Maintaining productivity is crucial when trying to manage your growing business.
Introduction
As a business owner and leader, you are constantly busy in many directions. Between responding to customer service messages, updating your store, and promoting your products, it can be hard to know where to focus to ensure you’re spending your time on the tasks that move the needle.
Inspirational quotes can be a nice way to motivate work and help you get through daily tasks, but they aren’t an effective way to help you get things done in the long term.
On the other hand, the best productivity apps ensure that you spend your time on the right tasks, eliminate tasks that need not be done, and secure tasks that aren’t worth anyone’s time.
To help you get started, we’ve compiled this list of the top 24 free apps to boost productivity.
Best Task Manager: Asana
Asana is the best free task management app. You can use the free subscription plan to create up to 80 projects, making it easy to categorize your tasks into different lists as needed.
For example, you can create separate lists for work tasks and home tasks and manage both lists from the same app. Or you can be more detailed and create lists for work, home, daily tasks, emails, side projects, long-term goals, and anything else you need to classify into a distinct group.
The beauty of Asana is its simplicity. Add a quick line describing what you need to do, then check it off when you’re done. It’s essentially a digital version of a handwritten to-do list that works anywhere and on any device you use the moment a task comes to mind.
Best Time Management App: RescueTime
RescueTime is a time management app that tracks and calculates how much time you spend on different types of tasks.
For example, you might feel that you’re only looking at social media for a few minutes each day. RescueTime can show you exactly how much time you spend scrolling through your feeds. You might be surprised by the results and realize that you need to cut back on that distraction.
Or perhaps you feel that copy-pasting data from one app to another doesn’t take much effort and is worth the hassle. RescueTime can show you how much time you could save using an automation tool like Zapier.
If you feel like you’re working long hours but not accomplishing enough, RescueTime can help you see and understand where you’re spending too much time on tasks that aren’t impactful enough. This allows you to find opportunities to delegate those tasks and automate them, or to avoid some distractions altogether.
Best Distraction Blocker: StayFocusd
If you find yourself wasting too much time on social media, news sites, and other online distractions, you can use StayFocusd – a Chrome extension – to completely block access to those sites.
StayFocusd works by allowing you to set how much time you want to spend on specific types of sites. If you want to limit your time spent scrolling through Twitter to 10 minutes a day, you can set that in StayFocusd. When the time you specified runs out, StayFocusd will block your access to Twitter for a duration you set.
StayFocusd also has a “nuclear option” that allows you to block access to all sites – or to all sites except for those you need (like Google Docs) – when you need to focus on a specific task. It’s a great tool when you need to limit distractions but find it difficult to stay focused on your own.
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Best Task-Focused App: Forest
Forest is a fun app that helps you stay focused and increase your productivity by growing virtual trees. The goal is to help you stay away from your phone and avoid distractions. This way, you can concentrate on work, study, relaxation, friends, entertainment, or anything else in life.
When you start the timer, the app plants a virtual tree, and if you continue to focus for a specified period, the tree will grow. The tree dies if you stop the timer or switch to another task before the timer ends. You earn rewards when you reach four hours of focused time, and you can convert virtual currency into real trees in life.
The Forest team collaborates with the tree-planting organization, Trees for the Future, to plant real trees. When you spend virtual currency in Forest on planting real trees, the Forest team donates and creates planting requests. So far, 1,468,511 trees have been planted around the world.
Best Time Tracking App: Toggl
Toggl helps you work more efficiently by tracking how much time you spend on tasks. It features a simple and clean interface that makes it easy to use, and it’s packed with features that make it a powerful productivity tool.
Key features: Start and stop the timer with a click, Pomodoro timer to help maintain focus, reports showing how much time you spent on tasks, tags that allow you to track tasks more easily, and a calendar view that shows upcoming deadlines, syncing with popular work tools like Asana, Trello, and Google Calendar.
Best Clear and Error-Free Writing App: Hemingway Editor
Writing takes a lot of time without worrying about spelling or grammatical mistakes — or whether what you’re writing is simple enough for others to understand.
Hemingway Editor alleviates these concerns by highlighting spelling and grammatical errors, showing sentences that are hard to read, and indicating words and phrases that can be replaced with simpler alternatives.
You can either write directly in Hemingway Editor or, if you don’t want to deal with the suggestions while writing, you can paste your text into the tool to clean it up once you’re done writing. It’s a good way to capture your thoughts without getting distracted by trying to achieve perfection at the same time.
Best Project Management App: Trello
If you manage projects that need to move from person to person before they are completed, Trello is the ideal project management app.
With Trello boards, you can create different pathways for each step in the project process, move tasks from one pathway to another upon completion, assign tasks to the people who need to complete them, and easily see the progress of each pending task.
Trello is perfect for workflows like digital marketing, where writers, editors, and graphic designers collaborate on projects, or for recruitment and hiring, where the HR department and hiring managers need to complete specific tasks during different parts of the process.
Best App for Small Teams: Asana
While Trello is great for workflows, the free Asana plan provides you with greater flexibility in how your team works.
The board view in Asana works exactly like Trello, allowing your team to manage tasks and projects on a Kanban board. But if this view isn’t suitable for your team, you can also display tasks in a traditional to-do list or even in a calendar.
Another feature of Asana is that you can manage multiple projects from a central perspective. In Trello, you need individual boards for each workflow, but Asana allows you to assign tasks from any project to anyone in your organization from a central board.
A drawback of Asana is that its free plan accommodates only 15 team members, so if you have a larger team that needs to collaborate, you’ll have to upgrade. For the free Trello plan, there’s no limit to how many people you can add to your boards.
A Real-Time Communication App: Slack
Slack is a messaging app that allows teams to communicate in real time. Individual team members can send instant messages to each other to chat when email isn’t fast enough, and entire teams can create their own discussion channels for full collaboration.
But where Slack truly shines when it comes to productivity is its huge library of apps. You can connect Slack to any other app you use to do things like create support tickets from Slack discussions, save attachments directly to Dropbox or Google Drive, or add tasks you receive in Slack to your task list.
There are also Slack apps that help you save time in obtaining information from your coworkers. You can add an app that collates daily updates for the morning meeting, or takes food requests for a catered lunch, or sends weekly surveys to gather employee feedback.
Some of these apps are free while others are paid, but the large library of Slack apps gives you many options to choose from.
Best Google Apps for Real-Time Collaboration
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides make it easy to collaborate with others to create text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Contributors can work together on these resources in real time, seeing where others are making changes so that what one person is doing doesn’t overwrite what someone else is doing.
You can also control what others can do regarding the resources you create, granting them permission to view, comment, or edit them. Use Suggestion mode to submit changes for the document owner to accept or reject, or leave comments when there are questions or a need for additional clarification.
The best thing about this suite of tools is that all historical versions of the resources you create are saved and accessible. So if someone makes changes you don’t like, or if you need to revert to a previous version, you can not only see all previous versions but also revert to them with a single click.
Best App for File and Folder Sharing: Google Drive
While many businesses use Dropbox, Google Drive is a better option if you’re looking for a free tool to share and store files and folders. The basic Dropbox plan only offers 2 GB of storage, but you get 15 GB with Google Drive (although this space is shared with your Gmail account if you have one).
Google Drive works more seamlessly if you also use Google tools like Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Files you create using these tools are automatically saved to Google Drive. You can create shared folders in Google Drive and give anyone with access to the folder the same access to the files inside that folder.
Google Drive’s backup and sync tool makes it easy to back up files you save on your computer to Google Drive and access those files without having to open your web app. It’s another way to have everything you need in a centralized location so you don’t have to guess where files are saved.
Best App for Team Knowledge Management: Notion
One of the best ways to keep your team productive is to ensure that everyone has easy access to the information they need to do their work. This is difficult when every team uses a different system for documentation and knowledge storage.
Notion solves this problem by making it easy for teams to build internal knowledge bases that can be searched and accessed by anyone in the company. Create different workspaces for different groups, such as human resources, marketing, sales, and customer service, and then search across them all at once to quickly find the knowledge that any team has documented.
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The free Notion plan allows you to add unlimited team members and create up to 1000 storage blocks, making it ideal for startups looking to aggregate company knowledge early on without a large budget.
Best Simple Accounting App for Businesses: Wave Accounting
Wave is a free and advanced business accounting tool that allows business owners and their finance teams to work together to track sales, invoices, expenses, and profits.
With the free Wave plan, you get unlimited bank transactions, invoices, and receipt scanning, making it easy to gather and compile all your business expenses and revenue. Add your employees’ credit cards to capture their expenses, and ask them to send pictures of receipts using the Wave mobile app.
You can also accept payments through Wave (although transaction fees apply) and automatically convert payments in foreign currencies. Add your accountants and corporate accountants to your system so you all work from the same data, and assign permissions to ensure that everyone sees only what you want them to see.
Best Screenshot Sharing App: CloudApp
Screenshots are useful for communicating clearly both internally and externally, but sharing screenshots can be burdensome. CloudApp makes it easy to capture and share screenshots and short videos with anyone you need via a web link. It helps business owners guide their employees clearly and helps employees guide customers clearly.
To use CloudApp for free in your business, each employee who needs it must create their own free account. While this won’t keep all business screenshots in one place, you can easily share them amongst each other through links that can be password-protected if they contain sensitive information.
Best Time Tracking App: Toggl
Toggl helps you track time easily with just a few button clicks. No complicated timers or software. It also comes with a mobile app, so you can track time wherever you are.
The most popular feature of Toggl is its reporting tools. You can access detailed reports showing how much time you spent on a project or task. You can export these reports in seconds and share them with your team or clients.
Best Task Focus App: Brain.fm
Brain.fm lets you access a flow state quickly and with a single click. The app can enhance your focus, relaxation, sleep, or meditation using functional music. The scientifically-backed music guides you to the mental state you desire.
To reach a deep work state, you can play music designed for tasks requiring prolonged periods of intense focus. With Brain.fm, you can customize your activity levels, the type of music you want to listen to, and your sensitivity level.
Best Video Communication App: Vowel
Vowel is a video conferencing tool that transforms your meetings into searchable and shareable knowledge. Think of it as an alternative to Zoom that helps your team stay productive and works directly in your browser.
Vowel promotes good meeting habits, with agendas and meeting notes in one place, so you can have more productive audio and video calls with your colleagues, suppliers, or work friends.
Best Collaborative Brainstorming App: Mural
Mural is an easy-to-use, intuitive collaborative platform for brainstorming and mind mapping. You can create virtual whiteboards where teams can draw, add notes, attach files, and interact in real time.
Mural offers over 200 templates in categories like brainstorming and quick project planning. The templates are designed to help teams interact with one another to brainstorm, generate ideas, and solve problems.
Important
Features: Unlimited and customizable options to meet your collaboration goals, quick and easy visualization for flows, maps, journeys, and processes, saving time across your organization by deploying easy-to-use templates for everyone, the ability to connect team members through comments, text chat, or quick talk, creating and organizing colorful sticky notes to see patterns and solutions, integration with other productivity tools such as Airtable, Asana, OneDrive, and Google Drive.
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