If by IFTTT (iOS, Android, Web)
If by IFTTT has tons of “recipes” that will let you automate a lot of little tasks throughout the day. If you have a hectic morning and forget to check the weather, you can set If by IFTTT to send you a weather notification every morning. If your phone battery is awful, you can use a recipe to turn off your phone’s Wi-Fi when you leave the house to conserve battery, and more. The app has tons of user generated recipes you can use, so head over and find the ones that will make your day a little bit easier. That way you can focus on the work in front of you rather than stress over the little things.
Letterspace is a clean and robust note-taking app that allows you to organize your notes using hashtags. It’s a clever and clean way to keep your thoughts in order and searchable. It’s the simplicity and ease of use of Letterspace that makes it stand out from the crowd of other similar note-taking apps.
Whether writing is a big or small part of your job, it’s important to focus on readability when you type out your words. Whether you’re writing an email, blog post, or even a whole book, using the Hemingway text editor will allow you to write concise, logical sentences. Hemingway will track your writing as you type it and tell you which sentences are too complex, long, or dense, giving you best practices for how to shorten and simplify along the way. A web app version is available for free, and an installable desktop version will set you back $9.99.
Workflow (iOS)
Workflow is an app that connects the several other apps you might use for work or productivity to one another, creating a literal workflow between them that automates a lot of the things you do on your phone or tablet. Using Workflow, you can set various apps to run in a specific context. For example, if you have a calendar appointment set away from your office, you can use Workflow to automatically call an Uber ahead of time. The app has a whole store of user generated workflows that you can choose from, or you can easily make your own.
Office Lens (iOS, Android, Windows Phone)
Office Lens is an app by Microsoft that allows you to take and store photos of documents, receipts, whiteboards, pieces of paper… you name it. It then converts those photos into a readable PDF or text document that is stored in Microsoft’s cloud storage service, OneDrive. The contents of the document are easily searchable, allowing you to find them quickly and saving you time you’d otherwise spend opening dozens of files to find the right image. A nice added feature of Office Lens is the ability to easily crop a picture so that it only contains the item you’re trying to store
Snowball (Android)
Snowball is a notification prioritization app that bundles the least important of your notifications while highlighting the ones you need to pay attention to. Find yourself distracted by constant pings from Candy Crush Saga? Getting tons of favorites on your latest Twitter brilliance? Snowball will group those notifications and allow you to swipe them away at once while bumping your priority notifications to the top. And best of all, you can actually respond to messages directly from the notification, saving you precious seconds you could be using more productively.
RescueTime (Web)
RescueTime is more than just an app that will let you block the apps and sites that distract you during the day. It’s a tool that will track your work habits to find the specific sources of your wasted time during the day and report them back to you. At the end of the day or week, you can look at your report from RescueTime to see exactly where you’re sinking your productivity. The free version will provide you with this information, while the premium edition will give you the tools needed to tackle your inefficiencies.
TeamViewer (All Devices)
TeamViewer allows you and another individual to very quickly share or control each other's screens. Whether you're looking to show them something that isn't easily sent over email, asking or giving help with a tech issue, or even controlling a second computer from afar, TeamViewer is easy to set up and even easier to configure to the variety of ways you and your teammates might use it to collaborate.