The considerable list of 25 productivity tools to try in 2021 — Backlsh

No matter what role you have or what goals you want to achieve, at times, you may find yourself struggling with productivity. All this struggle can take a huge toll on your work quality.

To make our lives easier personally and professionally, we make use of different apps to plan our time and projects. However, at times juggling between tools could be immense.

Luckily, as there are different types of distractions, there are as many tools to help you stay productive, however, it can be difficult to make a pick.

So, we handpicked a list of productivity apps that may give you more value for your time. Either you are a student or an employee or a group of employees working on a project, these tools are going to help you increase your productivity.

What we are going to do is, we will be breaking these tools into the following categories:

1. Stay organized
2. Scheduling and Calendar
3. Increase your focus
4. Note-making
5. Save your time

Let’s get started:

Apps that help you Stay Organized

Pricing plans: A free trial of 7 days, $5 per user per month with many features like track time and project, website, and app tracking, real-time monitoring, etc.

Backlsh is a productivity tool that helps you with time tracking, planning, and tracking your projects. It is an online task management software, outlined primarily for teams. It gives you all the freedom to be as productive as you could be and has a simple interface that is very easy to learn and use by a home engineer to a freelancer and to teams to get productive. Backlsh is a simple project management tool that provides its users with many distinct features including time tracking, project management, productivity meter, and mapping projects.

This means you don’t have to hop through different tools for getting things done. These features ease the teams to avoid paying for any third party.

Key Features:

With so many features Backlsh has to offer, here are some key features-

• Time Tracking — discover employees’ inefficient practices in work that might be hindering the company’s growth.
• Screenshots — automated screenshots for a more detailed view of your teams’ efficiency and for monitoring remote employees.
• Web Usage — get to know about websites visited by your employees with categorization.
• Productivity Meter — track productive and non-productive hours of the team.

Project Management — manage people, projects, resources, and cost-efficiently.

Pricing Plans: the premium plan is available at $27.99 per year.

Among many other features, this app comes with intelligent task creation using Siri. When it comes to productivity apps, Tick Tick can be your next best friend. Create tasks and access them from anywhere.

With data backup and synchronization, your data is safe at all times. It has voice input to help you add tasks faster and easier.

Key Features:

Some of the main features-

Pricing Plan: Free and Premium with $2.99 per month.

Any.do is a fun and easy to work with the tool. Any.do gives a neat set of options to get you to work swiftly. Once you sign in, it asks you to choose some tasks you would like to achieve for a week. After the settings, the mainboard offers a view of All tasks.

Key Features:

Some of its features are-

Pricing Plan: Free, business class for $9.99 per user per month and Enterprise plan for $20.83 per user per month.

Trello is easy to use tool, it optimizes your work by breaking it into respective categories of progress they are currently in. the boards are shareable and you can invite anyone to collaborate on your project progress over time.

Key Features:

Some key features of Trello are-

Pricing Plan: Free, Team Plan of $9 per month and $3 per user per month.

This one is for the gamers inside you, habitica allows you to gamify your habits and get stuff done while having fun. Create to-do lists, daily goals, or habits and earn rewards whenever you check them off. These rewards unlock different in-app features and help you to level up.

Key Feature:

Some of the key features of habitica are-

Pricing Plan: Essential plan for $45 per month when billed annually and Ultimate control plan for $85 per month when billed annually.

ProofHub is an overall good app to keep things organized, increase accountability, communicate more efficiently, and keep everyone on the same page.

Key Features:

Some of the main features of ProofHub are-

Scheduling and calendar

Pricing Plan: free for Android, iOS, and web.

The most widely used work schedule up is the Google calendar. It has the benefit of being free and comes in Android devices as a part of the Google native app.

Key Features-

Some of the features of Google calendar are-

Apple Calendar

Pricing Plan: free for iOS, Mac, and Web.

While Google still has a dominant share of the smartphone users, Apple is catching up and Apple’s calendar app is as likely to be used as Google’s. It comes free on Apple devices, so if you’re using an iOS or Mac then this app can make your life a lot easier.

Key Features:

Some of the key features of this calendar are-

• Keeps information synced on all Apple devices
• Lets you to add things through Siri
• Easy access through every Apple device

Pricing Plan: $69.99 per year as part of Microsoft Office 365 personal but can be provided by an employer or school

Microsoft Outlook Calendar is a great tool for businesses and is most likely to be used by employees of large institutes. Good app for basic functioning.

Key Features:

Some of the key features of Microsoft Outlook Calendar are-

Pricing Plan: Free for basics, $8 per month for the premium plan, and $12 per month for the pro plan.

Calendly is best for business owners to organize their hiring process. More of a specialized scheduling tool or recruiting software than a calendar app.

Key Features:

Some of the main features of Calendly are-

• It synchronizes with every other calendar app
• Integrates interview into schedule automatically when they are booked
• The interface is bright, minimal, and easy to understand
• It lets you choose your interview times and dates after you put your availability into the app
• Sends reminders for the meeting

Pricing Plan: $49.99 on Mac, $9.99 on iPad, $4.99 on iPhone; only for iOS and Mac.

Fantastical works in multiple languages, this app just might make you consider getting a wearable device.

Key Features:

Some of the main features of Fantastical are-

Increase your Focus

Pricing Plan: $1.99

The forest app is built to help you discipline yourself and keep you away from your phone. Whenever you need to focus while working, open the app, set the timer, and plant a tree.

Key Features:

Some of the main features of the Forest app are-

• It helps you maintain discipline and keeps you away from your phone
• The team has partnered with a tree-planting organization
• By now, there have been about 1,021,948 trees planted by Forest.

Pricing Plan: free

SelfControl is an open-source app, which blocks sites that you consider too distracting. You set a timer and the sites get blocked until the timer is up.

Note: once you set a timer there’s no going back, you can’t cancel it like other apps. Not even restarting the computer or deleting the app will help with it. This app is best to get you focused.

Pricing Plan: $9.99 per month.

Due is a task scheduling app that repeatedly reminds you of tasks that you must get done until you act on them. This app could be annoying but it is effective as there is no chance of forgetting the tasks.

It is more convenient can be used on your phone. It snoozes the reminders with a single tap and so you don’t have to waste your minutes on rescheduling it.

Pricing Plan: Free

The idea of this app is based on the Pomodoro technique, in which you divide the work into time blocks, say you decide to work for 25 minutes, you focus on work for that time, then take little rest. Pomofocus is a customizable timer app that works both on desktop and mobile.

Key Features:

• Works on desktop and mobile web
• Free time has audio notifications
• You can add tasks you need to complete

Pricing Plan: Free

Kill news feed is a chrome extension that blocks your News Feed on Facebook when you need to focus on work. The habit of scrolling the Facebook news feed is the real productivity killer.

If you work through Facebook- don’t worry! While it kills the news feed but it still shows the messages and notifications to access your business pages.

To help you in Note-making

Pricing Plan: Basic is free, Premium is for $7.99 per user per month and the Business plan is for $14.99 per month per user.

Evernote acts as your second brain and helps you to remember everything. It is a reliable note-making app to stay updated and stay organized.

Key Features:

• Collect everything in one place
• Add attachments, links, and audio recordings
• Scan and search information from business
• Reminders and email notifications
• Search option

Pricing Plan: free and extended plan $34.99 per annum

Standard notes is a personal productivity app, that is both free and secure. With end-to-end encryption, this small productivity app ensures that the data send by you is encrypted and this means that is secured by any loss and leakage of data.

Key Features:

Pricing Plan: Free

Google Keep is a sticky note app powered by Google. This is the free app that helps you in writing down your thoughts before you forget them.

Key Features:

Pricing Plans: Free, Premium plan for $9.99 per month, and Enterprise plan upon request.

If you hate typing to keep your notes organized then certainly Otter is for you. It is a smart note-taking app that takes voice commands to make notes.

Key Features:

To save your time

Pricing Plans: $2.99 per month for an individual and $7.99 per month for business purposes.

The 1Password is a browser extension. This app lets you forget all your passwords. It has a simple and user-friendly interface. To use it, simply install its browser extension and create an account. Whenever you login into a website 1Password asks you to remember the username and password.

Once saved, your username and passwords will be available for later use and you will be able to login to websites with a single click.

Pricing Plan: Free for the basic plan and $2.90 per month for the premium plan.

LastPass saves all your Passwords, so you only have to remember one password. LastPass has a free version which is good enough to use without the upgrade. Install the extension to your browser and then start saving your passwords to LastPass to save your time.

Pricing Plan: Free for the Basic version and $3.33 per month for the Pushbullet pro plan.

Pushbullet is software that helps you connect all your devices so they feel like one, whatever is on one device is also available on the other devices you use.

Also, you can easily share files and links from one device to another. It also notifies you about the incoming messages on your mobile while you work on your laptop.

Pricing Plan: Free

If you are looking for information on a certain topic and don’t want to spend time searching the web, then Google Alerts is for you. It lets you enter the keyword you’re looking for and customize it by selecting which sources you want.

You will get e-mails whenever something is published about that topic.

Pricing Plan: Free for the Basic version and $8 per month for the PRO plan.

Drag is a free chrome extension that lets you turn your inbox into a manageable workspace. The allows you to categorize your emails into three columns- To Do, Doing, and Done.

Categorizing makes it easy for you to analyze what has been processed and what yet is to be done. This makes your inbox organized and save several hours in a day.

Bottom line

We hope this helped you in finding the best productivity apps you need to be more productive at work. At the same time, I would remind you that productivity isn’t about finding the right app. To increase productivity you should develop the right working habits.

Originally published at https://www.backlsh.in on April 10, 2021.