Handy Productivity Apps That Free Up Your Precious Time

Author: Cody McBride

Entrepreneurs waste a whopping 21.8 work hours a week on “low-value” work activities: responding to emails, checking social media, communicating with co-workers, troubleshooting, and other non-critical tasks. Thankfully, as ZenBusiness notes, these days there is amazing technology available to small business owners to help them efficiently cover these and other tasks. Often that tech comes in the form of an app. Below The Grid offers some app examples that can take care of many of these everyday tasks for you and, thereby, free up some of your priceless time:

Planning and note-taking: Notion

Officially, Notion is dubbed as the “all-in-one-workspace” for notes, databases, tasks, and wikis. Practically, it’s a mash-up of several popular apps: Google Suite, Trello, Todoist, and Evernote. You can use the app to jot down your thoughts, create business plans, collaborate with team members, and organize your projects. The app has a slick interface and you can control everything from a unified dashboard.

Team management: Asana        

Asana is one of the fastest-growing team management and collaboration tools, with a growth of 90% year-over-year (pre-COVID). The top features of this project-management software are team collaboration, multi-project views, agile support, and process management automation. This app integrates with other popular productivity tools, like Slack and Google Drive. Essentially, you can use this tool to assign teammates tasks, communicate with them, and generally make sure your various projects run smoothly.

Maximize hours worked: Toggl Track

Toggle Track also gives you an overview of where you spend most of your time. If you’re going overboard, you’ll know and be able to cut back. This app runs both offline and online and allows small and large teams to track hours worked on the fly. It’s easy to set up and run and comes with downloadable apps for your smartphone. Besides automated activity time tracking, this app also does a decent job of tracking hours worked.

Password Manager: LastPass

How many times have you forgotten your passwords and spent minutes resetting them? If it happens all the time, a password manager like LastPass is indispensable. This app will securely store passwords for a range of sites and automatically enter them for you when you visit. Unlike other similar apps, the free version of LastPass is excellent and comes with several useful bells and whistles.

Calendar: Google Calendar

Google Calendar is quickly becoming everyone’s go-to calendar and scheduling app. It helps that everyone already uses some Google service or the other by default, which means Calendar is already up and running by default on most everyone’s devices. The app comes with several surprisingly handy features: a scheduling view, appointment slot tools, an offline status indicator, an advanced search function, and a nifty year view. You can ask Google to email you when important events are coming up.

Email Management: SaneBox

The time when you received one, maybe two emails a day has long passed. It’s normal for most people to receive several, if not several dozen, these days — with the majority being non-necessary, “bloat” messages that are one step away from being spam. That’s where SaneBox comes in. This lifesaver app automatically categorizes and sorts your email as non-important and important. Further, it learns over time and gets better at sorting. SaneBox works with the most popular existing email clients. The only con of this app is that it’s subscription-based.

Remember that apps can only take you so far. For best results, consider picking up time management techniques to schedule better, prioritize, and generally stay on top of your workload at all times. It’s always a good idea to develop healthy habits like self-discipline and focus, as well as continuous learning and improvement, to use your precious time to the fullest.

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Article By Cody McBride [email protected]