Feeling unproductive these days? We all need a boost for more productivity. Sometimes finishing tasks that require a couple of hours work ends up consuming your whole work day and killing your productivity. [clickToTweet tweet=”Your productivity could be affected by a lack of organization or an abundance of distraction. These tools will help.” quote=”This could be caused by a lack of organization, an abundance of distraction, or both. These tools will help you out.” theme=”style3″]This could be caused by a lack of organization, an abundance of distraction, or both. These tools will help you out.
Managing your tasks and goals
We don’t like to exaggerate, but Trello might just be the productivity app of productivity apps. We love it so much at WUZZUF that we use it ourselves. A superb task-management platform that is smart and visually appealing, Trello transforms tasks into “cards” that are assigned to team members, grouped into “boards,” and lined up with attachments and comments. It makes teamwork much smoother and individual work much better organized.
Key advantage: Visually organizes to-do lists.
An excellent task and project management platform, Todoist does a lot more than create to-do lists. It allows you to create sub-tasks and sub-projects, prioritize tasks, collaborate on shared tasks and projects, and visually track your productivity through Todoist Karma.
Key advantage: Distraction-free design that makes task management simple and efficient.
If you’re looking for a tool to help you set SMART goals, track your goals and habits, and keep you motivated with reminders and pretty charts, Strides is the one for the job. The smart tracking tool groups the goals and habits you want to achieve into “target,” “habit,” “average,” and “project.”
Key advantage: Flexible enough for you to customize goal management however you want.
Managing your meetings
If you’re constantly overwhelmed with poorly organized and ineffective meetings at work, Cisco Spark Meeting Notes could be a life-saver. The collaboration-friendly tool allows you to keep track of all your meetings and automate meeting best practices for your team. It lets you create meeting agendas, meeting notes, and action items for each meeting and helps you and your team stay on track during the meeting.
Key advantage: Seamlessly integrates with all the platforms that matter (such as Google Calendar, Google Drive, Trello, and Evernote) and pushes meeting notes to them.
A helpful scheduling platform, Doodle helps you find the best time for a meeting or event by setting up possible dates and times and inviting participants to vote on them without even creating their own Doodle accounts. You can see calendar conflicts in the app as well.
Key advantage: Saves you the time of sending many messages to different people on different platforms.
A unique and effective teleconferencing tool that is self-proclaimed to be “fast, easy, and free,” JoinMe provides you with unlimited video and audio conferencing that includes screen sharing, whiteboarding, and presenter swapping and can be hosted directly on the JoinMe website without anyone needing to download and configure software.
Key advantage: Sets up meetings in advance with convenient one-click scheduling or directly from Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar.
Keeping your notes organized
The best digital notebook out there, Evernote makes note-taking simple, organized, and clean. “Your second brain” helps you capture and organize notes and add checklists, tables, attachments, website links, and audio recordings.
Key advantage: Helps you find any note you want (even handwritten ones) quickly on any device through searchable notebooks.
Unlike other note-taking apps, Quip turns notebooks into collaboration fiestas. The tool integrates notes with simple documents, spreadsheets, images, videos, polls, and team chats through which everyone can comment and share ideas. It also allows you to publish notes online and save them as PDF documents.
Key advantage: Makes collaborating with your team easier and much more efficient than sending emails back and forth all day.
Papier is a smart Chrome extension that allows you to type in notes the second you open a new tab. The notes are automatically backed up directly to Chrome without having to create an account or sync anything. It’s fast, easy, and distraction-free.
Key advantage: Helps you document your thoughts instantly as you work without having to open an app.
Staying focused
An excellent productivity tool based on the Pomodoro Technique, Focus Booster helps you stay focused on tasks and eliminate distractions through Pomodoro sessions. These sessions are automatically in your timesheets and productivity reports are produced to help you improve your performance.
Key advantage: Helps you create better work habits through visualizing progress, workflow, and rhythm.
A superb focus-inducing tool, Freedom blocks the websites, social media, and apps you want to run away from as you work to eliminate distraction and help you enhance your productivity. You can sync your sessions across all of your devices for maximum performance.
Key advantage: Allows you to schedule “Freedom time” sessions that recur daily or weekly.
FocusWriter is a productivity-friendly word processor that provides you with a writing environment that is distraction-free. It uses a hide-away interface that you access by moving your cursor to the edges of your screen, which helps you stay entirely focused on what you’re writing.
Key advantage: Provides a clean and simple writing environment that includes timers and alarms to help you stay on track and get work done efficiently.
Tracking your time for better productivity
A powerful real-time tracking tool, Hours helps you track the hours you spend on each project and keeps a running list of timers you can easily switch between with one tap in the app. It then provides you with insightful reports that help you audit how much time you often spend on tasks and with which clients or team members.
Key advantage: Makes tracking time hassle-free through a visually appealing timeline that helps you identify mistakes and make adjustments through quick dragging of time blocks.
A simple but brilliant time-tracking tool, Harvest uses an intuitive interface to provide you with accurate timesheets and powerful reports to help you enhance your projects’ time and budget.
Key advantage: Provides you with insights to better estimate your future projects and enhance your overall productivity.
A great productivity companion, RescueTime tracks the time you spend on the websites and applications you use and provides you with detailed reports based on your activity while working.
Key advantage: Allows you to understand your work habits so you can make changes that help you be more productive and find your work-life balance.
Bonus awesome stuff you need at work:
- Grammarly: The internet’s best grammar and spelling checker.
- Noisli: A high-quality background noise and color generator perfect for helping you focus with soothing sounds and chromotherapy backgrounds.
- Blinkist: An incredible app that transforms the insightful nonfiction books you’ve been dying to read but haven’t had the time to into packs you can read or listen to in 15 minutes or less.
- Genius Scan: A genius document scanner that turns your paper documents into high-quality PDF files.
- oTranscribe: The web app that makes transcribing recordings painless by allowing you to type as you listen without switching apps and with having the option to pause, rewind, and fast forward.
If you think we’ve forgotten about tools that manage the black hole that is your email inbox, think again. We created a whole separate list of them!
Do you use other apps to boost your productivity? Tell us about them in the comments below!
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