Whether you’re an employee working from home, a freelancer looking to stay on track, or a professional who’s back in the office, sometimes we all need some help staying productive. Let’s explore the list of the best productivity apps to help you stay on top of your game in 2022, focus on the task at hand, and manage projects with ease.
Trello
Trello is a great productivity and project management tool for both individuals and large companies. This app makes it easy for teams to collaborate and manage tasks. Trello works by creating boards that you fill with lists and cards detailing what has to get done and when. As your team grows, you’re able to expand your use of the app with more features.
Huge companies like Google, Fender, Squarespace, and Costco have all helped their employees optimize productivity through this app. Signing up is free for individuals.
They have tiered pricing for organizations with less than 100 employees and more than 100 employees.
Asana
Asana is a great productivity app for staying organized and managing conversations between collaborators. The app allows you to create to-do lists for projects, set goals with deadline reminders, and send work requests to colleagues.
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Their productivity tools can be organized by workflow or by teams, like marketing, operations, and sales. This allows you to use their tools in a way that best suits your organization and flow of communication. Asana is free for individuals. They have tiered pricing based on the size of your organization and its projects. Their three tiers are Premium, Business, and Enterprise.
ToDoIst
ToDoIst is a great app for task management. It’s perfect for individual people to organize their tasks, as well as for multiple employees to collaborate on projects with each other. ToDoIst wants you to feel calm and in control of your day by helping you organize everything on your plate and have a clear overview of what you need to get done today so you don’t have to worry about forgetting something.
The app allows you to sort your tasks based on priority and tags, set deadlines, and create reminders. It also helps you track your progress when working through your to-do list.
ToDoIst offers three types of plans: Free, Pro, and Business. The free plan is perfect for individuals and teams of up to five people.
The Pro Level is $3/month when billed annually, offers additional features over the Free Level, and covers up to 300 people.
The Business Level is $5/month when billed annually, has even more additional features over the Pro Level, and covers up to 500 people.
Evernote
Evernote calls itself the best note taking app. It’s great as a planner and for organizing notes. It’s perfect for creatives because it helps you take notes, organize your ideas, and search through them later.
You can add pictures, audio files, and PDFs into the app as well, meaning all of your files for each idea are easily accessible and expertly organized. The app syncs across all of your devices meaning that whenever an idea strikes, you can record it in the app even if you’re offline.
They offer Basic, Premium, and Business plans ranging from free to $14.99 per user per month.
Freedom
Freedom takes a new and much-needed approach to productivity. They block some of our biggest sources of distraction in customized time windows so you can minimize distractions and maximize productivity.
They believe that willpower is a finite resource, and sometimes even the most focused individuals need some help. You can block specific websites, apps, and even internet access entirely. For example, you could block YouTube, ESPN, and Reddit. If you shouldn’t even be on the internet at all, you can block your access to it.
You can sync as many devices as you would like including your desktop, phone, and tablet so distractions are minimized at every access point. Freedom offers monthly, yearly, and forever plans ranging from $6.99/month to $129 forever.
Google Sheets
Google Sheets is a free app that’s great for project management. It’s easily accessible and widely used among companies and individuals alike. Whether you’re a project manager for a large company, a small agency looking to manage client work, or a freelancer looking to stay on top of tasks, Google Sheets offers a variety of templates to best fit your unique circumstances. You can create to-do lists, schedules, calendars, and budgets.
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Keeping all of your information organized in one place can help you boost productivity and stay on top of the task at hand.
Sticky Notes on Your Desktop
This productivity tactic is slightly controversial, however it has its place in helping people manage tasks. Sticky notes can be used both digitally and physically. You can purchase sticky note pads and write out deadline reminders and to-do lists, or you can write them digitally. No matter your operating system, there is typically always a Sticky Notes app on your computer.
This means that every time you open your computer, your notes will be waiting for you, front and center. Keeping your to-do lists and reminders physically in front of you helps make sure you don’t miss them. You then also have the satisfaction of throwing them away or deleting them off your desktop after you’ve completed a task.
Rescue Time
RescueTime is a time management app which sits in the background of your computer or smartphone and automatically tracks the amount of time you spend using different apps, websites and software. It helps you classify activities you are doing that are not productive and which activities keep you productive.
It also allows you to set goals and time limits on the different apps, websites and software that you use. Ultimately this app helps to keep you accountable for how you use your time and it’s meant to enhance your productivity and help you build better habits.
It also features a detailed report to help you analyze how you spend your time in order for you to start improving your behaviors and tendencies. The app is only $6.50 per month and can be a great resource to use in order to keep yourself accountable and productive.
HIVE
Hive is a great piece of technology to help you get productive and stay productive. It features both a web application as well as a mobile application that can help you track and improve your productivity on a day to day basis.
Your team can check on their tasks, share files and see updates about projects all in one integrated management portal. Their analytics suite can help you track your productivity progress and make sure you are staying on track with your production goals. They feature rich Gantt, Kanban and many other charts to make sure you know where you are lacking and where you could use improvement.
It’s free to download and use with their base package starting at only $12/month and allows for integrated email access.
Airtable
Airtable has a very Excel-stylesque’ feeling to it and if you’ve used Excel in the past you will be very familiar with Airtable’s spreadsheet style layout. If you are used to using Excel for managing projects and communicating data to your team and customers, you will love the look and feel of Airtable.
It allows you to create and assign specific tasks to people, set meetings and deadlines, add important attachments, include important notes and so much more.
Airtable can help your whole team stay productive with some of its amazing features below.
- State of the art project management tools
- Messaging system
- Workflow automation capabilities
- Reporting
- Data transformation with actionable views feature
Overall it’s an amazing tool to use in order to help your team remain productive, well organized and optimized for faster workflow.
Conclusion
We want to present you with a variety of tools that have an assortment of uses, benefits, and costs so you can make the best decision for you and your business.
This list of productivity apps to help you stay on top of your game include both free and paid, so you can pick the right option for your work situation. The various tools discussed in this article can help avoid the distractions of the internet (Freedom), make your long to-do list feel manageable (ToDoIst), and stay on top of large projects with your colleagues (Trello).
Free and easily accessible options like Google Sheets and sticky notes on your desktop are also great options for organizing your workload and staying on top of tasks. Now that you’re aware of these new productivity tools, it’s time to get organized and start completing tasks!