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In today’s world, professionals are expected to be constantly connected, especially if they want to effectively manage high-stress schedules and keep everyone happy. Fortunately, there are plenty of websites and applications to choose from.
Deciding on which will work for you, and which are most relevant to your lifestyle and line of work, isn’t as easy as it should be. As a result, many professionals face option paralysis when choosing the best productivity or time management apps. Here are five of the best apps for busy professionals that will help you narrow your choices and download software that’s perfect for you.
Freedom
Even the most experienced professionals get a little distracted from time to time. After all, there are countless things to keep up with: social media, news, projects, emails, and meetings among them. Freedom helps you reduce your biggest digital distractions by making it easy to focus on the tasks at hand. Users can start a session, creating rules for what tasks are banned—like browsing social media or checking email. If you were working on designing a logo, for example, you could even block the entire Internet.
According to the company, the app is used by professionals at Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Harvard University. Furthermore, Freedom users have reported an increase of productivity by 2.5 hours each day.
Smart Time App
There are plenty of time trackers on the market, but few cater to a specific industry/niche, and Smart Time — attorney time tracking software— achieves just this. The app takes a design-forward, minimalist approach to law firm time tracking, and makes it easy for clients to manage and access data without interfering with any work.
It boasts several great features that legal industry employees will find particularly useful, including the ability to track activity seamlessly from directly within the dashboard, switch workflow to and from desktops and mobile devices, and provide timekeepers with real-time compliance checking.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is one of the best productivity apps on the market. Hubspot named Wunderlist as the the best to-do list app of 2017 and Apple named it “App of the Year” in 2016. One of its key features is its real-time collaboration; quickly share and collaborate with other invited users on lists that are important to you. For example, you might collaborate on a grocery list with your spouse at the same time as you both peruse through the aisles on a busy pre-Thanksgiving day.
In addition to its mobile version, it has a great desktop version as well. If you were using the Mac desktop versions, you’d be able to quickly glance and today’s assignments from your Notifications tab on the upper righthand corner. And lastly, the app is intuitive and smart. Because of its “Smart Due Dates” feature, it understands what you mean if you create a task with a due date that’s “tomorrow” or “next week.” You can also sort the priority levels of the items on your to-do list.
UpWork
This option is a little different from the rest on this list, but it’s worth mentioning. UpWork allows you to hire freelancers for a range of tasks, which can be ideal for busy professionals who need to get things done quickly. For example, administrative help is a big area on UpWork, and if you find yourself in need of a fast personal assistant, you can simply open the app, browse through top-rated profiles, and hire cost-effective assistance within minutes.
The mobile app makes it easy to browse profiles, reviews, and interview candidates. This could be great for offloading some of your more minute tasks, freeing up your time to focus on important projects that can’t be outsourced.
Evernote
Although it isn’t new, Evernote, unsurprisingly comes up on the list for many best apps for professionals, thanks to its versatility and a wide range of features and capabilities. This is the perfect app for organizing your thoughts and schedules, putting them into a meaningful context. For some, it’s even better than Google docs, with dozens of unique and useful features.
Another super-capability of Evernote is its ability to merge with desktop features, too. For example, with the Evernote Chrome extension, you can easily save web clippings and files directly to your dashboard, which syncs across all devices. So, if you were surfing the web and saw an article on the most effective leadership skills, you could quickly “clip” it and come back to it later. And because of Evernote’s comprehensive search ability, you can look up keywords if you can’t remember the exact title of the article, or have too many clippings built up. A quick search for “leader” shows you all related content.
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