Productivity has become such a buzz word in the online landscape. Everyone, especially small businesses, want to find ways to make themselves the most productive. While there’s a lot of content out there giving practical tips, you can’t really implement productivity hacks without getting into tools and apps that help you achieve them.
In this post, you’ll get a list of some of the most used and well-known tools for improving your productivity, especially for those who work at home or handle their own ventures.
Project Management
I find the best project management tools have integrations that allow organization, coordination with the team, file sharing, and basically the features that allow a team to follow a task or project to completion. These are just some that I’ve personally tried or have seen most people use for their own projects.
Trello
Trello is a list-based project management website and mobile app that allows you to create cards in a list style to categorize each project. The lists are arranged side by side and cards can be migrated easily to another list.
It’s good for keeping track of systematized tasks that go through a process. Migrating cards that contains each task from one list to another can help you keep track of who’s in charge or it, where it is in the process of completion, etc.
The best feature of Trello is its simplicity. You can put all the details easily and not have to worry about format. It helps you categorize it with other features like labels, tags, assigning features, deadlines, checklists, and deadlines.
Asana
Asana is much like Trello in terms of project management. It contains much of the same features, but it has a lot more navigation options more than just lists. It makes creating and assigning tasks more seamless and organized.
You can create an entire project and everything that falls under it can be viewed in one page. Asana is best for people who have more complex projects to work on and for bigger teams.
Notion
Notion is for the creative types. To be honest, this is more of an all-around application that enables you to customize the format of every page. It can used for project management, list-making, taking notes, saving links and bookmarks.
People also use it to make mood boards and compile inspiration in one place. It allows you more flexibility than Asana and Trello in terms of layout and the types of content that you can save in it.
Communications and Team Collaboration
When working from home, you’re most likely working primarily online. Without the chance to just go up to someone’s desk and instantly start a conversation, you have to rely on online messaging, which are not always reliable. This is what a lot of people use and recommend when it comes to communicating for professional purposes:
Slack
Most channels for communication are attached to social media, or there’s a social aspect to it. Slack is an application that allows your team to have threads and conversations that are solely for business and work matters.
It’s easy to navigate and has features that make your conversations and discussions organized. It also has a nice interface that doesn’t make you dread going through it.
Task Management
Task management is mostly for personal use. Some people may omit this in their process, but using tools to keep you on track with your tasks can immensely help with your productivity.
Todoist
Todoist is a self-proclaimed “best app and task manager” for your most pressing tasks. It promises to give you some peace of mind when it comes to overwhelming work because you can put everything in it from the smallest task to the biggest project that need to be done.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is as much a project management tool as it is for task management, but the latter is the best category for its list-based features that ensure you and everyone involved in a certain task is up to date with the work that needs to be done.
The assigning functionality gives everyone on track with the progress of a task. This one is best to use if you need the functionality of adding other people to your personal lists.
Calendar, Notes, and File Sharing
You’ll find that a lot of these tools overlap with their functionalities and features, but nothing beats using one tool for its best feature. That’s why we’d recommend getting into separate calendars, note-taking, and file-sharing apps so that you know where to find something like a schedule, a certain note, or file.
Fantastical
Fantastical is deemed the best calendar app for Mac users. You can create events and reminders in one place. The layout looks best especially for people whose productivity is affected by the appearance of their tools.
This one is not hard to look at and navigate. Updates focus on making it look more mature in terms of integrations to be 100% efficient when used for work.
Evernote
You probably already know Evernote. It’s a popular note-taking tool that keeps your notes in notebooks. It provides a lot of free storage for any notes you need to keep for a long time.
Aside from just text, you can create tables, insert photos and videos, put links, and other media in it. The notebook format organizes your notes into prominent categories that allow you to find each one more easily as needed.
Google Apps
With this one, I’m sure you know it already. Google apps are incredibly reliable for keeping files with its built-in integrations. Google Drive, Calendar, Docs, and Sheets are among the top tools used by people.
It’s what most prefer because it doesn’t have to take up space in your computer. You can load it up on your browser and have access to it with just an Internet connection.
Automation
All these tools could definitely boost your productivity, but there’s actually a better way to integrate them into your process that makes you work more efficiently. That is automation. You can apply it with these tools through app integration, which these other tools help you achieve:
IFTTT
IFTTT is an acronym for “if this, then that”. The concept is an action is automatically done when the trigger is activated. First, you integrate different apps and tools together. For example, you can integrate Google Home with Fantastical. When a reminder is set for a certain time and date in your calendar, Google Home can remind you of it.
While working, you don’t have to think about what to do next and what to focus on during a certain period because it will be told to you through this integration.
Automate.io
Automate.io works much in the same way, but it focuses more on apps. It currently hosts over 100 apps in its roster. You can integrate email marketing apps, social media platforms, document-based apps, and so many others, so you don’t have to deal with the tedious tasks that can be automated.