There are many great tools out there that can help you stay focused and organized. No matter your individual workstyle, there’s a program out there that can make a great difference in your productivity.
(1) Things
Things is a goal-oriented task manager app for iOS. It’s compatible with Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. It has a great design that makes it easy to keep your tasks cleanly organized.
- Today and This Evening feature shows your most immediately pressing tasks first
- Upcoming list lets you look at everything coming your way in the next week
- Headings give you the option to break up bigger projects into smaller tasks
- Checklists let you outline details of a project
- Magic Plus makes it easy to add new to-dos to any location in the app
- Quick Find instantly brings you to any to-do you’re searching for
- Many more features can be found in this list!
(2) Notion
Notion works as an “all-in-one workspace” to unite your whole team. It even has specific features in place intended for remote teams.
- Combines Team Wiki (replacing Confluence and GitHub Wiki), Project Management (replacing Trello, Asana, and Jira), and Shared Docs (replacing Google Docs and EverNote)
- Has a “long-term memory” focus to solve the issue of Slack deleting old messages
- Option to embed tools that the team currently uses
- Can link multiple different databases
(3) Toggl
Toggl is made up of three different programs. Each one aims to streamline a different business process.
- Toggl Plan: project planning
- Features for project management, team planning, and task management
- User-friendly design
- Toggl Track: time-tracking
- Options to break down hours by projects, clients, tasks, etc.
- Time entries are synced across different devices
- Toggl Hire: candidate-screening
- Smart Test feature weeds out weak candidates from the start
- Automatically screen candidates by score, test results, or tags
- Analytics offer insight into your hiring process
(4) Sloth
Sloth is a very simple task management app for iPhone and Apple Watch. It allows you to set specific timers to keep you from spending too long on any one task. It’s intended more for individuals than teams, but can be very useful for people who need an external reminder to stay on task.
(5) Forest
If you’re someone who has trouble staying off their phone when it’s time to work, Forest is a great motivator to stay focused. When you’re starting a new task, you “plant a seed” in the app by starting a timer. If you close out of the app, your tree dies, but if you stay focused on your work and stay off your phone, your tree grows! The app has partnered with Trees of the Future to plant real trees based on the activity in the app, so there’s an added environmental motivator!
(6) Freedom
Freedom is a popular website blocker app that is compatible with Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and Chrome. You can use it to block any distracting websites for a designated period of time across all your devices.
Productivity apps like the ones mentioned here appeal to different kinds of workers, so it’s very helpful to think about your individual workstyle when trying out different programs. These apps tend to be pretty affordable, so we recommend trying out as many as you can to figure out what works best for you!
