specific person, file, or event in a document, you can do that with the help of the ‘@’ symbol.
- The Smart Compose feature helps you write quickly with fewer errors. It highlights grammatical and spelling mistakes, making it easy to write anything within less time. It also supports voice typing and document translation.
- It connects to all other Google apps, including Google Sheets, Google Meet, and Google Drive.
- It also supports editing Microsoft Word files online without the need to convert them.
Pricing
Google Docs is available in two different plans, namely Personal and professional.
- Personal: Free forever
- Professional: $12 per user/month
4. If This Then That (IFTTT)
Best for Automating Tasks
IFTTT provides the best ways to integrate your devices, services, and applications. It helps all three to work together in a new and robust approach. This top productivity app lets you enable different automation, ranging from daily tasks to specialized ones.
For instance, you can set a reminder at a certain time for drinking water. It can also do more complex tasks, such as setting up a reminder to get a notification when the International Space Station passes by you.
Furthermore, it lets you automate repetitive tasks and save significant time that you can invest in performing other important tasks. In short, If This Then That can do anything for you.
Features
- IFTTT lets you do anything with more than 700 different apps and services.
- It allows you to bring services together into Applets, which is automation that lets you do things that your application and services can’t do on their own.
Pricing
IFTTT provides the following three pricing options:
- Free: Free forever
- Pro: $2.54 per month
- Pro+: $5.07 per month
5. Calendly
Best for Scheduling Meetings
In this remote work culture, we obviously understand the importance of virtual meetings. Calendly eliminates the hassle of scheduling meetings according to your team member’s schedules. It is a scheduling automation platform that eliminates the hassle of emails for finding the perfect time and scheduling meetings.
When you sign up for Calendly, it synchronizes with your calendar. It lets you choose the availability preference from the time slots of 15 min, 30 min, 45 min, etc., based on your availability. Once you share the Calendly link with other team members, they can do the same thing. The automatically schedules a meeting based on the availability of all team members.
Features
- This tool lets you co-host a meeting with the client, along with your team member, and email reminders and follow-ups.
- With high-value meetings, this automation platform helps you retain your customers, increase revenue, and land recruits.
- You can boost your productivity with the help of a plethora of extensions and integrations.
- People can schedule meetings on your website.
- You can screen people before they schedule a meeting with you.
Pricing
Calendly provides five different pricing editions, as follows:
- Basic: Free forever
- Essentials: $8 per seat/month
- Professional: $12 per seat/month
- Teams: $16 per seat/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
6. Internxt
Best for Privacy and Security
Internxt is a cloud-based storage service for your files and folders that emphasizes privacy and security. It comes with a suite of services that focus on your security. If security is a major concern, you can switch to Internxt Drive, Photos, and Send. By keeping the security of users in mind, it encrypts all data stored and transferred across their network.
The zero-knowledge technology provides users with complete control over their data, i.e., who can access or share the data. The following are the three primary services of Internxt:
Drive: A general cloud storage.
Photos: Sharing and viewing photos across devices.
Send: A safe and encrypted file transfer service.
Features
- This tool fragments and encrypts your files and photos while sharing before they leave your device.
- It lets you access your files from any device, including a computer, tablet, and mobile phone, with an internet connection.
- With Drive, you can backup files from your computer, organize files into folders, rename files, and search for them using a filter.
- Photos provides a synchronized gallery across all your devices. It lets you upload photos from your smartphone and view them on any device.
- Send lets you share files, documents, photos, and videos, without having to sacrifice your security.
Pricing
The price for Internxt depends upon the storage space. The following are the different storage space options available:
- 10 GB: Free
- 20 GB: $0.89 per month
- 200 GB: $3.49 per month
- 2 TB: $8.99 per month
7. ClickUp
Best for Agile Project Management
It is one of the most widespread and popular agile project management tools that help you bring all your team members together under one roof. This is one of the best apps for organization that lets you organize all your project tasks in one single place. It is easily adaptable to any of the agile methodologies, including Kanban and Scrum.
With ClickUp, you can plan, track, and manage any kind of work, as this tool caters to your team’s needs. Whether your team is of two people or more than 1000, this tool is a perfect solution to manage your projects.
Besides project management, this tool is ideal for engineering, IT, sales, marketing, HR, finance, product, and design teams.
Features
- The Everything view of ClickUp helps you find any task across any level of your organization, regardless of the hierarchy it lies in.
- This tool lets you manage your work using any of the 15+ views.
- It comes with more than 35 ClickApps that customize tasks according to your work needs.
- You can automate your routine processes with over 50 triggers, actions, and conditions.
- It can seamlessly integrate with more than 1000 other applications.
- ClickUp makes collaboration more effective by providing different features, including a visual canvas for creating workflows, adding comments to any task, sharing any document or link, and attaching documents to tasks within ClickUp.
- Reporting features help you set goals, track progress, and manage resources effectively.
- You can bring all important project indicators in one place with the help of the dashboard.
- This tool lets you assign a deadline to each task, track the time required to complete each task, and automatically create reports.
Pricing
ClickUp provides five different pricing options, as follows:
- Free Forever: Free
- Unlimited: $5 per member/month
- Business: $12 per member/month
- Business Plan: $19 per member/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
8. Chanty
Best for Collaboration
Chanty is an easy-to-use team collaboration and communication chat app for teams of all sizes. It provides unlimited secure messaging free for a lifetime. It helps you keep your routine work and tasks organized and aligned in one place. You can create and assign tasks and also create a task from a text message.
The video conferencing feature helps you communicate face-to-face and share information more efficiently. You can join a video call from any device. In video conferencing, you can share your screen and discuss what you want. A single video conferencing can support up to 1000 participants.
Features
- Teambook is Chanty’s space for organized conversations, pinned messages, tasks, and all other content you share with others.
- You can view any type of media in Chanty without switching applications and save time. It lets you share YouTube videos, GIFs, and other social media content with others.
- With “@”, you can ping your team members or other online members for any queries.
- You can pin any message, whether it is a new idea, the latest report, or anything, so that you may not miss out on something important.
- This tool lets you share code snippets with your team members and get updates from them.
- You can execute the scrum methodology and manage all your tasks in one place. Assign priority and set a due date for each task.
- Chanty can integrate with many other third-party applications, such as Trello, Mailchimp, OneDrive, DropBox, and Google Drive.
Pricing
Chanty provides two different pricing options, as follows:
- Free: Free forever
- Business: $3 per user/month
9. Forest
Best for Staying Focused
Forest is a mobile-friendly and best self-improvement app that helps you stay focused on things that are important. By focusing on your daily tasks, you can achieve them and turn your hard work into a lush forest. Whether you are working, studying, or outing with friends and family, Forest helps you stay focused on your work.
When you want to stay focused on your work, simply open the Forest app and plant a tree. It will grow as long as you don’t touch your mobile phone. When you exit the app before you complete the task, the tree dies. You can turn trees into dense forests by working hard and staying focused.
Features
- Each tree represents your hard work, and by planting more trees every day, you can create a forest.
- When you stay more focused, you get rewards and unlock more tree species.
- The Timer Mode can help you set the focus session and dive deep into your work or study. You can even apply the Pomodoro technique.
- You can start and stop at any time.
- The app itself reminds you to put your phone down by planting a tree and focusing on your work.
- You can even read favorite and inspirational quotes to stay motivated.
- The app provides you with the statistics of your focused time so that you can understand whether to change your habits or not.
Pricing
Free.
10. Engross
Best for Pomodoro Timer
It is a time management application that lets you allocate your time efficiently for each task you perform every day. You can focus completely on your work, avoiding distractions. The best feature of this app is the Pomodoro technique timer. This technique improves your productivity by breaking your work into smaller intervals. Each interval is of 25 to 30 minutes, separated by a few minute's break. However, this app lets you customize your intervals and breaks as you wish to have.
Features
- It helps you accomplish your goals within less time and be more productive.
- The statistics and analysis help you track your time and growth.
- With the help of a planner and calendar, you can maintain your work or study life aligned and on track.
- It eliminates the need to add everyday tasks.
- It alerts you of your events, tasks, and sessions.
- While Engross is running, you can block all other unwanted applications.
Pricing
Free.
Conclusion
Here ends our list of the best productivity apps. By using the aforementioned applications, you can achieve your tasks faster and with great efficiency. When you use any of the above applications, your workflow becomes simple, and you can avoid doing everyday trivial tasks.
Many of the applications on our list are free to use. You can try them first, explore their features, and then decide whether to use them or not. More importantly, make sure to pick the right productivity app for you based on your needs or requirements.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is a productivity app?
A productivity application is a type of software program that assists people in performing tasks. It facilitates tasks and improves productivity.
2. Why should I use a productivity app?
The primary purpose of a productivity application is to make a user more efficient by automating certain tasks or allowing them to focus on high-priority tasks.
3. Do productivity apps really make you productive?
Yes, productivity apps make you productive by allowing you to stay focused on your work, set goals for yourself, become more efficient and organized, and carry out tasks quickly and efficiently.
4. How to choose productivity software?
Initially, you need to be very clear about the purpose for which you need the productivity software. Next, figure out whether you need the application for business or personal use. Check whether a free application fulfills your purpose. Otherwise, opt for a paid application that fits within your budget.
