By Samrat Amatya
Steve Jobs once said “You can’t mandate productivity; you must provide tools to let people be their best”. Productivity has been a burning topic among people of late. With so many distractions, staying productive has become an onerous job. Luckily, the very thing that may distract us can also aid us in improving our productivity.
1. TickTick
Availability: Free on both Android and IOS
TickTick is a simple yet an effective tool to organise your daily activities. You can create a to-do list and tick them away as you finish. If you are someone like me who forgets things a lot, this app will help remind you the important deadlines and activities. Besides having a modern UI, the app is also fairly straightforward. All you need to do is follow the instruction on the screen and you are good to go. The app also has a persistent alert function that makes sure that you don’t miss the alarm.
TickTick also has an inbuilt calendar which gives you a bird’s eye view of all the tasks you need to complete at different dates. Besides the obvious work stuff, you can also use this app to complete household chores. You can create a list, collaborate with friends and family members, and share information with others.
2. Pushbullet
Availability: Free on both Android and IOS
Pushbullet is a great productivity tool that bridges the gap between using a laptop and a smartphone. Usually while working, it is a cumbersome process to switch between your laptop and smartphone. Well, not anymore with this nifty little tool! This app helps your smartphone and laptop talk to each other so you don’t need to juggle between them. You can answer calls, reply to text messages, send pictures, share links and much more straight from your laptop. The app also shows you customisable notifications from various apps and even websites.
3. Grammarly Keyboard
Availability: Free on both Android and IOS
If you are someone who writes a lot of paper, sends multiple e-mails in a day, this app will prove to be a boon for you. For those not introduced to it yet, Grammarly, in the laptop space, is one of the most widely used toolsby various writers, researchers and bloggers. Grammarly Keyboard is an app which merges this highly productive tool with a keyboard. It looks like any other typical keyboard you would find on your smartphone with the exception of its state-of-the-art errordetection capabilities. And correcting these mistakes is also as easy as pressing the word that the app has detected as an error. Unlike the keyboard that is already present on your smartphone, the app is more powerful and efficient in detecting errors and grammatical mistakes.
4. Alarmy
Availability: Free on both Android and IOS
Getting up on time is always a chore for many of us! We set an alarm on our mobile device to wake us up at a desired time. But most often than not, when the alarm rings, we just snooze the tune and get back to our precious Z’s. This defeats the whole purpose of setting up the alarm, doesn’t it? Introduce Alarmy, an app that doesn’t let you easily snooze or turn off the alarm. You can set up an alarm in such a way that you need to solve a math’s question, take a picture, shake the phone vigorously or scan a barcode. Unless you do one of these tasks, the alarm will not turn off! You can also program the app in such a manner that you can’t delete the app in desperation to get some extra snooze time. Overall it is a more effective alarm than the one, already, present on your phone.
5. Headspace
Availability: Free on both Android and IOS (Includes in-app purchases)
A healthy mind is the very foundation of being productive. Without a healthy mind, our thoughts get cluttered and we can’t perform to our fullest. To help clear our mind, we have a meditation and mindfulness app known as Headspace. The core belief of the app is that mediation is not a way to get rid of thoughts but to be at ease with them. The app has a 10 days beginners course where you are guided by a pre-recorded voice on how to meditate. You can choose between 3 or 5 minutes of meditation. Besides, voice-guided meditation, the app also has an animation section where you can watch educational videos on the mind and body.
The basics are free but you will need to purchase other advanced courses on meditation. This app is great for increasing your productivity and also dealing with other problems like anxiety, stress, anger management and much more.
