From taking notes to scheduling meetings, from overcoming distractions to collaboration, here are our top 15 productivity tools for you!
Being productive at work takes a lot of effort. Yes, you heard it right! With so many distractions around, it becomes difficult to be effective, in fact, working itself feels like a task. With so many social media apps and constant news updates, the scrolling never ends, right?! So, it takes consistent effort, some prior planning, and commitment to get the work done.
With remote work, we have distractions physically and digitally, too, making it extra hard for us to concentrate. But thanks to technology, it knows to break us and even give alternate solutions, too! Welcome productivity tools that help us stay updated with our work and monitor the results, too. These tools can be used individually or as a team that focuses on collaboration and management.
Productivity Tools for Distractions
When I started to freelance, I was a bit off track and felt overwhelmed with the tasks. I couldn’t figure out where to start and my work was all over the place. Also, with distractions, I never could complete my planned tasks for the day. That’s when one of my friends suggested using a productivity app that tracks my work hours and doesn’t allow me to access any of the social media apps. I was super impressed as it made my day productive as the only productive and organizing tool I used was Excel Sheets.
When I was working in the IT sector, excel sheets were a savior – from analyzing to operation management lists, these spreadsheets were super cool to use. With some f.02ormulas and shortcuts, excel made our lives easier. Later, when I shifted my career to fashion writing, I thought I would use Excel sheets only to list out the articles I write but I was so wrong. While analyzing fashion trends, it was easier to segregate the trends based on various parameters. So, just like this simple Excel sheet
So, I wanted to create a list that not only helps you be productive but also organizes your work making your life simpler and more manageable. We have curated a list of our top 15 productivity tools. Let’s check ’em out!
1. Toggl
Toggl is an app quite popular with freelancers as it tracks your online activities. This helps in charging the clients with the billable hours. It’s very easy and convenient to use. It also has a weekly reporting interface that helps to track your productivity results. It has a free and paid version. You can save some documents and even schedule an email for the latter. Overall, it’s one of the best productivity tools for you to track your work activities.
2. Clean Email
Do you wonder how to clear your email inbox that’s filled with 10000 messages? Well, when I was on my maternity break, I never accessed my Gmail account. The day I logged in, I was flooded… um, overflooded with emails. I didn’t know where to start. Clearing your inbox is boring and requires a lot of attention so that you don’t accidentally delete important mail. Clean Email helps you to clear unnecessary mail from your inbox every day. It can delete thousands of emails and also manage your new messages keeping your inbox sorted.
It also helps you to unsubscribe from unwanted newsletters, automate your email tasks and also block unwanted emails. This app also organizes your inbox based on your necessity and suggests the list of emails that needs to be cleaned or unsubscribed.
There are a few glitches, too. Sometimes it adds important emails to the unsubscribe list or spam. However, it’s a simple tool to organize your inbox within a few clicks. It has both free and paid versions available.
3. Stayfocusd
Okay, this app is the reason, I’m writing the top productivity tools article today! We have reached a point where the distraction doesn’t end at one app but we want to do multiple things at the same time… apart from working. Lol! Okay, this is a serious issue where we aren’t happy with just one source that releases dopamine but we want more. Unfortunately, the tech industry is going to feed us more with these apps, games, shows, etc.
But we need to stay focused and work because that’s how you move forward in your career. Stayfocusd is an extension for Google Chrome that helps you stay focused on your work by blocking unwanted websites. Of course, it is configurable that allows you to choose to block or allow certain sites, specific subdomains, pages, or even in-page content like images or videos.
The specialty of this app is that once your allotted time has been done, the sites that you blocked will be inaccessible for the rest of the day, too. This productivity extension is free and super easy to use. So, what are you waiting for?! Go download it!
4. Self Control
Okay, here’s another website blocker app on our list of productivity tools. Social media apps are seriously a threat, eh? It makes distracting websites inaccessible. The interface is easy to use and helps to increase focus and productivity. One disadvantage of this app is that when you’re using a VPN, the blocking won’t work.
5. Harvest
Harvest is an integrated team app that lets you easily access and track the time worked with specific clients, for different projects and tasks. During the pandemic, working from home was a blessing but for team managers, it was really difficult to track the work done by the employees. Imagine you work the entire slot of eight hours but your colleague just works for an hour and reports as if he/ she spent an entire day on research. It isn’t fair, right?!
Well, with the Harvest app, you can integrate all the team logs into one place. It also provides data on the billable hours of each person and also catches any differences between what was assigned and what was completed. The timesheet feature helps to track the work of the in-house team to remote workers. This is one of the most user-friendly productivity tools in the market.
6. Trello
To-do lists are never-ending. Despite noting down the major ones or the top five tasks, the micro-tasks get lost. Also, the number of notes we take on notebooks, sticky notes (physically and digitally), feedback, ideas, and many more are everywhere. Imagine having a tool that lets you keep everything in one single place. Yes, you heard it right, it’s possible.
When I started to freelance, my work was all over the place. I had to deal with two clients simultaneously and I had a personal blog and so so many ideas. This made me feel overwhelmed and also mix up my tasks. I came across Trello app in a professional work group and there’s no looking back.
With Trello, you can organize your projects as boards and further as lists. This will look very organized on your homepage or dashboard. You can add members, share it with your co-workers and work together with the workspace feature. It even has a variety of template ideas for you to get started.
7. nTask
Here’s another app on our productivity tools to make team management seamless. From project management to team collaboration to scheduling meetings, nTask is one of the resourceful productivity tools. You can organize virtual meetings, and connect with clients to present work progress. There’s a dedicated section for timesheets where you can track the team’s productivity.
8. Rescue Time
Here’s another app to block unwanted websites or sites that are distracting and hinders your work progress. It can be used as an individual or as a team. This app helps to track your team’s timesheet. You can set goals and alerts to stay focused. A weekly email report summarizes your activities and provides a productivity score to help you work smarter in the coming weeks.
9. LastPass
Remembering your passwords is a task for sure. With everything digital, life also becomes difficult in securing your data. With LastPass, you can store, secure and auto-fill your passwords. This definitely makes life easier. Be mindful and use different passwords for different sites and follow the best practice while creating passwords.
10. ProofHub
Proofhub is a complete package for project management. From managing tasks to setting up virtual meetings, from making team plans to collaborating, ProofHub makes you manage the project from start to end effortlessly. It’s easy to use and makes working together simple.
11. EverNote
If you’re someone who takes a lot of notes or loves to pen down your thoughts onto paper, then EverNote is your app. This app is quite similar to Trello app, the only difference being you can have the notebook experience digitally. You can set reminders to your notes, save your notes with tags, add photos, or even emails. This is a perfect app for you to organize your thoughts on the screen.
12. Notion
Notion is a project management and note-taking app that makes you feel like writing down on a physical paper. From adding notes to to-do lists, you can do anything on Notion. Tracking your budget, fitness stats, study notes, sales CRM and many more can be done on Notion. This is one of the best organizing and productivity tools that actually covers pretty much everything. You can even create a live webpage. How cool is that?! For a person who is creative and is always looking out for ideas and needs to note them done and refer them in the future, Notion makes it simple for you.
13. SaneBox
Sanebox is an email management tool that segregates unimportant emails into a different folder called SaneLater. It has additional features like snoozing the mail, tracking when people don’t reply, analyzing email history, and many more features.
14. Google Calendar
Calendars are not only to track the date or days of the week. Of course, on a physical calendar, we do mark important events, track grocery outings, list holidays, etc. But digital calendars are not limited to these tasks only. You can have your day planned and get notifications on your phone by syncing it with a Google account. This may not be on important occasions only. You can plan an entire year by filling in the data and selecting the time.
Also, you can schedule meetings and send the invite to your client calendar so that they save the date. You can even share the entire calendar with them to give an insight into what your work day looks like. So cool, right?! So, go ahead and make maximum use of these calendars.
15. Calendly
Calendly is a great app for freelancers and for small organizations as well. This app will make you more professional and makes your meetings and discussions hassle-free. As soon as you create an account on Calendly, it will sync your calendar and make notes on the days you’re available. You can send a link to your client while having a phone call or a Zoom meeting.
So, these were our top 15 organizing and productivity tools. Which ones have you used and which ones do you need the most? Let us know! We would love to hear!
Sahana is a Senior Staff Writer at Shilpa Ahuja Media. With an experience in fashion, lifestyle and work-life writing, Sahana’s majority of works can be found at ShilpaAhuja.com. She’s a hardcore Bollywood fan and she loves to cover the nostalgic topics on the same.
Prior to her experience with ShilpaAhuja.com, Sahana has written as a freelance author for online magazine, Mashup Corner, and interned at EventsHigh as a content writer. Her blogs on basic fashion, makeup, fitness and city’s food joints that gave her a chance to experiment with her writing. She also has voiced her opinions about feminism and equal rights for men and women at PolkaCafe journals and after quitting her job, she decided to take up writing as her full time career.
Sahana is an engineering graduate and has worked in an MNC, Tesco, for more than a year as an Operations Support. It was her sheer love for fashion that made her quit the monotonous 9 to 5 job to pursue a career in the fashion industry.
She’s originally from Bangalore and is currently settled in Chennai (she’s loving the city)! For any queries and discussions, contact her at [email protected] or tweet her @Sahana_17.