Readers usually love when we share some of our favorite apps. Productivity apps, especially, seem to be super-popular.
That should come as no surprise, considering how much we all must balance these days between work, life, and family. It can feel overwhelming, keeping it all straight, and keeping ourselves together. In fact, sometimes, just ensuring we don’t forget important tasks or events can feel like its own full-time job!
Here are 10 of our top productivity apps of 2017 that we think you might find helpful:
Any.do
Any.do lets you sync all your important schedules – business and personal – over all your devices. You can even add items by voice on mobile. Calendar integrations and file storage are premium features that make this app even more awesome.
Newton Mail
This app isn’t free ($49.99 a year) but if you have multiple email accounts (such as work and personal), it’s tremendously valuable. It combines all your email accounts and then can perform “cleanup” functions on them, as well as auto-schedule messages and replies. Newton Mail can even “snooze” messages so that you remember to come back to them later (instead of forgetting them after they’re filed away).
Trello
Trello is commonly known as a work or business website and app, but is also great for personal use! It allows the user to have multiple bulletin boards – or “cards” – to use to aggregate information or as “to do” lists. You can drag and drop items and move to other lists, or even other users (like friends and family who have a Trello account).
Droptask
This app is akin to Trello—just a little more visual. The “card” concept is similar, but cards are color-coded and link to each other for continuity and project management. You can add up to 5 people for a free account and among these five, you can assign and share tasks. The premium version has a lot more features, including file sharing and storage.
Slack
Slack combines the very best features of email and instant messaging, as well as file sharing and storage. The cool thing about it – aside from being real-time communication – is that you can add files and images which are stored with the messages themselves. Then, messages are indexed to be super-easy to search.
Last Pass
Ever get tired of remembering all the different passwords you have for your personal life and work? Especially since nearly every site you use has its own special format? Last Pass calls itself a “password vault.” It stores all your passwords and you can access them by remembering one “super password” from any computer or device. Last Pass can even store personal data and notes securely in its “vault” too.
How many times are you surfing the web and come across something you want to read “later?” So you email the links to yourself or bookmark them, etc., but can’t remember where you stored the information. Or maybe you do remember but it’s just not easy to access or retrieve the things you saved? With the Pocket app, you literally store them inside the app which becomes your “digital pocket.” Now, they are all stores in one place for super-easy access.
SwiftKey
Imagine how much time you waste due to “dang autocorrect” when typing an email or text message? Would you believe a big part of the problem is the keyboard?! SwiftKey is an amazing keyboard for your devices that has sharp, smart, and intuitive autocorrect and predictive type ahead. It also lets you save frequently used answers and phrases. Even better, it “syncs” your patterns and behavior across all devices where it’s installed.
Gboard
Gboard is SwiftKey’s newest rival. Gboard has all of the same features as SwiftKey but integrates Google’s search engine into the keyboard itself. This has the potential to be a huge timesaver. You can search for something while typing a message or email and insert it without ever having to open or close additional windows.
Fantastical 2
While only for iOS, Fantastical 2 is a calendar on steroids. It’s packed with features and will even let you create events by voice. Fantastical also generates a “ticker” with upcoming events and you can edit events and reminders right from the ticker itself without opening the app.