The 10 Best Tools and Apps for Boosting Your Productivity

Let’s talk about productivity. No, not busyness – productivity.

The two are very different. You might be juggling loads of tasks but, if you’re not accomplishing anything useful, you’re not being productive. As author Seth Godin says, productivity is “the amount of useful output created for every hour of work we do.” So, if this is the case, how can we ensure that we are always being as productive as possible rather than just flitting from task to task?

With the help of apps, of course! Whether you get distracted by social media or by checking your phone too much, there’s an app or tool to help you get your working day back on track.

At Dragon IS, we’re dedicated to helping you use IT more effectively to ensure that you can be more organised, fight procrastination, and work faster, better and more efficiently.

Here are some tools and apps we recommend you look at, that you can use to boost your productivity:

Tools & Apps To Track And Measure Your Productivity

Checky

Checking your phone has become a reflex. This habit eats up precious minutes that could go into your work. With Checky, you can see how many times you’ve checked your phone – and where you’ve done so – and start regaining control over this productivity-killing habit.

Checky requires iOS 7.0 or later.

You can download Checky for free from iTunes and Google Store

Harvest

Harvest is a browser extension that shows you how much time you spend on different activities and enables you to make informed decisions about whether this much time is needed – e.g. you might spend a lot of time in meetings but little on producing deliverables.
The Solo package is $12 per month and Team is $12 per person per month.
Harvest is compatible with iOS, Android and Mac.

You can download Harvest for free here.

RescueTime

RescueTime provides you with an overview of how you spend your time each day, broken up into percentages – e.g. 6% on entertainment, 13% on business and 11% on social media. You can use the data to adapt your working practices and spend more time on priority tasks.

The app costs $9 per month or $72 per year (you get 4 months free if you pay yearly).

You can download RescueTime here.

Tools & Apps To Help You Control Your Time

Strict Workflow

Do you find yourself absent-mindedly straying onto distracting sites throughout the working day? Strict Workflow is a Chrome add-on that blocks time-wasting websites for 25-minute sessions, followed by a 5-minute break, to help you focus on your work without distractions.

You can add Strict Workflow to Chrome for free from the Chrome web store.

Time

Time helps you keep on track with your tasks. Simply enter the task you need to focus on and how much time you want to spend on it. The app provides a countdown for your session, using green, yellow and red backgrounds to signify your time running out. It sends you notifications if it thinks you’ve got distracted and tells you if you went over your time. Time requires iOS 10.0 or later.

You can download Time for $9.99 here.

Momentum

Momentum is a habit tracker that helps you create positive habits and routines. It lets you create a focus for the day and generate to-do lists with tasks that can be ticked off throughout the day – taking inspiration from Jerry Seinfeld’s ‘Don’t Break The Chain’ idea.
Momentum requires iOS 9.0 or later.

You can download Momentum for free on iTunes or Google Play.

Freedom

Freedom blocks websites and apps that distract you from your work. It functions across your laptop, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android, so there’s no risk of you sneaking onto your phone if a site is blocked on your laptop! Freedom can add up to 2.5 hours’ productivity to your day.

The app is compatible with Mac, Windows and iOS.

You can download Freedom for free here.

Tools & Apps To Manage And Organise Your Daily Tasks

Asana

Asana enables you to easily manage projects and tasks. You can update the tool in real-time so that everyone knows who’s doing what, how the task’s progressing and when they need to contribute.

The Premium package is £7 per month (billed annually). Pricing isn’t given for the Enterprise package.

You can download Asana for free here.

Trello

Trello is a visual collaboration app that lets you create boards and cards to organise projects. Drag and drop cards to allocate tasks to people and update them in real-time.
You can use Trello for free here.

Todoist

Todoist lets you drag and drop tasks across your phone, laptop and inbox to easily collaborate or send ideas to yourself or a colleague. Prioritise tasks into four levels and get feedback on your productivity.
The Premium package is £28 per year and Business is £28 per user per year.

You can sign up to Todoist for free here.

More Useful Apps

Nowadays, there are masses of tools and apps to help you be more productive – whether you need an app that checks your grammar in emails so that you can get on with liaising with clients, or a tool that can automate your social media posts to free up your time.

We recommend looking at the following (for more information, check out this article):

Evernote: Create memos and sketches in the cloud and work on them on the go.

Any.do: Make to-do lists, calendars, notes and more and share them with others.

Grammarly: Check your grammar and spelling and get suggestions to improve your writing.

Google Drive and Dropbox: Instantly share and collaborate on files with colleagues in a secure cloud environment. You can find out more about these in our 2017 round-up of productivity tools.

Buffer: Automate your social media posts through your desktop or mobile device.

ZOOM: Access cloud-based video conferencing, online meetings, chat and mobile collaboration features.

Remember, an app isn’t going to turn you into a productivity superhero without any effort from you, so choose apps and tools that fit in with how you like to work. Do this and, before long, you won’t even need apps – using your time productively will have become a habit.

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