The world is obsessed with productivity. We all want to know how to get things done more quickly and with less effort; improve our time management skills; and lead more productive, fulfilling lives. The eight productivity apps listed in this blog post will help you achieve those goals.
Fantastical is a favorite with the Mac users on our team, but it’s one of the most expensive options out there and you’ll have to pay separately for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps. Pricing: Fantastical is available for Mac, offers a 21-day free trial and after that can be purchased with a one-time payment ($49.99) for each platform (iPhone. One of the best productivity apps is the aptly named Todoist, a multi-platform planner app that keeps things efficient with a clean, gimmick-free approach to interface and task management.
Jan 14, 2020 The Best Productivity Apps for 2020. Buckle down and get things done with the best productivity apps for getting work done, organizing your personal life.
We've pulled from our personal experiences and conducted detailed, in-depth research to compile the best productivity apps for 2020. An investment in just a few of these tools is sure to make you more efficient. So without further ado, let's dive in!
How We Define 'Productivity Apps'
For the purposes of this blog post, a productivity app is any piece of software that makes your job easier and allows you to get more work done in less time. Some of the applications listed below aren't 'productivity apps' in the traditional sense of the phrase. But each is worth having and will save you hours of precious time when used consistently.
After reading through our list, we encourage you to sit down and think about which areas of your life you'd like to become more productive in for 2020. Then get the app (or apps) that will help you get there.
The Productivity Apps You Need In 2020
Each of the following 10 productivity apps will make you more efficient in some way.
Before we start, we should note that, while our list is numbered, the placement of apps doesn't represent their level of importance. Meaning the first app isn't better than the last. The numbers simply make it easier to track through this post. Ready?
1. Lucidchart
Lucidchart's features improve your productivity by offering high-quality visual creation with simple keyboard shortcuts or a quick click of the mouse.
To use the tool, simply create a custom document or choose from multiple templates to get you started. Then start making your visuals easily with hundreds of shapes, colors, and the option to add layers.
But Lucidchart is more than just a personal productivity tool. It can also be used to keep your entire team on track. Collaborate within the software by simply tagging team members. The seamless communication allows for work to get done faster.
Lucidchart is free for basic functionality, $7.95 a month for individuals, and $9 a month (per user) for a team account with premium features. You can also contact Lucidchart for an Enterprise-level quote.
2. Calendar
Looking to save more time, be more productive, and achieve better focus? Look no further than Calendar, the smart tool that you need to add to your stack.
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This artificial intelligence-led productivity app is always learning for you and will save you time and effort as you plan out your day, week, month, and even year. The best part? The more you use it, the more valuable it becomes.
With Calendar, you can allow anyone to choose a time and book a meeting with you, directly inside the app. And you'll never have to worry about overbookings, as Calendar will automatically protect you from any meetings being scheduled at the same time.
Calendar, featured in CNN, Inc, Forbes, and Entrepreneur, will also let you dive deep into the analytics of your calendar to discover ways to maximize your productivity and save more time.
It's easy to get started, just go straight to Calendar.com and follow the sign up prompts. You can get started for FREE or get access to more features via a monthly subscription plan.
3. CloudApp
Next, we have CloudApp, a highly intuitive visual communication tool that can save your team up to 56 hours a week! The only difficulty is deciding how you're going to use all that extra time.
Whether you happen to be communicating with a colleague, a customer, or a client; CloudApp's screenshot, webcam recording, GIF creation, and image annotation features will help you get your point across faster. Don't bother writing lengthy, complex emails, simply show people what you mean.
3 million users, including industry titans like Uber, Facebook, and Adobe can't be wrong. CloudApp is an incredible productivity app that you need in your business software suite. Fortunately, it's incredibly affordable.
The free forever plan will get you started. For additional features, subscribe to an upgraded plan for just $9+ a month.
4. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM was built from the ground up to be ready for the modern world. Intuitive and automatic where other systems are complicated and manual, HubSpot CRM takes care of all the little details - logging emails, recording calls, and managing your data - freeing up valuable selling time in the process. It regularly ranks as one of the best CRM software products for small businesses.
Here are the reasons HubSpot CRM is the top choice for small businesses:
- Manage your pipeline and never let a deal slip through the cracks.
- Find and focus on closing the warmest leads.
- Use our proven email templates or create your own.
HubSpot CRM is 100% free forever and comes natively integrated with other free features that essential for small businesses: email marketing (up to 2000 emails/month), meetings scheduler, forms, email tracking, live chat, chatbot builder, reporting dashboard, contacts and pipeline management.
Clients: Wistia, Atlassian, InVision, VMWare
Price: 100% Free Forever
5. Slack
You've heard of Slack. The unicorn company, currently valued at over 20 billion dollars, is one of the fastest growing of all time. Major corporations like Target, Oracle, and AirBnB use the app on a regular basis because it's an incredible productivity booster.
If you've never used the tool before, it's a communication app that makes collaboration a breeze. Email is great for many things, but it can be cumbersome when conversing with colleagues. It's too easy for messages to get lost, or buried beneath a mountain of other emails.
With Slack, all of your office communications are neatly organized and searchable. Different channels can be created for different projects, departments, and clients; and team members can jump in and out of conversations as needed. Meaning they won't get notifications about conversations they're no longer involved in.
But Slack is more than just an email alternative. You can also share documents, video chat, and send GIFs inside the application. To really boost productivity, integrate your other tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, SalesForce, and CloudApp. Plans range from $0 to $12.50 a month, per user.
6. Trello
Trello is a project management app that makes managing projects less stressful; enjoyable, even. How is that possible? It all starts with the platform's Kanban philosophy. Trello is highly visual, which makes it very intuitive.
Users can break big projects down into smaller chunks by creating 'cards' for every task. Cards can be arranged into different columns, which represent different phases of a project. As tasks get completed, cards are easily transferred from one column to the next.
Here's how this process might look in a real-life scenario:
Jen is tasked with managing her company's blog. To keep track of all the articles written and submitted by different writers, she creates a Trello board with four columns: 'Blog Ideas', 'Writing', 'Editing', and 'Published'.
As each blog idea is worked on, it makes its way from the 'Blog Ideas' column, all the way to the 'Published' column when the article has been finished and posted. Make sense?
Trello is free to use, though they do offer premium plans with additional features starting at $9.99 a month.
7. Hootsuite
Social media is a business game changer. Companies have never had such easy access to their customers as they do now. It's an amazing opportunity, but it comes at a cost: crafting social posts and responding to comments takes a lot of time.
Fortunately, there are apps out there that make posting social media content much less time-intensive.
Hootsuite is a social media management app that allows you to update your company's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn pages from the same screen — without having to log into each individual platform. You can also reply to comments inside the tool, too.
But the real reason why Hootsuite makes our best productivity apps for 2020 list is because of its scheduling feature. Log in once, schedule every post you plan to make for the next week, month, three months (Hootsuite allows you to schedule hundreds of messages at a time), and then just monitor your accounts as the software automatically posts content at the time you specified. How cool is that?
Hootsuite plans start at $29 a month after a free 30 day trial.
8. Toggl
Toggl is the simple, intuitive time tracker that you and your team will actually use. It isn't limited by device and works on your computer, tablet and phone; so no matter where or what you're working on, your hours are being tracked. Oh, and you'll never forget to turn this productivity app on because it sends you friendly reminders to do so.
When you've completed a task, take a look at the detailed report. Toggl crunches the numbers and shows you how your time was spent. You just have to analyze its findings and adjust the way you work in the future to be more productive.
If you're a freelancer, a tool like this is mandatory. How else will you accurately bill clients? But even those who are employed on a salary basis will find Toggl useful. After all, to become more productive, it helps to first know how you're really spending your time.
Toggl is free to use, though premium features start at $9 a month per user.
9. LastPass
We'll say it, passwords are incredibly frustrating. Having to remember a different combination of letters, numbers, and symbols just to log into each digital tool you use for work is a nightmare. And the truth is, passwords actually don't do much to improve security.
Enter LastPass, a password management tool that makes it easy to generate, remember, and even share detailed and secure passwords. Here's how it works:
- Download the LastPass browser extension to your computer.
- Create your LastPass account and create a long, detailed master password.
- Add sites and unique passwords to your personal LastPass password manager vault.
- Now, when you go to any of the sites that have been added to your personal LastPass vault, LastPass will automatically fill in the details for you.
If you want to boost digital security and productivity, you need LastPass, which can be used for free with basic functionality. Paid plans with additional features start at $4 a user.
10. HelloSign
Before electronic signature software, signing documents was a pain..
First, you'd have to scan your specific contract into the computer and email it to your recipient. Once received, the signee would then need to print the document out, sign it, scan it back into their computer, and, finally, email it back to you. That's just too many steps!
HelloSign takes the hassle out of signing contracts by enabling you to sign them electronically. And don't worry, every document signed through HelloSign is legally binding.
As an added bonus, your signed contracts are organized inside the secure HelloSign system, meaning you don't need to waste time or space storing physical documents. Simply create the agreement, send it out for the necessary signatures, and file it away for future reference.
HelloSign is free for limited use and upgraded plans start at $13 a month.
It should be noted that only the user creating and sending documents is charged this monthly fee. Those receiving contracts are not required to pay anything in order to sign them. In fact, they don't even need to create their own account.
11. Zapier
Last, but not least, we have Zapier, which allows its users to create integrations and automations between apps that normally wouldn't communicate with each other. For example, a new email received in Gmail can be programmed to automatically download all included attachments to a Dropbox folder and alert you via Slack.
The best part is, all of these integrations and automations can be built with just a few clicks of your mouse; no coding required. Just select your business software of choice (this productivity app works with over 1,500 other tools, so your favorites are bound to be included) and start building customized workflows.
You'll save hours every week and become much more productive when you let Zapier handle monotonous tasks like data entry for you. After a 14 day free trial, plans cost $20 a month and beyond, depending on the features you want.
Discover the Best Productivity Apps for You
If you want to become more productive in 2020 (and who doesn't) the ten apps listed in this blog post will help. We encourage you to investigate each of them yourself, sign up for the free trials, and see if they can assist you in getting more done in less time.
For your convenience, the productivity apps mentioned in this article are listed below. Here's to your most productive year yet!
Learn how CloudApp will make you more productive
The Best Productivity Apps for 2020
The iPad has differentiated itself from the iPhone so much that there now needs to be a separate version of iOS for it, appropriately dubbed iPadOS. But it's not just the operating system itself that helps you become more productive with your iPad, it's the apps! Here are some of the best productivity apps for your iPad that we found on the App Store.
Things
When it comes to productivity, the first thing you're going to think of is a task manager. Things combines beauty and power with plenty of flexibility to suit your needs.
Unlike other task managers, Things is never complicated and doesn't need a lot of time to learn and start using. You create Areas with Projects under them, and then add in your project tasks. There's always a circle for your projects to show your progression, and all tasks can be given a due date, tagged, have a checklist if necessary, and even flagged for deadlines. Everything can be moved around via drag-and-drop, and there are intuitive gestures to get things where they need to be.
I've been using Things as my daily driver task manager for the past few years, and it makes managing my tasks easier than ever. It's also available on iPhone and Mac.
Fantastical
The second thing you may think about when being productive is your schedule. After all, how are you supposed to get things done if you don't have a calendar to put down all of your important events and such?
Fantastical is my favorite calendar app on iPad, as well as my iPhone and Macs. With Fantastical, you get a beautiful and streamlined interface that is as easy on the eyes as it is to use. You can view the weekly ticker, the entire month, as well as your upcoming agenda all at once on the iPad. Creating new events or reminders (integrates with Apple's Reminders app) is super easy thanks to the natural language input system that it uses. And if you ever need to search for something, the handy search feature lets you go through all of your events, whether past, current, or future.
Spark
Email can be a pain, but Spark is an app that helps make managing your inbox easier.
With Spark, you can add multiple email accounts and manage them all at once with Spark's Smart Inbox system. This organizes all of your emails into separate categories: Personal, Notifications, and Newsletters. You can also turn on Smart Notifications per account, which will only alert you to messages from senders that you may not want to miss out on, rather than being bombarded with notifications for everything. It also has other useful features like scheduling emails for later, snoozing, pinning important messages, search, integrations with many third-party apps and services, and much more.
I've been using Spark for years, and it definitely helps me with managing my mess of an inbox.
Scanbot
Scanning important documents to have a digital copy should be something that all of us are doing. But having a physical scanner may not be something that all of us have. Fortunately, there's Scanbot.
With Scanbot, you can launch the app and use your iPad's camera right away to scan a document. It's very good at detecting sheets of paper and will get the edges right and all that in a matter of moments. If not, the app tells you to get closer and to not move so that it can capture the scan nicely. Scanbot supports multiple page documents, has filters that you can apply that affect the scan quality (if you want it like a color photo or just black and white, etc.), and works with various third-party cloud storage solutions for uploading. You can organize all of your scans into folders right in Scanbot itself, and there is also a faxing functionality if you need it.
Bear
If you intend on being productive, you can't go without some kind of writing or text editing app, right? And Bear is a great option to consider.
Bear gives you a stunningly beautiful and simple interface that won't interfere with your writing. In fact, it'll help you focus more on the words, rather than tinkering around with various settings as you write. You can even drop in images directly into your documents, as well as web clips, files, sketches and drawings, and more. Bear also makes use of tags for organization, and the search functionality helps you find exactly what you need.
Bear is free to download and use, with some limitations. If you want to get the most out of Bear, including access to different themes, full iCloud syncing, advanced Export options, and more, you'll need to get Bear Pro. Pro costs $1.49 a month, or $15 a year.
Documents
While Apple includes Files in iPadOS now, you may still need something that's more robust and powerful than the default option. That's when you need Documents by Readdle.
This all-in-one file hub can replace your document viewer, PDF reader, 'read it later,' music and video player, file downloader, cloud integrator, and more. You can pull in your files stored on a variety of third-party services, including iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and more. Documents does everything you would need it to with your files, including zipping and unzipping, editing and creating, viewing, sharing, storing, and more. All of your stuff can also be protected with a password too, in case you don't want others getting into your files.
Yoink
If you're on an iPad, you may be working with multiple apps at once. And when you need to get some items from one app to another, there is no better app for the job than Yoink.
Yoink is essentially a place to temporarily store items that you want to use later in another app. It helps eliminate the need to go back-and-forth so much and streamlines the process. The best way to use Yoink is to have it as a Slide Over app on top of two other apps that you're working in with Split View mode. Drag items like photos and video clips, text, files, web snippets, URLs, emails, and other items into Yoink to store them temporarily. Then move Yoink over and drag those items into your destination app.
To make things even easier, Yoink also has a keyboard so you can move items stored in Yoink into other apps without having to launch Yoink. There's even iCloud syncing for all of your items, Handoff support, an action extension, and more. Yoink is one of those apps that you'll wonder how you did without.
Copied
Copied is similar to Yoink, but it is more of a clipboard manager, but it's excellent to have if you're constantly dealing with copy and paste all day long.
With Copied, you're able to view everything that you've copied onto your iPad's clipboard, and go back and copy them again with ease. This applies to everything, from text, URLs, and images. Copied even lets you edit text with rich formatting if need be, and all of your clippings get synced between your iPads, iPhones, and Macs with iCloud. There is also an intuitive drag-and-drop interface if you prefer working that way.
PCalc
Believe it or not, but your iPad doesn't come with a calculator app built-in. Shocking, right? Fortunately, there's an app for that, and PCalc is one of the best.
PCalc is an incredibly powerful calculator app that will benefit scientists, students, engineers, programmers, and anyone else who needs a feature-rich calculator app. Some of its features include RPN mode, multi-line display, customizable button layouts, extensive sets of unit conversions and constants, paper tape, multiple undo and redo, engineering and scientific notation, as well as hexadecimal, octal, and binary calculation support.
Free Productivity Apps
There is a free version with some limitations that you can unlock with in-app purchases, or you can go for the full version for a single, flat-rate price of $10.
Good Productivity Apps For Pc
What are your favorites?
These are just some of our favorite apps for being productive on the iPad. What are your favorites? Let us know in the comments.
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Best Productivity Apps For Mac
Apple has today announced expanded partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to boost coding and creativity opportunities.